My parents have physical photo albums from the film days. The albums are curated for events and memories, such as vacations and weddings etc.
When I got a new phone, I bought 128GB thinking it would be more than enough. But it's not.
I find that I just snap photos of things I want to remember. Some photos are nearly identical, but I don't delete them. I feel a sense of attachment. Though I never go back and look at them. Periodically, I offload a bunch to an HDD and then I definitely don't look at them.
I don't have social media to post photos. I have a digital frame I upload pics to, but that also just fills up over time.
How do you go about managing your photos? Does it feel like digital clutter? How do you approach memory making through photos?
Finally, any cool tech solutions are welcome.
For photos of our kids, we have an iCloud shared album that is shared with family (grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends, etc) so that becomes the curation of all the photos of the kids. Not ideal since it's in lower resolution.
Every year for the kids birthdays I make a collage of their highlights of the past year and print it in A2 as birthday banner and these make for nice memories.
For memorable trips after the trip I go through and create an album and put it in an album. I like looking back at these when I'm feeling nostalgic or anxious about my place in life.
For stuff I like to refer to like hobby projects, stuff around the apartment (device setup/model numbers/wiring etc) etc I create albums and sort them in folders.
When I need to find a photo, if it's not in an album 80% of the time I find it through the geotagged world map feature. "that campsite that weekend was over here somewhere, oh there's that photo of the nice stream we bathed in". The other 20% is mostly through text search (Photos does OCR on all your photos) or date.
I do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired...
The ability to search the photo library has been steadily improving (in my experience, Google still has an edge over Apple in this area) and with the advent of new AI technology I only expect it to get better. Except for special occasions I don't even attempt to "organize" or "tag" my photos. It reminds me of how Google Search surpassed early 'library catalog' style indexes like Yahoo.
The biggest downside of iCloud is the lack of an API to access the data programmatically for backups etc. I've experimented with `icloudpd` and it worked OK, but I'm not sure about the long-term stability as it's basically just "screen scraping" iCloud.com to download the photos from the web which is not officially supported by Apple and is sensitive to any changes to the website as well as the (remote?) possibility of getting your account banned. The performance is also bad as it has to download all photos even the ones that are already stored locally.
There’s also `osxphotos` (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) which works by reverse engineering the undocumented sqlite database in the photos library that Apple uses for storing the photos metadata. This avoids the performance problems of accessing the library through iCloud.com like `icloudp` does and enables many more features like searching by faces, places, etc. and they have an export function with a ton of options to backup your library.
Finally, I have a side-project working on a simple set-it-and-forget Mac app for backing up your entire photo library (including iCloud Photos) to a local disk, network share, NAS, etc. Unlike the above options, it uses the official Apple PhotoKit library to access the photos and doesn’t require setting up a Python environment, running command-line tools, etc. If you’re interested check it out here: https://www.ibeni.net
I've enabled the "Download originals to this Mac..." option in Photos, which then gets backed up using Backblaze, but obviously that takes a ton of space on my Mac that I could be using for something else.
[1] https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd
Yeah, it "just works" in Synology's built-in Docker support on their models with Intel CPUs.
I used to use the "download originals" option until my photo library started exceeding the storage in any of my Macs...
I used to take a lot of time organizing my photo library in Lightroom Classic. Now I have similar philosophy, just leave it. I am sure soon enough we will have AI that will organize photos decently, fix minor issues in photos, and delete dupes and really bad photos.
Also, all current photo library solutions are deficient and built mostly for a single flashy keynote presentation, not for managing actual photo libraries. Sharing with your family has only recently started arriving at Apple, for example. There is no good and reliable way to manage and keep metadata with your photos (like extended descriptions), and it seems everybody at Apple believes that the EXIF date in an image is the actual date that the photo was taken (apparently nobody at Apple used older digital cameras, or scanned anything from paper/film).
I was severely bitten by this approach, because I entrusted my archives to Aperture, which Apple later discontinued. I am not left with a large library which I can't migrate anywhere: first, because there is nowhere to migrate it TO, and second, because I know of no other programs that can manage photo stacks: groupings of several related images (like the front and back of a scanned paper photo, or several versions of a scan). I still don't know what to do about this library. I'm thinking about writing my own exporter that will read the Aperture sqlite database and export the pictures with all the metadata.
I thought about writing my own long-term photo archival and sharing software and making it open-source, but when I realized which particular group of lowlives this will be very useful for, it gave me pause and I'm reconsidering. Perhaps I'll write something for my own use.
https://mylio.com/
I haven't used it personally, but worth checking out. It supports Aperture in the past and worth checking if they still support, or if you can download an older version which supports it.
It's more difficult since I have a cellphone that take good pictures, since I can have a lot of day with one or two pictures instead of sevral in few days like before, but it's also an opportunity to get rid of unwanted pictures
For photo scanning, I'm just using a batch number that I also add to the physical media
My plan is to make some albums for memory in the future
Social media and sharing isn't very positive either, I think. There's a tendency to try and represent a more idealized existence, and when other people do it too, you can end up with envy for a fiction. Not an original insight.
Brief, occasional reminders of past times can be nice. Google Photos' alerts about X years ago isn't bad, and can sometimes generate a smile, without risking getting stuck into a 30+ minute nostalgia session.
We he done this since our first year dating and now have multiple "Year X" albums that we sometimes pick up and go through.
We do also have a Google Home Max that is connected to a shared album we add photos to, which we keep in the kitchen and see latest photos pop up there, which we love seeing. But the physical albums are great because we hand picked those photos while going through the events of the year.
So in my opinion, there's no reason not to also have physical albums
Since my gf and I have been doing our yearly photo albums, my outlook has greatly improved, and you get to summarise your entire year (albeit with some cherrypicking) - which in itself is a fantastic bonding exercise - as well as present it to visitors.
It's a testament to our love, to our shared past, and to our continuing future.
The market for this service of online printing on-demand of photo albums is actually really mature at this point, with many options and many tiers of quality at surprisingly competitive prices.
We were already planning on getting albums printed for our child's first few years too, by collecting the digital originals ordered by year.
1: Putting it euphemistically.
My workflow is to import all photos onto the computer into an Import folder, sorted by day for the SLR and month for the phone (using the SLR creates higher volume but only for some days). I use Photosync to move from phone to PC as it only moves new photos and sorts into folders. Apple cloud wants to put everything in one folder, which is awful.
After that personal photos & memories go into one parent folder divided by year/month/ or year/occasion and all the random photos, photos of notes, similar photos where somebody blinked, etc... are removed at this stage. This leaves me with a lower number of meaningful photos to be able to look back on (or be surfaced by the On This Day feature of OneDrive).
Non-personal photos, e.g. nature, graffiti, whatever go into a different folder with theme based sub-folders. This can mean that if I go on holiday somewhere I have photos of the family in a different place to photos of cool things that I saw but that's what I'm after. Non-personal photos are the one most likely to have future editing & posting on photo sites or used as a background.
We have thousands of photos of our children who were born when smartphones were prevalent. Opposed to my own childhood (early 70s) were only a dozen or so photos of me exist. Then I am beginning to calculate the time it takes for someone to watch the 10.000 or so photos that will be made of our kids until the are grown up. Are they supposed to go all through this mess of duplicates? And no one will ever have the time to go through all photos and bring order to it.
So yes, it feels like digital clutter but on the other hand it really does revive a lot of (mostly positive) emotions to go through a huge collection of family photos.
But my wife takes a gazillion photos of everything. I organize them in a directory hierarchy by date, on my NAS. I also run a private wiki at home, and have pages of "special collections" of certain photos by subject matter/event/ whatever that link into the hierarchical directory collection.
But if you're out there and your intent isn't to take a picture (but you're doing so anyway), I agree that'd also take me out out of the moment and reduce enjoyment of things.
Yes.