
Ask HN: How do you manage your photo library? - jeffnv
In the age of excellent smartphone cameras, I would expect the average 30 year old person to have several thousand photographs they would rather not lose. How do you keep them straight?<p>What software do you use? What naming strategy? Do you transfer to your long term storage on a regular interval? Exclusively cloud based?<p>Please include the approximate size of your library as well.
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pesfandiar
Short answer: AWS S3

I've written a lightweight JS app authenticated by AWS Cognito that uploads my
photos to S3. It even has a thumbnail making Lambda function, and a comments
sections for family and friends. I wrote about it here:
[http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2017/03/10/serverless-
photo-s...](http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2017/03/10/serverless-photo-
sharing-app-aws)

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Someone
I don't do what I preach (I have 20k or so photos, 10k or so backed up to DVD,
which I almost don't have a reader for anymore), but I think the best strategy
is to let loose of the idea that you _must_ keep _all_ those thousands of
photos. You don't live to babysit a photo-collection, and the more photos you
have the fewer sentimental value each of them has.

One approach could be: buy a USB stick every few months and copy a few
thousand random photos from your collection to it. If your hard disk dies,
grab as many of those USB sticks as you feel like making time for, and restore
the photos from them.

If you are really adventurous, put a quotum on the growth of your collection
(e.g. 50 photos per month or x MB per month) and force yourself to throw away
older photos if you want to keep more than 50 for a month. If you set the
limit at x MB per month and really want to keep 100 photos, you can give up
photo quality by recompressing some photos.

~~~
wingerlang
> but I think the best strategy is to let loose of the idea that you _must_
> keep _all_ those thousands of photos

I feel the opposite, I keep everything (even 1000s of screenshots) because
managing it would be a higher workload than otherwise. Furthermore, even the
worst photo of something insignificant can bring back vivid memories of the
time and location. If I "pick" only the "big" moments all the other ones are
lost.

I have almost 30gb stored in Dropbox sorted by phone (I change phones a lot),
every week or so I just click "import all" from my phone.

~~~
Someone
If "Synced to Dropbox" is all you do you may be only one inadvertent mouse
drag or clip command away from deleting some photos.

Yes, you can recover deleted files in Dropbox but to do that, you must know
you deleted something, and then, what you deleted, or you must periodically
check for deletions in the Dropbox UI.

Also, Dropbox probably will happily sync files that were written with bit
errors on your hard disk.

Acceptable risk? I think so, but it means accepting some decent risk of losing
photos.

My point is that many people likely would be happier if they spent, say, two
evenings a year watching past photos together with their loved ones than when
they spend that time making (more) sure their collection stays perfect (and at
thousands of photos a year, two evenings is _nothing_ if you want to make sure
your archive is bit-for-bit safely stored and properly indexed so that it is
reasonably easy to find photos on demand)

~~~
wingerlang
Maybe, but I doubt this is an issue. When is the last time you accidentally
deleted a file like this without knowing?

I have accidentally deleted files before and if it is a significant amount
(e.g. if I try to do bulk processing on some) Dropbox notifies you by email.

I could easily duplicate my folder, or even triplicate it to minimise hard
disk errors and not be near my Dropbox limit. However I poke around at
pictures quite a lot and I don't think I've seen issues like this so I don't
mind it.

(I think they are also synced to Google Photos now that I think about it).

------
Nadya
I have a well-maintained, though not perfect library about 800GB in size
hosted in a personal "Booru"-style software (MyImouto) with all images tagged.
I use it for _all_ of my photos - everything from my personal photography to
silly pictures of cats.

Whenever I have a new image, I upload it and tag it.

I periodically back up the database and keep it stored on a separate drive.
All of my drives are also backed up to Backblaze in the event my house burns
down or all my drives get electrically fried, etc.

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randack
I have a library about 90GB in size currently, spanning about 12 years. I've
played with all kinds of options, but I have a problem - I'm married to a
luddite. My wife just doesn't get online storage and doesn't care about
accessibility. She just wants to know where the most recent year's worth of
photos are so that she can post to Facebook and create photo books.

After toying with Dropbox, Amazon Photos, Google Photos and a host of others,
what I ended up doing was connecting a 1TB drive to a Raspberry Pi, then
setting up a Samba mount on the local LAN. There's a read/write "dropbox"
folder where we can upload photos manually, and I have a Python script running
out of cron that sorts everything into date-based folders
([https://github.com/andrewning/sortphotos](https://github.com/andrewning/sortphotos)).
The date-folders are read-only on the Samba share.

I also have Dropbox configured on our mobile phones. Photos can be auto-
uploaded to Dropbox, and I have CLI scripts that download them from there, and
move them into the date-folders. The Python script de-dupes everything, and I
move "duplicates" to an S3 folder where they're either purged after 30 days,
or I'll review them to double check something wasn't ignored by mistake.

Everything on the 1TB drive is synched to S3 weekly, and moved quickly to
Glacier. I also have a secondary 1TB drive that I'll sync to the master on a
monthly basis.

So I don't get on-the-go access to my full photo archives, but I can move what
I want to Amazon Photos if I really want something, and I've got enough
redundancies to make me feel like I won't lose anything.

------
TommyBombadil
I actually still use the discontinued desktop software Picasa as my local tool
for bulk organizing photos into folders which are backed up to Dropbox. I can
access at home on the computer with a synced Picasa folder and access those
via the Dropbox app if needed.

From there I'll curate a gallery of particular trip or event and upload to
Google Photos where I can more easily share with friends and family.

------
mcgrath_sh
I use a combination of Dropbox and a nifty piece of software called Hazel on
macOS.

The general workflow is that Dropbox automatically uploads photos from my
phone and from my husband's phone to a "Camera Uploads" folder. My husband's
photos are brought over to my Dropbox via a shared folder. Hazel watches the
Camera Uploads folder and renames and then sorts photos into a directory
structure of "YYYY > YYYY-MM." Each photo is names YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.EXT. It is
incredibly easy for me to find any photo I am looking for. I am not locked
into any software or file structure. I use Lyn.app or GraphicsConverter.app or
even Finder.app to browse the photos. There are a couple of iOS apps that look
into your dropbox directory and make albums out of folders.

So far, the biggest weakness of this setup is pictures that are not taken by
me and the co-mingling of those images with personal photos. I need to be
better about reviewing the monthly folder at the end of the month and placing
those where they belong. Examples of the things that are in this category are
photos of sports players/games/events, screenshots, memes, wallpapers, etc. I
do have a separate but similar workflow for screenshots of video games, so
that is not an issue.

I also had really poor backup habits when I was younger (yay for multiple
copies of everything and just adding a random number to it) and have a huge
chunk of photos that are all improperly dated for December 2013. This means
that I have to spend a lot of time de-duping. I use DuplicateDetective.app to
help with this, but photos are one area where I will not do that
automatically. Sadly, I am missing a couple month chunk right around when my
dog was adopted, but overall, my pictures from late high-school forward have
survived pretty well. Once I have the old stuff mostly organized, this will
self-maintain in the future.

I do not know the size of my photo library.

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Broken_Hippo
I somewhat regularly back up my pictures onto an external hard drive.
Additionally, some are backed up in the cloud.

My photos are generally divided into 2 categories: high quality artwork photos
and everyday pictures, usually from a cell phone.

The art pictures are divided into "collections", named according to whim. Most
files have names as unique as the picture. I also have art reference photos
here, as well as a few cell phone photo collections: Things that look
glitched, manhole covers, and sunsets behind a utility pole.

The others are badly organized. I usually have a "dump" folder with
unorganized photos. I try to name folders so I remember, but I forget.

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leipert
I used Adobe Lightroom in the past. With a folder structure
[YEAR]/[YEAR]-[MONTH]-[DAY] Event/[YEAR][MONTH][DAY]_name.png. All on a
Synology NAS (with RAID) and backup to external HDD.

Images from my iPhone are synced up to iCloud, and I never come around to put
them in the structure above.

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Powerofmene
I was the worst with this. Until just recently my photos were scattered
everywhere; phones, laptop, iPad, tablets, etc. I took several hours and
loaded everything to Dropbox and then for 30 minutes a night for 4-5 nights I
organized all photos into sub files within the photo file. Now I can find a
picture in a flash rather than having to search across several devices.

------
nibstwo
Google Photos.

~~~
sixQuarks
I reluctantly put all my photos there, giving Google yet another huge access
point to my life. But dammit if it's not the best photo management/archiving
app, especially with its AI photo search.

~~~
kbyatnal
Surprised more people haven't mentioned this. It works so well it's pretty
incredible. I get really excited every time they release a new update because
I can't wait to see what new AI features they added.

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palidanx
I upload my photos periodically to Amazon Glacier. I use the Windows Fast
Glacier app as the interface to it. Glacier penalizes you heavily financially
for retrieving the data, so it is more for the worst case scenario of losing
all of my photos in my local harddrive.

Costs are about $2/month for about 100 gigs so far.

------
kleer001
100G over 10 years.

Managed poorly. 1/2 of it Just slaved to Mac's Photo app. The other half in
loose dated folders.

No tags, only a hand full of albums. No face detection. Scattered backups on
DVDRS. Also backed up with the rest of the computer every week.

It's all coming from my phone camera, which I sync and cleanup every week or
so.

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tmaly
I have about 400GB of photos and video. about 260GB are on back blaze. The
rest are on an external drive.

I do not have a great strategy to access them all in one place. I was thinking
of possibly utilizing Amazon photo backup that comes with prime, but it does
not do video.

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swiley
I don't :(

Maybe I should try setting up a cron job to rsync my DCIM folder. I haven't
really heard of anything better that doesn't rely on some third party service.

------
8draco8
Currently about 200GB of photos on local RAID1 Synology NAS mirrored to
Backblaze in case all drives dies.

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trafficlight
A single folder. It's all right there.

------
akshxy
Why nobody mentioned Photos by Apple?

~~~
matt_s
I used to use iPhoto, don't know if their Photos app is the same but iPhoto
was extremely slow and put every pic into its own proprietary "database".

I'd rather have access to a file system that has them and I can sort through
that way, do copies, backups, etc. without having to touch a 20+GB file.

