

The Best Way to Organize a Lifetime of Photos - scosman
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-way-to-organize-a-lifetime-of-photos-1429637857

======
tommyd
Tangentially related, I have to give a shout out to Chris Marquardt's "1000
Pics 1 Hour" Lightroom workflow:
[https://shop.chrismarquardt.com/bookshop/product/1-hour-1000...](https://shop.chrismarquardt.com/bookshop/product/1-hour-1000-pics-
supercharge-your-lightroom-workflow/). Simple but effective way of dealing
with the massive volume of images we capture with digital cameras, and
reducing your photos to the real keepers.

It's worth paying for the e-book as he goes into some interesting points, but
in a nutshell the core concept is going through your imported photos in three
passes: first, quickly pick all the ones that might have some potential merit
(e.g. they are in focus and of something somewhat interesting), then go back
through the picked ones and quickly rate them from 1-3 stars (1 being "has
documentary value", 3 being "potentially a great photo), then take the 3 star
ones and spend a bit of time retouching them if needed and giving them 4 or 5
stars if they are really special.

The end result is that you can quickly get down to keeping maybe one in ten
photos from a shoot - it makes the whole process feel a lot more manageable
and opening Lightroom less scary! Plus, it reduces the amount of photos we
store so you need to worry less about the capacity of your cloud solution ;)

~~~
StavrosK
> The end result is that you can quickly get down to keeping maybe one in ten
> photos from a shoot

Are you a photographer? I'd love to be having that much success, if I end up
with three good photos out of 500, I call it a good day.

~~~
dagw
I read a quote from Ansel Adams to the effect that if he got 10 good pictures
in a year then that was really good year. So 3-4 good photos in a day and your
a third of the way to beating what Ansel Adams could to in a year :)

Basically everybody has different goals and ambitions with their photography
and comparing how many 'good' pictures you get is pointless since everybody
defines 'good' so very differently.

~~~
ryannevius
The rate at which we can create photos nowadays is much, much higher than it
was back then (due to the equipment we're using, availability of "gear", etc).
It would make sense that a skilled photographer today could produce quality
photos at a faster rate.

------
jwr
Alas, I think there is no "best way" right now. All solutions fall short. And
the problem is not just with library management (although that's bad, too),
but even with sharing photos with your family.

For a couple of years I've been paying SmugMug to host my galleries, but
recently finally got annoyed: they are great for pro photographers (who sell
photos), but their goals are not aligned with mine.

What I need is fairly simple:

* online site, available at a specific (ONE) URL, that my entire family can bookmark (ONCE),

* login/password required to enter, and I want multiple login/passwords,

* HTTPS (duh),

* no borg-minds harvesting my photos for advertising data, or doing face recognition,

* good image quality, fast and responsive, both on mobile and desktop,

* single gallery index, automatically ordered by date,

* gallery date ranges extracted automatically from photos,

* easy adding of new galleries, preferably just by uploading a directory with a bunch of images exported from Aperture/Lightroom/Photos/Whatever,

* simple text-based search that finds galleries.

Google Picasa, Flickr, SmugMug, whatever you pick — they all fail at this
simple task (for various reasons). And some people even use Facebook to share
images with family (sigh).

I got so annoyed that I finally wrote my own solution. Which works. Costs me
6EUR/month for a Hetzner.de virtual server, but I can finally have all of the
above "features" without any extra annoyance. Plus I get significantly better
image quality than any other solution I've seen (mozjpeg kicks ass).

And I don't depend on anyone, in particular on any company's whims or
"strategic cutbacks", nor am I "the product being sold".

I find it amazing that it's 2015 and I'm writing software that manages private
online photo galleries. I think it doesn't speak well of the current
business/tech landscape.

(Incidentally, software to manage your photo collection is a whole another
story. After Apple screwed me over with Aperture I am thinking hard about what
to do about my photo archives.)

~~~
onethumb
Hey there, CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug here. Seems like we do all of those
things with the exception of always-on-HTTPS (which we're actively working on
as I type this).

You sound like exactly our target customer, so if you've got some time, I'd
love to understand what these things are. I'm sure there are nuances here that
I'm missing or not fully understanding. Thanks!

~~~
jwr
I don't think I am your target customer. Or perhaps you think I am, but it
certainly doesn't show in your product.

I just checked and here's what I wrote to you in our support discussion from
2013 (when you introduced Sharegroups, which I thought would solve my
problem):

> "I'm not sure you thought this out — I can't be expected to manually add
> every new gallery to the sharegroup (which is not an easy process if you
> have >50 galleries), and then rearrange them manually (something I already
> did within my folder anyway) using the old interface."

There are a number of problems with SmugMug. The most important one is the
amount of work I have to do to add each new event (gallery). I had to fight
the category system (I don't even want categories), remember presets (will
that one work?), manually rearrange galleries, and perform a number of other
chores. And there were minor annoyances, such as that at the end of it all,
SmugMug still insisted on placing "Powered by SmugMug" branding on my pages.

For comparison, so that you understand, these are the steps I have to take
right now (with my software), starting from a folder full of images exported
from Aperture/Lightroom:

* run a script that converts/resizes/prepares images,

* upload the whole resulting directory to my server.

That's it. There is nothing more to do. Galleries get sorted automatically,
date ranges are automatic, featured photo is chosen either randomly or based
on a "featured" keyword. Galleries are named after directories by default.
Galleries are reverse-sorted by date. There are no categories. Family and
friends can log in, view pictures, search galleries. Oh, and it also supports
retina images, and works _very well_ on mobile devices.

I think if you want to address use cases like mine, you have to realize that
those photos are not the center of our lives, they are just a tiny part of
life. I am not a pro photographer obsessing over how I want to categorize my
galleries and how I will sell my pictures. I want to spend the absolute
minimum of time dealing with placing them online.

------
hcurtiss
Crazy that they don't mention Carousel. I've been really happy with it. Easy
to send family links. Not tied to a social platform -- my wife and I share the
same account with all iPhone photos uploaded/downloaded to family computer.
Onedrive offers much of this, but its slow -- photos load relatively slowly on
iPhone app, and videos constantly buffer. Carousel/Dropbox is instant. For me,
the only missing feature is rotate/crop, but I can always do that on a
desktop/laptop linked to Dropbox account, and all devices update.

~~~
hsshah
+1 After few iterations, currently I too have landed with Carousel/Dropbox. It
just works. Although, there are several features that it lacks related to
editing. If Apple Cloud Photo service proves reliable, I might switch over (My
family has all apple devices so makes it easy)

~~~
hcurtiss
I admit Apple Photos and family sharing looks pretty slick. Unfortunately,
while we use iPhones, iPads, an Apple TV, and several Airport Expresses (home
audio), the home computer is still a Windows machine, and I use a Surface Pro
3 daily for work. I'm also wary of doubling down on Apple. Our next family
machine may very well be an iMac, but I guess there's something attractive to
me about keeping our data separate. I want to be able to pay Dropbox for a
premium service that "just works" on every machine, no matter the OS. That way
I can fluidly move to the next big thing without all the hooks (I struggled
with a messy Google+ exit a year ago). Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but I'm one
of those guys who think the Dropbox team is on to something. They need to work
quick though. Google's move to decouple photos (and provide for auto desktop
download) threatens to shake things up -- at least in our little household. My
wife will love another transition . . .

------
mark_l_watson
I played with Photos and it is nice. The problem is if you also use Android
and Windows devices.

I have a simple setup that works well for me: I set my Android phone to not
upload photos to my OneDrive Camera Roll unless I am on a wifi connection, and
I turn off wifi on my phone when I am hiking, at family dinners - anytime I am
taking a bunch of pictures. When I am home, I delete unwanted pictures before
turning wifi back on and the pictures sync to OneDrive.

All my picture file names are time stamped and I add descriptions to the some
of the file names after the time stamp. Occasional descriptions help find
stuff in a time stream.

Every several months I rename my Camera Roll directory to
Camera_year_month_day and create a new empty Camera Roll directory in
OneDrive. It is easy to find any of my pictures, select groups of pictures and
generate share links, etc.

This same scheme used to work fine when I used Dropbox, and converting from
Dropbox to OneDrive was easy and maintained this setup.

edit: I use selective sync to device to not have all of my pictures on my
devices, relying on the web OneDrive interface to show people pictures without
taking up local disk space.

------
BorisMelnik
What I look for the most in a backup solution for something as precious as my
personal / family photos is the stability of the company. Will it be there in
5/10/20 years?

Regardless of the solution, redundant backup is an absolute must for me. I
will never depend on 1 solution for any of this no matter what the price.

My current solution is this:

* all photos go to Dropbox about once a month or if there is a large batch (birthdays etc)

* redundant backup to a RAID server in my house (3 TB drives) right now about 50% full

* I also compress really important photos and send them to an FTP server on a VPS with limited web access (no httpd)

~~~
knodi123
is there much benefit to compressing your photos?

~~~
BorisMelnik
its more organizational for me than anything. the fact that they are "inside"
a gzip/tar or zip file kind of keeps them categorically together. It does
usually end up saving some space, not a ton.

------
mattbeckman
Excited about Apple Photos.

Every solution I've attempted to instigate with my wife has been met with
resistance for minor technical or minor inconvenience reasons.

Previously, it was an external drive with iPhoto that used what eventually was
a merged iPhoto Library on an external drive. The external drive would be
plugged in to the RAID 1 NAS periodically to preserve it. Finally, every week
or so the NAS would backup to S3.

However, all of that proved too inconvenient or too aggravating.

Apple Photos is working great so far for us (albeit with a tight coupling).

------
cdown
If you really want to store a "lifetime of photos", you should probably
consider having a better long-term backup strategy than just putting it in
locations that are managed by a single piece of software. :-)

Sure, some of these applications store a copy both online and on disk, but if
your application chooses to run amok and delete everything, that's not really
going to matter in many cases. I've seen horrifying things happen when iPhoto
tries to sync with the cloud before. :-(

------
matdrewin
Apple Photos would be great if they had more powerful family sharing. My dream
is to have the family photo collection on all devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook)
that we can both curate.

Adobe Creative Cloud seems to support 1 collection with 2 people accessing it.
Apple Photos is less expensive though, comes out to $5 a month for both of us
(20GB + 200GB) vs the 10$ a month for the Lightroom.

------
mattsmith321
I'm actually liking [http://thislife.com](http://thislife.com) which is an
extended service of Shutterfly. It can pull photos from your local machines as
well as online accounts. You can pay to also have video access.

------
outericky
Just started using Amazon's cloud offering. Don't mind it... it's not perfect,
but it's simple. Coupled with prime it's affordable. Easily back up multiple
devices, videos, etc.

~~~
ValentineC
How many photos do you usually upload? I was signed up for the trial, but
stopped using it when the web client decided that it couldn't upload an entire
camera's worth of photos (~70GB) at once.

~~~
outericky
I don't use the web client. On my mac, I installed the desktop client, and
that seemed to work fine for the 30 or so gb I did per batch.

On the phones I backed up 2 phones, each with about 10gb of photo/video.

------
bane
Since I started taking photos in earnest during travels in late 2004, I've
collected around 120k photos. I don't really shoot very often, but when I do
shoot, I take tons of photos. For example, on a 10 day trip to London, I took
around 9,000 photos. I'm not a great photographer, but somewhere in that pile
will be some great photos I'm pleased with.

I don't want to be stuck with one software's way of doing things, so here's
how I organize them:

\- Each trip is organized in a folder with a sortable date down to the month
and general placename: "2014-05 London"

\- Inside that folder, at the end of every day of shooting, I dump all the
photos into a folder with the name of the day of the trip: Day1, Day2, etc.
Sometimes I'll use the date for the day instead. It doesn't really matter
much.

\- Since during the course of a day, I might shoot at several locations,
inside each "Day" folder, I organize the photos by location of the shoot or a
short description of the event I was shooting, "Walking Around the Shard",
"Tate Modern", "East Dulwich" etc.

\- I also use a couple different cameras, so inside each of those, I have a
folder for each camera: Nikon, Lumix, etc.

\- Inside each of those I separate out pictures I took of my family or of me
with pictures of sites. I usually upload the "personal" pictures to Google or
Facebook so I can access them anywhere.

\- So if I want pictures of us from Picadilly circus on the 3rd day of our
trip to London (and not the 6th day when we went there again), I go to 2014-05
London/Day 3/Picadilly Circus/Nikon/Us

\- If I want Pictures of Bernini's _Ecstasy of Saint Teresa_ from the Santa
Maria della Vittoria in Rome, I go to 2011-04 Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria
della Vittoria/Canon

\- In each of these, I make a folder called "top" where I copy the photos I
think are the best. As I process the photos I make a final selection and put
the results in a folder called "done".

\- So the best, finished and processed, shots from my last example are 2011-04
Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria della Vittoria/Canon/top/done

out of maybe 200 photos total at that church, only 2 or 3 might make it to
"done".

Even if I can't remember exactly which day I took a shot, the descriptive
names are searchable in the file structure and I can usually find a specific
photo in a few seconds. It's also self documenting so when I need to update my
CV or remember when I took a trip somewhere, just navigating the file system
provides all that information.

There's often 1 more step, an agency also buys some of my photos, and their
acceptance process is even more stringent than mine, so out of 20 or 30 "done"
photos, I might only get 6-10 accepted for professional publication. I put
those in a "published" photo under "done".

I've started a new system as well. On January 1st, I take the previous year's
photos and put them in a folder with that year. Only the current year's photos
stay in my root photography folder. This makes things much tidier even if a
little harder to find. So all of the above examples would have one more folder
with just the 4 digit year before it.

I make a global backup of my entire collection after every trip or shoot onto
a couple other disks, one of which stays disconnected most of the time and in
a drawer.

~~~
flatfilefan
Basically as they say: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to
reinvent it, poorly"

Over the time and many setbacks (lost stuff, not able to find stuff) I have
also drifted to a very simple solution: use a file system to organize and
store your stuff. This is valid equally for pictures and for music (and
documents, and books, etc.). This makes sure you will never loose your stuff.
Backups, search, copying etc. is provided by tested and reliable tools either
from the OS itself or the standard tools like rsync. Everything else is "on
top". For example you can use iTunes, Clementine, Foobar, whatever music
library software you want, but keep your mp3s in folders sorted by
rating/artist/album/song and you will be able to migrate between the vendors,
backup, restore, script conversion (need to compress music and resize photos
further for the phone to fit into 128GB limit of the sdxc card). Same thing
with the Photos. I use very simple folder structure of Year/Location. Bad
shots are just mercilessly deleted (power to the Paper Bin!). Super good ones
a copied to Favorits. Because photos are coming from different devices I have
given up on filenames for lack of consistency.

And, should the vendor drop your library management software in next 10 years
what will you do? With a filesystem oriented approach you can be sure to have
it available 50 years down the road, or something better comes around and you
will just upgrade.

------
hammock
How is there not a free service that does this? Or were free services just not
reviewed in this article.

~~~
kijin
Free services tend to come with a fairly small amount of disk space, nowhere
near enough to store a lifetime of photos.

------
copsarebastards
The fact that this is a problem widely felt enough to be reported in the WSJ
is a side effect of consumerism run rampant. Advertising campaigns that
conflate high resolution with high quality combined with a "you can do
anything" attitude have persuaded millions of people that they're great
photographers when in fact they're just taking photos and videos which even
they will likely never watch.

Don't get me wrong, the technology is great and it's enabling some really
talented people to do really awesome things. But those people spend literally
years learning to compose shots, and hours after each photo session poring
over thousands of duds to find the few gems. The average person isn't doing
that. Let's face it, if you want the sunset in Puerto Rico captured in a photo
you're better off letting the professionals do it.

There are other definitions of quality. I have a lifetime of photos too, but
my lifetime of photos amounts to about 300 photos taken over 30 years. They're
not well-composed. A lot of them were shot on crappy hardware and it shows. A
lot of them are pictures I didn't take. But every single one of them takes me
back to something I care about and makes me smile. My vacation photos are of
me and of people I care about, with things we liked.

I don't need cloud storage to sync those 300 photos between my devices. They
don't require organization; they're stored by date and time and that's it--I
know where every photo was taken and who is in it by looking at it. The photos
are stored on my laptop hard drive, a backup drive, and on my personal server.
I sync them with rsync but if that didn't exist there are a dozen other ways
that would work as well.

If you're not a professional or trying to be one, then the solution isn't
waiting to be invented. The solution is to stop taking so many pointless
photos. Is sifting through hundreds of photos really improving your life? Do
you really care about all of those photos, or could you figure out before you
even take the photo which ones you're going to care about?

And taking all those photos has other downsides too that have nothing to do
with poor storage solutions. Trying to capture everything for the future
prevents people from living in the present. I see people at concerts all the
time watching the entire concert through their phones. Are you really going to
rewatch that poorly lit video with its shitty sound later? You're damaging a
present experience that could be awesome in exchange for a mediocre future
experience that might not happen. Not to mention how this affects other
people's experience: if you're tall it's not your fault, but if you're holding
a phone between me and the artist I paid to see you're being an asshole.

TL;DR: The best way to organize a lifetime of photos is to stop taking ones
that don't matter.

~~~
flatfilefan
Not taking photos is equal to deleting them. And this is the hard part - which
to delete?

Not sure how much, how far you travel and how various activities are you
participating. When I bring my photos from a distant country people are
interested to look at them. And different people find different pictures
interesting. Some people want to see all the pictures of penguins, while
others like to see architecture. Others still happy to see tens of different
motorbikes from a trade fare. Often the ones I thought were worth deleting are
the interesting ones for the people. So unfortunately deleting them right away
(or not taking) is not an option to me.

Also as usual - telling people stop doing things they like is hardly helpful.

~~~
copsarebastards
> Not taking photos is equal to deleting them.

I get that my post was long so it makes sense that you didn't read it, but
maybe don't respond to posts you didn't read?

Taking photos and then deleting them is _not_ equivalent to not taking them.
It takes time and storage, exchanges a present experience for a mediocre
potential future experience. I already explained this in my previous post.

> When I bring my photos from a distant country people are interested to look
> at them. And different people find different pictures interesting. Some
> people want to see all the pictures of penguins, while others like to see
> architecture. Others still happy to see tens of different motorbikes from a
> trade fare.

Are any of these things photos _you_ have to take? Or could you find better
versions of these photos, taken by professional photogs, online, and send it
to people with a "I saw this"?

> Often the ones I thought were worth deleting are the interesting ones for
> the people.

Often when I'm taking a photo, I think, "<X friend> would really like to see
this." These make up a small fraction of my photos and after I send them to
the person I delete them. But the difference here is that on a trip I take 15
photos instead of 10.

All this says about you is that you're not approaching your photo-taking
intentionally. None of the objections you've brought up couldn't be solved
with 15 seconds of thought.

> Also as usual - telling people stop doing things they like is hardly
> helpful.

I'm not telling you to do anything. If you want to spend money and time
viewing your life through a small screen so that a few people _might_ find
_some_ of your photos interesting, go ahead.

People like all sorts of things. Some people like cocaine. But it's easy to
get caught up in short-term dopamine-releasing behaviors and sometimes those
behaviors do more harm than good even though they feel good. It makes sense to
take a step back occasionally and look at the effect of you behaviors you
enjoy on your overall happiness.

~~~
hcurtiss
As a guy with little kids, I genuinely enjoy going back through old photos. We
have about 60gb of photos and videos over the last ten years. I don't spend my
time viewing life through a viewfinder. With modern technology, snapping a
photo, or a series of photos, is very low friction. You might also be
surprised by how little you actually remember, and how much you enjoy being
reminded of life's little events perusing pictures later. And postcards are no
replacement for pictures of my wife and kids in Hawaii.

Also, I find your tone spectacularly offensive.

~~~
copsarebastards
> As a guy with little kids, I genuinely enjoy going back through old photos.

> You might also be surprised by how little you actually remember, and how
> much you enjoy being reminded of life's little events perusing pictures
> later. And postcards are no replacement for pictures of my wife and kids in
> Hawaii.

I don't disagree with any of this. The problem is not taking pictures, it's
taking so many pictures that it causes storage, organization, and experience
problems.

> We have about 60gb of photos and videos over the last ten years. I don't
> spend my time viewing life through a viewfinder.

The first sentence contradicts the second.

> With modern technology, snapping a photo, or a series of photos, is very low
> friction.

It hasn't been extremely difficult to take pictures for most of my lifetime.

> Also, I find your tone spectacularly offensive.

Stop the presses, we definitely shouldn't be talking about anything that
offends anyone!

Getting offended does not make anything better ever--it's just a way of
ignoring people you disagree with instead of considering differing opinion. If
that's what you want to do, you're only hurting yourself.

I'm not criticizing you or anyone else as a person. In fact I'm not even
telling anyone what to do. If you choose pictures and videos over direct
experience, that's your choice to make.

I think most people would be happier if they took fewer photos, but I think
there's a lot more to happiness than that. If you're happy then there's no
need to fix what isn't broken. But if you think you could be happier then
there's no reason not to explore conversations about what makes people happy
or not.

