

Ask HN: How do you manage your digital media - jman1

I am facing a problem of managing our photos and videos. The problem is me and my wife take photos and video using our 2 iPhones, 1 iPad, 1 canon DSLR and 1 Fuji Point and Shoot and then find ourselves looking for pictures in various devices. Also as a result we have no physical pictures because all the photos are scattered in different places and have not been consolidated. I am sure other people (specially new parents) are facing this problem and  I wanted to know what kind of tools or setup you guys are using to conquer this problem.<p>I am wondering if there is a solution where all this media could be housed in once location and then be viewed seamlessly by any type of device (mobile phone, home computer, overseas via browser) ?<p>Thanks in advance.
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neya
At home, we have 5 HTC phones and 2 Apple devices (iPhone and an iPad) and a
Canon DSLR. We face the same problem too, but then, the solution is really
simple, but involves some manual work - Though it will be rewarding in the
end. I have a Seagate 1 TB hard disk just for this purpose and I have a folder
called "Photos". Inside this folder, there is a naming convention that all of
us follow - Each family member has to create a new folder by the norm "Date,
Title, Name". As you guessed, the date represents the starting date of the
first photo in the album (be it the phone or the DSLR) and the title could be
anything, Eg. "Las Vegas" or something. Name represents the (shortcode) name
of the family member uploading the photo. this actually makes searching for a
particular photo or album easier. Say, I want to find out albums uploaded just
by me, so I could just search for "name" and bingo! There you go..

Now, we're a Windows family, so all we do is just share this folder for
everyone else from Windows within the home network. So anyone can access the
"Photos" folder from any device (Mobile OR PC) and can transfer their photos
to this folder. So, there' s no confusion. For mobile devices (android) there
are some apps that let you do this - either through FTP, etc. The kids in our
home use it, but I personally connect it via USB, drag and drop the photos
straight to the "Photos" folder.

This may appear like a complex process, but once you follow this, it's
actually not. Also, I make sure I take backups of the 1TB drive and burn them
to a dozen DVD's once in a while to make sure everything's safe and we don't
lose any data. Probably you could get yourself a dropbox account to make all
this easier, but I am still not convinced about the cloud based solutions,
mainly because it takes too much time to view these images as a gallery (each
image is approx. 10-30 MB depending on the device).

We've been following this procedure for about 3 years now and it sure gets the
job done. Maybe there are specific apps to make some intermediate processes
easier, but with Android there's the issue of some apps not working as they
should in ALL of our devices. So, I never really bother with the apps, I just
plug the USB and upload stuff. Oh, I forgot to mention, I have a docking
station, so that makes things a bit easier - connecting the DSLR, HTC phone or
iPhone, etc.

