
The Best Photo Organizing App? I’m Still Looking - user_235711
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/17/technology/personaltech/the-best-photo-organizing-app-im-still-looking.html
======
bane
I'm a travel photographer in my spare time. I don't really need a photo
organizing app, what I need is a photo metadata app. I already have a great
way to organize my photos via the file system, but I don't have a good system
to put metadata on each photo (where it was shot, what it is, etc.), personal
rating (so I can grab the top shots and public them), etc.

The old flickr was perfect for me, I could group things by
continent/country/city give a title, drop it on a map to geolocate it, etc.
But now they've flattened out the structure a bit and it's not as good for my
purposes.

~~~
clarkm
Is there something like ID3 tags for pictures?

~~~
th0ma5
Yes, EXIF metadata.

~~~
clarkm
I totally forgot about that. Though I thought EXIF just had technical info
like resolution, camera mode, date, and location. Is it really as flexible as
ID3?

I know next to nothing about photography, so maybe there tons of tools out
there to manage your photo library EXIF tags that I have never noticed.

~~~
Brian-Puccio
Beyond EXIF, there's also IPTC, which the afore-mentioned Lightroom is pretty
good at managing. Couple that with built in geo-tagging of photos thanks to
cameras with built in GPS (or do it after the fact with a GPS logger) and you
can have a pretty decent system. Both the geographic feature and the keyword
feature allow for hierarchies, not just strictly free tagging.

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veidr
I've tried them all too, including the ones that cost $100+ (Lightroom,
Aperture), the free ones (iPhoto and friends), and the doomed web apps
(Everpix, Picturelife, etc.), and I fully agree that there is not one workable
solution in this space -- which is _crazy_ since there are more than a billion
people who need this.

This problem _cannot_ be reasonably solved with a web app. Or even a native
app running off a mechanical hard disk. With 20MB photos common these days,
you need the data coming off a blazing fast local SSD. Otherwise, you can't
flip through your photos in a reasonable way. It takes too long to move from
one to the next, and every web app does that thing where they load this horrid
blurry version first while waiting for the full-resolution version to load.
Unacceptable (to anybody who's ever experienced instantly flipping through a
hundred pics off a fast SSD, anyway).

So a web app can't do it, but you _do need_ a web app component, and cloud
storage strategy, to solve this problem. People's local SSDs are typically too
small to store all their photos. Plus, you want your photos everywhere, on all
your devices.

So not only do you do need to architect a web/cloud component, but you either
need to create a native app for all devices, or at least create an integration
with the local photo management facilities on each platform, so that the
subset of photos people want are in fast local storage.

It's a hard problem. Meanwhile, my own 500GB of photos (I used to have only
maybe 20GB, but then my kids were born) are just sitting in a big folder, with
no organization at all, waiting for somebody so solve it.

~~~
Veratyr
Picturelife + Lightroom works pretty well for me.

Lightroom lets me do all the adjustments and metadata correction locally
(something that only has to be done once anyway) and Picturelife gives me the
cloud storage and browsing/sharing capabilities I need. It's not one
application but it is a workable solution.

As for webapps being 'doomed', there's a pretty large spectrum between 'horrid
blurry version' and 'full-resolution version'. Considering that my photos are
generally ~4K in resolution and I don't own a monitor that can display them in
full resolution, a 1080p scaled version is fine and loads entirely fast
enough, even on my terrible ~8Mbps ADSL connection.

Sure it's not as great as flipping through an SSD locally but I think it's
definitely acceptable and 'a reasonable way'. I think you're just setting your
standards too high. Most of the world doesn't even own an SSD, let alone
demand that speed in every application they use. Most users are entirely happy
just flipping through albums on Facebook.

~~~
veidr
You are right to some extent, but I think the reason I have these expectations
is not that I'm some kind of computing perfectionist, it's simply that all my
machines have had SSDs and high-res monitors for a while now.

Once you get used to that (which doesn't take long at all) the old, painfully
slow ways no longer seem 'reasonable'.

Right now, my equipment may be fairly high-end, but we are fast approaching
the day when virtually all computers have fast storage and 4K+ displays.

In 1992, I thought it was reasonable to dial a modem, log onto the Interzone
BBS, and have conversations like this one at 9600 baud in Zterm on a 512x342
pixel screen. Few people would accept that today, though.

Having said that, I do agree that Dropbox + Lightroom + Picturelife is about
as good as managing photos gets today. (I canceled my own Picturelife
subscription, though, because using it was too slow.)

------
deet
The author didn't look very hard considering the article doesn't mention
Picturelife.

(Disclaimer: I work there, but my position is supported by many other
reviews.)

~~~
taftster
Thanks for the mention. I didn't know about Picturelife, but now I do. This is
pretty close to what I want. Namely, a "cloud" product that let's me get all
my photos into the same account, download them back when I want them, and
organize online.

I don't want ever want to "sync" to local storage, nor rely in anyway on local
storage. Local storage is temporary. I want durable "cloud" storage.

But note, I want to be able to safely backup my entire digital collection
wherever I choose. Perhaps backing up the Amazon Glacier, or something like
that. I don't trust that a new dotcom is going to necessarily survive.

Thanks for the pointer, going to check it out.

~~~
citruspi
> But note, I want to be able to safely backup my entire digital collection
> wherever I choose. Perhaps backing up the Amazon Glacier, or something like
> that. I don't trust that a new dotcom is going to necessarily survive.

I completely agree. One of the features that I love about Picturelife is the
ability to setup your own storage. Instead of paying for the service, you can
connect it to an Amazon S3 bucket. All the photos you upload are stored in a
bucket that you own and you only pay the S3 bills.

Then, because you have complete control and access to the bucket itself, you
could setup a backup to Glacier every week or something.

~~~
hsshah
This is great. Had I known about this couple of weeks back, I would have opted
for this instead of singing up for Dropbox and going to the initial painful
step of uploading ALL my local photos (hundreds of GB) to it. Do you know if
PictureLife works with Dropbox?!

~~~
kuyan
Picturelife has an option to connect to your Dropbox account but I don't think
there is an option to use Dropbox as a storage medium.

------
qohloinc
Good Albums - Photo Organizer app: Easily organize your pics and safely show
them to your friends.

1\. First of its kind to group photos by moments.

2\. Easy to organize your pics into awesome albums.

3\. SafeView, brilliantly hide your personal photos, and only show relevant
photos to your friends

Get from Google Play: [http://goo.gl/L1myRJ](http://goo.gl/L1myRJ)

~~~
swrobel
Are you the author? Here's my 2* review, just posted on Play:

\- Moments just seems to be organized by day instead of by month as in
Timeline view.

\- No easy way to bulk-select photos to add to an album.

\- Curious overuse of radio buttons. Did not like.

~~~
qohloinc
I am the author :) It's a valuable feedback. Thanks. Moments are to group
photos by event (taken in short span of time) and timeline view to group
photos by month. Do you suggest me to switch the functionality, like timeline
to show photos by event and moments by month? I'll revise the app to use other
UI pattern instead of radio buttons. Also, bulk selection is very important.
My mistake, I thought about it, must have implemented it, at least :(

------
java-man
What do you guys think of one of my creations (still in development stage) -
Secure Digital Archive:
[http://goryachev.com/products/archive](http://goryachev.com/products/archive)

While not strictly a photo organizer app, it does have a photo gallery,
timeline, and raw file format support.

~~~
miahi
Trying it now. Opinions/bugs (not very well organized, sorry):

\- please allow multiple folder selection for volume source folder

\- the analysis phase is really slow and it looks CPU-bound on the
ImageScaler.resize() method; try to find a faster resize library or at least
allow user setting for scaling (smooth is quite slow) and multithread the
resize - right now I have 7 idle CPU cores and you have a really slow
application. This is bordering on unusable. I have ~2TB of jpg and raw photos,
it would take at least half a month to resize them - and I didn't even ask for
a thumbnail.

\- A snapshot cannot be stopped (there is no "stop" button/menu entry).

\- the persistent mode is called "Persistent" in one place and "Archival" in
another

\- Not sure I understand the "persistent/archival" setting; I would expect
that I can access the old/deleted files as long as they are in the repository
files even if the source is deleted/unavailable. I now have a 2GB repository
"backup" but I cannot access anything from it because I removed the volumes
(the repository did not shrink). At least make it the default with a big
warning if you disable it.

\- 64MB file chunk for the repository is quite small for something containing
photos that cannot ever be deleted (a raw file can easily have 10 or 20MB);
file access in folders with a lot of files is slow

\- please read EXIF data - it's way more important than Hex views; the
metadata-extractor library[1] is stable and fast (I'm using it for my photo
organizing application)

\- please rotate the thumbnails by EXIF data

\- corrupting/deleting a backup file doesn't give any warning (just that the
backups don't work anymore and I cannot see the photos)

\- not providing a name for the volume in step 1 gives a warning when you want
to leave step 2 (and not when you leave step 1)

\- raw image decoding is painfully slow; processing an 8MP Canon RAW takes 40
seconds; it estimates 6 hours for 480 photos.

\- try to buffer the DBInput/Output as RAF can be quite slow; check
MappedByteBuffer

So it looks like a good idea but it's really slow and it can fill up disk
space with files that cannot be recovered.

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/metadata-
extractor/](https://code.google.com/p/metadata-extractor/)

~~~
java-man
Excellent feedback, many thanks! The tool is still in the development stage,
so a lot of things are sub-optimal or missing. But your comments are all
valid.

Persistent mode idea is for situations where the user wants to accumulate a
large repository piecemeal - for example, a photographer can dump a day worth
of files in a folder, upload to the repository and then delete the files on
the local machine. This way the next sync will not delete the files dring the
next snapshot.

Can you email me an example of an image file that needs to be rotated (all
mine have been rotated using windows preview)?

Again, thanks for your comments! Very helpful.

------
rokhayakebe
Xoopit. It does not exist anymore, but this was by far the best plugin I ever
used. In fact it was one of the best software products I ever used, period. It
would go through your email, and organize every photo, pdf, document you ever
received and let you search through them.

Xoopit search was better than gmail search. Significantly.

Xoopit created a "personal media," [1] not social media, out of my inbox. This
felt better than Facebook to me; when I had FB that is.

[1] I heard the term personal media from Tyler Crowley, which helped to change
how I thought about this space.

------
jscheel
i consider myself a fairly smart and technical human being, but a good photo
storage solution is something I still haven't figured out. I want all my
photos on an external drive that is also backed up to backblaze. But I also
want that external drive backed up to dropbox so that I can access my photos
from my phone. Between dropbox wanting to auto-sync my phone pics, itunes
backing up my phone, lightroom's photo library management, my external drive
issue, etc, I'm at a loss how to organize everything.

~~~
rakoo
Camlistore ([http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/)) is kind of an
answer to that: just stuff all your data into it, and get back to it by
searching. You shouldn't have to care about where to put what: what you have
is Photos, Music, PDFs, and all are accessible through a search box. The
content can also be synced between your computers, and there's some work
started to sync with the phone (as far as I know, there's a photo uploader for
Android at the moment).

The project is still in its infancy (as in "not widespread yet") but it's
advancing at a good pace. For the moment the focus is put on how to run it in
the cloud, so that people can install a simple instance somewhere for them,
for their family or even for business (so you can run a public instance). But
if you want to see it for yourself, you'll see that a good amount of work has
been put on images (the golang's stdlib for image was improved from camlistore
work) as you can see in the videos.

------
monksy
What I'm looking for is a way to have multiple contributers to a photo album.
I've got photos from a lot of difference sources, so I need the ability to
merge those into one album.

~~~
surreal
We're doing exactly that at FOMO - we were fed up of missing out on great
memories just because someone else happened to press the shutter. www.fomo.fm

Get in touch if you need anything and/or have feedback :) shai@fomo.fm

------
Spearchucker
It's interesting to me that the author has photos on multiple devices. I sync
mine to my PC, where they get placed in folders named yyyy.mm.dd -
[location/event]. Since my kid was born I started adding folders named
yyyy.mm, which contain the day-to-day photos for a month.

Given that I've been doing this ever since I started amassing digital photos,
and that the author doesn't, and that her NY Times post is on HN, I have to
wonder what others do with their photos.

~~~
bane
I mostly shoot photos when traveling. So I do

    
    
       year\year-month location
    

Then under that yyyymmdd, then sorted by camera (I have multiple) and then
location or subject and under that pictures of people I'm with (I like taking
pictures of things more than people so my pictures of friends/family go in
their own folder, while my wife likes pictures of people more) sorted by
person or group of people.

So for example 2010\2010-11 Paris\2010-11-27\Nikon\Louvre

Is where all the pictures of the Louvre I took on that day are. If I need to
find pictures of the Louvre, I just use Everything on the top level folder and
search for "Louvre".

It works well enough, and I just sort everything back at the hotel while I'm
copying off of my camera onto my laptop. I'm not _super_ strict about the
specific locations, sometimes under "Nikon" will just be a pile of pictures.
Depends on how motivated I am to sort. I'm usually really good about filtering
out pictures of people from stuff though, and I post pictures of people to my
G+ account so my friends and wife and can enjoy them, and I use my flickr for
stuff. The best quality stuff I then publish through Getty. Maybe less than 1%
gets professionally published, but I have almost 120,000 photos organized this
way. I spend lots of time editing metadata in flickr and even more for the
Getty material since they have very high quality control.

I don't really make much money at it, but it's a hobby and I get to call
myself a "professional photographer" in some settings.

~~~
jwr
How do you deal with multiple versions of a single photo? Ones with vsrious
adjustments, or cropped in different ways?

~~~
bane
I don't. I just dump them all in the same pot and look at them. If I need to
select some out for some purpose (making an album or something), I just make
another folder inside there and copy out the ones I need for that purpose.

The ones I publish, I go through, pick the best shots from the group and when
I go through and edit the levels and crops and such I usually do a little
pruning of that set along the way and the edited versions go in yet another
folder deeper (so I have a non-destructive copy). It's useful for me to
publish several variations (like different zoom levels or crops) so they
buyers can buy one that fits their need the best.

------
espinchi
We tried at Photofeed, but decided to close it earlier this year.

It's not easy to make ends meet in this market: the percentage of users that
are willing to pay a monthly/yearly subscription fee is too low to make up for
the cost of storing the photos.

The big players provide online photo storage for free, so the user's position
is understandable. But it doesn't make it any easier for a small business that
wants to, well, make business.

~~~
icefox
Where you able to find anything users were willing to pay for related to
photos? Maybe more on the physical side with prints, photo books, posters,
postcards, etc?

~~~
espinchi
That's a good idea. We did some research on that and, still, the net revenue
we would generate out of those wouldn't make up for the costs either.

We started pushing some cool features like auto-magic clustering of photos
into moments. Now Google and a few others do it too, so I know it doesn't
sound all that impressive now.

~~~
icefox
Reading over all of the comments it sounds like trying to have a company that
is simply providing a place to store photos is a losing proposition. The
revenue would have to come somewhere else.

* By default the photos can be re-sold and the user gets part of the profit.

* Services such as photo restoration

* Selling physical goods such as mugs, tshirts, postcards, posters, puzzles, Christmas cards, photo books, etc

* Ads on top of a chat system based around photos ;)

* A social network that uses the photos to get your friends to join the network

* Now that you are backing up your photos for $ we could back up all your data

* Daily advertising games such as 1 random users that uploads a photo today featuring Taco Bell gets $1000 (aka advertisers pay for everything).

In fact any company that derives revenue secondary from having photos, but not
from the users storing the photos is incentivized to let the users store the
photos for as cheap as possible if not free (when possible). This is probably
the number one problem with any company that is trying to sell storage for
photos and will no doubt force them to pivot or close down eventually.

Alternatively the other option is to only cater to users that are willing to
pay and have no free option at all. You would want to interview those users
and make sure the problem they have is being solved.

------
GreatCrane
Check out Mylio [http://mylio.com/](http://mylio.com/)

It has automated cataloguing, organization, and offline backup of large number
of photos all synchronized across multiple devices.

Disclaimer - I work for the company, but I really feel that the product can
help people manage their photos.

------
uvee
If you store your images on a bunch of online storage locations, you could use
[http://mazira.me](http://mazira.me) to see them all at one place (even from
inside your email).

------
andmarios
Best DAM software is digiKam imo.

From online services I like (and fear) Google+ which let you search your
photos via context without any prior tagging (e.g “show my photos of cats”).

------
ajcarpy2005
Photoshop Elements has really great tagging functionality for people, places,
events, time, etc.

------
bobosha
are there any visual search i.e. search-by-example tools? or tools that
automatically cluster images?

