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Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
79 points by oldsklgdfth on Sept 27, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 90 comments
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.




Everything goes in iCloud Photo Library so it's always available to me on my phone or computer. There's about 2 TB of photos. It gets backed up to my Synology NAS via icloudpd in docker, and then uploaded to Amazon Glacier (3-2-1 backup)

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...


Nice to hear from someone else with a huge iCloud Photo Library--we've got about 1.2 TB! After a lot of experimentation with Google Photos, Synology's photo APP, etc. we finally settled on going all in on the Apple ecosystem (we're an all-Apple family). The game-changer for us was when Apple finally supported shared photo libraries between users.

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


Thanks for the pointer to icloudpd[1]! Looks very useful. Do you actually run it on your Synology?

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


> Do you actually run it on your Synology?

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 do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired

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.


Somewhat less philosophically: there is a huge technological problem in keeping photo archives. We entrust our photos to companies like Apple and Google with the attention span of a fruit fly — nobody seems to give any thought to long-term archival. Solutions appear and disappear within several years.

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.


It has been years since I was involved with this company, but at the time I worked there, Mylio was very much concerned with this problem:

https://mylio.com/


Current Photos app can actually import these libraries. Click on “import” and select the aperture file. It should keep all the albums, metadata, etc.


Photos has no concept of a "stack" of versions.


https://cyme.io/avalanche-photo-conversion/

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.


This looks promising! Thanks!


I put eveything in a folder named YYYY-MM-DD_XXXX where XXXX is an general identifier of the pictures, usually a place, sometime an event or a person. When there are several days that belong together I use YYYY-MM-DDstart_YYYY-MM-DDend_XXXXXXXX/YYYY-MM-DD

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


Heh, my solution exactly the same. 20 years of photos, and so far I pretty happy with this structure.


I do pretty much the same but I also use EXIF data to add place names to the folder name.


I'm doing almost the same except that I add a tag or two to the name of the folder.


Photos as reminders of times past are a double edged sword. Sometimes it can be healthier to forget. Photos may not just be reminders of happier times, but reminders of things that can never be gotten back.

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.


Me and my wife wanted something to better categorise memories, so we actually yearly go through the lady 12 months of photos and out together an album with 80-120 pages that we order.

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


We do this too. I have a very bad memory overall, mostly due to my willful desire to forget the past. As a result I reflect very seldom, and never really take time to smell the roses. I also just dump my photos into backups without thinking.

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.


I actually assembled a photo album using an online service to collect a few years worth of rather piquant¹ photos my wife and I made. I went all out with fancy options (faux leather cover with embossed title and high quality paper on museum cardboard stock). It made a great present for her.

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.


I take photos with an SLR & phone so have built up quite a large collection of photos and quick early sorting & review is the key for good future usability of your photos.

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.


Sometimes I wonder why people need to capture every supposedly special moment in a picture. Is it worse to "just" keep it in mind? There's propably some fear of losing or forgetting that moment in play.

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.


I don't take many photos, because the act of taking a picture removes me from being present for whatever it is I'm taking the picture of, and thus reduces my enjoyment of things.

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.


I think that's an interesting point about being present. I actually love the act of taking photos, adjusting the colors and lighting to capture how it looked, and then I rarely look at them again. My wife thinks it's bizarre, but it's not the reflection on the past, but the act of photography I like. I've turned some into prints and have a digital picture frame to scroll them through, but sitting down to reflect and look through them rarely happens.


Unless, of course, you take pictures very mindfully vs. just taking snapshots. I think the ease of which we can take photos now makes it very easy to cheapen photography. But we can still bring ourselves to be very present and mindful when doing so.

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.


"The act of taking a picture removes me from being present for whatever it is I'm taking the picture of, and thus reduces my enjoyment of things."

Yes.


Yes, I think it's digital clutter. I expect this is not a widespread behavior, but I haven't taken a photo in 15 years except when required to in order to make a home insurance claim and I snap the parking lot at the airport every time I travel in order to remember where I parked. I'm not going to forget my kids and, frankly, I think they deserve some level of autonomy and privacy not often granted to children. You have no idea how embarrassed they may be in the future and whether they really want those pictures to exist. But when I said this publicly to a friend who was constantly spamming naked photos of her twins to social media, she became no longer a friend, so I understand it's a sensitive subject.

You said yourself you never look at these. People storing multiple terabytes to a NAS and cloud backups likely don't have the time left in their remaining lifespan to ever look at everything they're storing. It's digital hoarding.

On the other hand, I don't think it's completely valueless to at least record a few special occasions. I appreciated a few Christmases back after my mom digitized all of the Betamax tapes from when I was a kid that she had taped my sister's birthday where one of my very first friends was present and singing along and playing with us, since that friend died when we were 12 and I haven't seen her in three decades. One video was enough, though. I don't need a number of photos I couldn't look through if I had until the heat death of the universe.


This sounds insane, but hear me out. If you take photos on film, it's less overwhelming. Film is expensive, so you can't spray and pray, you have to think about what's worthwhile to take a photo of. This also means you're more present in the moment.

The more manual the camera is, the more you have to think about what you want to shoot because it takes more skill, but it's also more rewarding when you take a great photo.

You end up with fewer pictures, but you value them more because you worked for them and they're not as disposable.


While I agree 100% on the change of shooting behaviour and film experience, I've had to spend a non-trivial amount of time and money recently trying to scan in a decade (1990-2000) of negatives (~10k?).

Because of the number of boxes sitting there, selectively scanning becomes harder than scanning it all and sorting digitally. No easy wins...

And while shooting digital over the last 20 years resulted in ~60k images, I can store that 2TB in the same volume as a single roll of prints, with the benefits of near-instant retrieval and offsite backups...


Just use a 1 or 2 GB card in your digital camera if you want to think more during shooting process. It's less complicated and result is the same.


I copy everything, cameras, phone, scans, to disk, organized by device. Some stuff gets organized, such as scans of old family photos, documents, faceplates, devices and so on. I have organized some in relation to the home and property should I sell.

Mainly, as I transfer from sd cards, photos get ranked (not tagged or renamed) and the best make it to a "gallery" folder, or an "illustration" folder for posting on the other aggregator site I use. Only two for me.

The phone photos are transferred in giant blobs, so they never get sorted. I won't host my photos outside the home because of the great internet copy machine and hacking plague. And so I have yet to find any desktop tech that will categorize photos even in the simplest way. iOS image search is insanely dumb and useless. It finds people, but the few other categories are not helpful to me and often hilariously wrong in identification.

I don't use Apple's photos app because in the past, it failed to do anything but create a giant album with phony virtual folders, and the underlying files were organized by date in a tree that made access to the actual files a fright. And with cryptic names.

So I organize, to the extent I do, in the simplest ways. A few categories, but otherwise, some big bags, and a "best" folder that I copy to the iPad Pro for showing off. No third party involved. Benefits not worth the perceived risk.


I think it definitely feels like clutter in some ways. I use Google Photos, and I practically back-up every picture I take, including screenshots. Indirectly, I find screenshots to be just as important to memory-making as pictures I capture.

Clutters up pretty quickly so I star pictures I like. If there is a special event/vacation, I tend to save all pictures in a folder and later upload that to cloud.

Definitely looking forward to using Apple's new Journal app on iOS 17 to journal special events and memories.


I pay for Google Photos additional drive space. I back up favorite photos and videos to Apple iCloud.

The primary reason I use Google Photos is that I have android smart TVs. With android smart TVs, during the ambience screen saver mode... I can choose which Google Photo album to display. That is I use my smart TVs to display my photos. Unfortunately, they do not display the videos.

My parents also have a google nest hub. I also set that up to display the same google photos albums.


I'll answer the technical & philosophical, technical to address your clutter question.

I have it setup to automatically backup from my phone to a NAS. Then the NAS backs up routinely to Backblaze. It's all automated, I don't even think about it. And it gives me great piece of mind, so it doesn't feel like clutter or a burden.

I routinely cleanup the photos from my phone, but even then, some photos I really like and I keep them on my phone. I try to keep at least a couple of photos from each 'memorable' moment I've captured, to look when I feel like it.

Keeping some photos on my phone helps when impromptu, in a conversation, you want to show something, e.g. Chatting with a barber recently, he asked about my summer and told him about a vacation I took, he was intrigued by some places I described, so he asked if I had some pics, I showed him the few I had on my phone from that.

Many photos I take, I won't keep on my phone because they go to the NAS and I clear them from my phone, but every once in a while, I open the folder in my NAS and it's cool to see and remember all those moments. That 'feel good' increases with time, so I expect the older I get, these will be more valuable. I don't do photos only, I also sometimes record a conversation with a loved one, just because I know one day they won't be there and I'd like to capture their voice.

Recently an aunt was telling me about a prank/revenge thing she did to an ex of her when she was a teenager, I was in tears laughing, and recorded that secretly. In a few years, when she's no longer with us, I'll be damn glad to have captured that and revisit that memory.


I used to have a limit of 3-4 photos a day (or one photo per event that day). If I took more than that, I would go through and delete the others. That's changed a bit since I started WFH.

The concept for me was that the point of the photo was to remind me of the event/ memory, and one photo did that for me. If I had 10-20-30 photos from a day or an event, I found that I was not mindful of each individual photo and just glanced at them (ignoring details and remembering memories). With a limited photo option, I was forced into mindfulness more. The added benefit, of course, was that it resulted in a conservative use of my phone's storage.

As for backup, I have syncthing running on my phone. It copies my photos into my laptop which funnel it into a time-machine storage and I have it up on google - photos. I would like to add one more syncthing instance (preferably out of my home) for redundancy, but that's about it for now. Maybe I'll start burning them on optical media or SD-Cards, once I have kids.


I have two places I store photos: a gallery[0] of curated photos on my personal website, and a larger stream of photos backed up to my NAS.

The photos on my NAS replicate what I capture with my phone. I actively delete photos of the mundane such as a random snap of food I cooked. I let the iOS photos app automatically create albums of people and places and display those as a widget on my home screen. I go through it every now and then to clean it up from bad photos that accidentally got uploaded. This collection has survived a transfer from Android to iOS since it is platform agnostic.

My gallery on my website is for hosting things I want to be shared and has a higher standard for what I select. I also don’t have social media, so when people ask where they can view photos of my trip, I point them to my website. Right now it has photos from vacation trips that were mostly shot on film. It’s more artistic in nature and features landscapes rather than humans. The idea is to capture the essence of the photo albums of the past that my older family members have. I can always go to my website and view photos from a trip. Shooting those photos on film makes the shots more deliberate and more limited in nature. I could always get them printed physically to place into a photo album, but I’m happy with storing them digitally for now to reduce clutter. The gallery feature itself is something I really enjoyed building.

I like the balance of viewing subjectively more interesting photos in my gallery but also being able to see the behind the scenes photos with my family in my digital collection. I’m waiting for a way in the future to more conveniently display my photos locally on a digital photo album such as a docked iPad.

[0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/gallery


I've finally decided on a system that works for backups and devices that don't have image recognition as well as Google photos and iCloud!

I have two types of folder:

Folders for specific events or activities

And folders for common themes for the year.

The themed folders can change throughout the years which is interesting to see but I tend to have the same core few.

I found if I grouped too many things into YYYY-MM(-DD) format I couldn't find the photo of a night out from ten years ago because I didn't remember the month (or year!) But I did know that it was with uni friends or work friends which narrowed down the folders greatly! Ofc iCloud and Google photos make that much easier now but I prefer to have my primary backups managed by me!

YYYY-MM Christmas YYYY-MM Holiday to abc YYYY-MM-DD day out at the zoo YYYY-MM House YYYY-MM Food YYYY-MM Gaming YYYY-MM Travel - days out YYYY-MM [Name of town i live in] YYYY-MM PC and tech YYYY-MM Inlaws YYYY-MM Family YYYY-MM Guinea pigs

Etc

One of the interesting things I found was that I was taking photos of random things around the house, some flowers, or the light at a particular time of day was interesting. Previously I'd have tried to organise those by month or more granularly but I now have a 'house' (or flat) folder for each year which I really enjoy looking back through to see how the house has changed. It's also useful for before/after photos I forgot to take! I have one of these folders for other houses or locations I visit often or take photos of random objects in like my parents or in law's house! I also have one for my local area.

I also have a series of Outbox folders for memes, references etc. In more recent times I've started removing screenshots and images I've saved from places from my phone and albums since they're not useful in a photo album!


I'll just address my philosophical approach - which is that of a scrapbook.

I don't manage my photos, which I take a fair deal of as i've been living more or less nomadically for 6 years now. I just organize them by year, as the filenames are datestamped.

If a particular photo is something I know will trigger a negative memory, for better or worse I put those in a folder called "lockbox" with no sorting - the idea being I know what i'm getting into when I look in there.

I very rarely review my photos, sometimes once a year when i'm coming up with my plans for the year.

This also matches my journaling - which I treat the same way. I've been journaling almost daily for 20+ years. It's a huge treat to go back to points in time and see what I was thinking and what was going on. I'm regularly surprised on how bad our memory is of what happened vs what we remember happening. I'll often visit it when i'm in a low spot / trapped in a rut.


Google Photos works well for me. There is unlimited storage (with compressed, but perfectly usable format).

I archive the originals to backups and can happily delete them from my phone. I have scanned all my old pictures, given them backdated exif dates (a bit fiddly), and, again, archived them and uploaded to Google Photos. I can scroll all the way back into the 1970s!


I just get a phone with big storage, right now using an iphone with 1 TB.

And I discover I actually use the photos a lot: - through the geo-location map of all photos - when I am trying to remember something, show somebody a specific memory, nudge my memory about a place or region I have visited, a hiking trail that I've followed, that view from that LA trip, etc. - through iOS photo search - it is not perfect but in 60% of the cases I actually find what I am looking for - random highlights that the OS gives me - I sometimes deep dive with Show in all photos and look at what I was doing back then

All my photos are synced in the cloud but I spend lots of time in the mountains, in the wilderness or travelling, so I prefer to have them all on my phone for the moments when internet connection is missing.

With all of these I actually feel very connected to my whole photo library.


I typically take photos and videos on my phone. I periodically manually copy all of those to my computer: camera pictures, screenshots, downloads, WhatsApp or other app media and so on.

I then tag those with date/event and compress the folders with 7-Zip. Those archives are then duplicated across 2 different local drives and 1 remote drive. I don't really tag the contents or store other metadata apart from the event name, if one exists.

For videos about software development or YouTube/Twitch streams, I render them with Kdenlive and put them on my PeerTube instance as acceptable quality backups. I actually needed those once because the OBS audio setup was messed up and YouTube only included my voice in some videos, not the computer/other audio track.

In short, do the simplest thing that meets your needs, but ideally also have backups. Drives occasionally fail, data loss is unpleasant.


I have not found any solution that even approaches Google Photos. That is: a reverse chronological feed with shared and private albums around events or interesting sets.

Google also identifies people and pets which is useful but not terribly reliable. Search works reasonably well which gives a forth avenue for accessing memories.

I do love the automatic retrospections which solves the problem of photos being stored and never looked at. That's the fifth avenue.

Finally, integration with maps gives you the ability to find photos from a given area. Even though it relies on simple meta data from the photo, this does not seem to be replicated well anywhere else.

Overall, I am very worried that Google removed the option to buy additional storage for legacy Workspace and don't know what to do when I inevitably fill up my current subscription.


I wouldn’t describe myself as a photographer so take with a grain of salt. A combination of iCloud and self hosted PhotoPrism [1] is perfect for me. My phone automatically backs up everything to both locations so I’m not worried about loosing anything and both do a good job of organizing by date/location/event. I can happily take photos without worrying that I’ll need to sift through them all at a later date. When I happen to use a camera that isn’t my phone (Mavic Mini being the most frequent), I can add the photos to both locations from my laptop. Apple does a great job of packaging and presenting ‘memories’ at a later date.

[1] https://www.photoprism.app/


Here’s a question I’ve wanted to ask — how many people just don’t take photos? I don’t have any philosophical bone to pick with it, I still take a photo if I need to reference something like where I parked; but I used to take photos on my phone at probably a normal frequency when I first became an adult, and I realized after a few years that I had never looked back on any photos I’d taken, so I just stopped taking them afterwards and never really felt any loss from not having them.

Incidentally, one unintended consequence of this behavior is realizing just how insignificant of a difference there is between smartphones even over 5+ years, if the camera is zero value add.


I've been taking digital photos since 1997. I've got everything stored in a set of folders stored exclusively by date, like \photos\source\2023\20230927 for today, with all of the folders created by the camera stored in those folders. The best photos move "up" into the folder.

I use DigiKam to do face tagging. A photo of people without names is effectively useless to anyone else. Recently, I've recently started discussions about what photos my family want to keep after I'm gone. I don't want to leave them with a ton of things they won't care about, and don't want to make them feel guilty when deleting them.

I used to keep everything, but I've started clearing out the lesser quality images.


I use imagemagick for that

cd myphotodir

montage -geometry 1024x768+0+1 -tile 4x3 -background Dim\ Gray *.JPG myresume.jpg

Take care of not having a file named 'myresume.jpg' in that dir or it will be overwritten. Modify the parameters to suit your needs.

To remove duplicates or n-plicates in the current directory tree use rdfind

rdfind -deleteduplicates true .

All photos are renamed with perl to include the timestamp in the filename. Thus If I want to see for example all photos of 27 sept in any year, a simple bash command connecting find with eog will do the job. I can pass then the list of photos to imagemagick. Very useful to see grow changes in the garden or in children birthdays for example.

And then perl is connected with postgresql


I have found out that iPhone automatically organizes photos pretty well, given the location services enabled. So I leave the photos I took with my phone alone, and can find anything I want, when I need it. It also creates memories for me, which is pretty nice.

For the photos I took with my camera, I use Digikam with an external hard drive, since they're relatively big images. I put them to folders named YYYY-MM-DD-$EVENT_NAME, merging multi-day events into a single folder, using the date of last day.

Digikam has tons of features, and allows me to organize and browse photos the way I want. For RAW processing, I use Darktable, which is fantastic.


I import all my photos onto my HDD with shotwell. They are just saved in folders by date.

If I see a picture I don't like I delete it immediately. The main problem is that we keep to many pictures. From time to time I go through some months of pictures and delete as much as I can, add some stars to good pictures and postprocess some.

Also from time to time we order prints of all of the "filtered" pictures and then we put them into a physical photo album. We certainly looked at these photos as a family but we never look at the digital ones.

The big problem with all kinds of digital collections is that you don't find anything at some point.


I copy photos from several smartphones, SLR, etc onto a single massive HDD. Use Shotwell under Debian to organize and tag.

Previously used iPhoto on a MBP, but even on the latest hardware it seems far slower than Shotwell. So I no longer bother.


I think we can write a big article on this.it drills down to 2 option

1. Upload all your photos to personal cloud such as google/apple/dropbox 2. Self host a similar cloud service such as photoprism (https://www.photoprism.app/)

Both have pros and cons and depending on your technical skills you can opt for option 2 of self hosting.

Option 1 will cost but privacy and getting locked out of account by company is big problem.

I personally use option 2 and feature wise its similar to big companies. let me know if you need more details about option 2.


I’m also now past the 128gb mark. I rarely go back through my old photos, and the more time that passes the less connection I feel scrolling through my library.

Occasionally I post to Instagram (with an accompanying caption), and I like going through that more because each post is highly curated and annotated with my feelings at the time. Not too dissimilar to a physical photo album. So even if you did that privately, it’s worth a go.

Other than that, I figure that one day I may want to look at them, eg when I no longer have any mobility. The cost is so low that it doesn’t make sense for me to delete photos.


If you have an iPhone (and iCloud), you can save a ton of storage space by enabling Optimize iPhone Storage. Your original photos will be moved to the cloud, but you'll get low-res proxies on your phone (good enough for the phone display).

Alternate, low-tech solution: my sister goes through her photos (print and digital), curates a decent selection and turns them into print-on-demand photo books. Much more compact than a physical album, yet more accessible than a digital frame (and giftable too). Does require quite a bit of time investment though.


We make one print-on-demand photobook for each year of holiday trips. It's very nice, no worry at all about data getting lost or whatever (of course you can keep your files too) and the process of making a book is also a nice way to curate and go over all the memories again. Making a new book is always a good occasion to have a look at the earlier ones too. You can show it to people without instigating a looking-at-phones party. If you're into photography at all it's also just nice to see them in physical format.


I gave up on photos, I never looked at them and never felt the want to look at them. I only ever took photos because other people were wo I thought that's what I was supposed to do.


I do delete near-identical ones, otherwise... I do pretty much what you do. I have lots of photos I took to mostly to show someone in one email somewhere, etc.

I use SyncThing for a lot of stuff, if I have a small file of any kind that I really want to keep, it goes in a sync folder.

Until recently, device storage just kept growing, so I never needed to think about getting rid of anything, the folder just followed me on every device.

Now phones are unfortunately ditching microSD, which I hate, so available storage is actually smaller than before.


With the context that I use my phone for taking photos and I am not even remotely professional by any means...

I don't. I used to manage my photos very carefully, doing all sorts of the things you can think of. Until I stopped doing that, because I realize all that effort gives me no real-life benefit and is a waste of time. Nowadays I just auto upload photos to Google Photos and call it a day. Occasionally I delete photos that are duplicates or are not meaningful, but that's it.


Pretty happy with my existing workflow. It started out with a photo organization script a couple of years ago that I ran manually and has now developed into a fully automatic system.

1. syncthing uploads photos from my phone to my NAS (receive only)

2. scheduled systemd service (hourly) on my NAS reads newly received photos, renames them by date, moves it to my photos catalog

3. photoprism starts a scan of the photo library (triggered by systemd when 2. finishes)

4. weekly systemd service syncs the library to backblaze


I stopped making photos after I realized that I never watch none of 100GB photos I have. In case I make them, I don't care about doing anything to them, most of photos I do I use immediately. And I even do not care about deleting some photos I have already used. Just push all of them to the HDD in case I need to clean some memory. After I have losed one of HDD because of dropping, I have a cool tech solution to store HDDs as close to floor as possible.


Big cardboard box, hdds, thousands of photos, sd cards, dvds, ect.

The Cloud is no solution at all, they're a revisionist nightmare.

I'd honestly prefer all my most valuable memories, from my family tree, on physical media, buried in a filing cabinet with a sign that says 'beware the tiger' in the basement of some forgotten farmstead, built on rock, a million miles from Jeff Bezos.

It's safe there. Everything else is just constant churn.


I had the same problems as my elderly parents living abroad are not social media users.

So I decided to create a sort of private Google photos meeting Google drive.

It is called Memories (I realised FB have the same idea) and it can be found at https://m.emori.es

I would be happy to provide beta access in return for constructive feedbacks.

If you are interested, send me an email to alain AT aoware DOT co DOT uk


All photos are migrated from phones to a SSD Raid setup as space fills up. Wife copies some photos, prior to migration, to a Google Drive folder that is shared with extended family. We don't use 'traditional social media'. Photos are generally browsed monthly to yearly, as a method of 'keeping track of who we were'. Similar photos are deleted with a weak emphasis on keeping the 'best' variant.


any SSD recommendations?

I've just been using regular hard drives for my RAIDs with really long lifespans, think 7-10 years -- and even then replaced just out of caution, they still work -- and I'm not sure if this is also achievable with SSDs or what to even look out for


I've been buying Samsung drives for a few years and had no problems. My general strategy is stagger the buys, in order to /hopefully/ get drives from different manufacturing batches however the reason I'm using a RAID setup is so I don't have to stress over durability. If one or two drives do tank, oh well. Buy new ones, clone contents from one of the parallel drives and go on with life.


I star/favourite some photos after taking them. If I lost everything except the starred ones I would be ok. Backup on dropbox, and dropbox in n computers.

Once in a blue moon I collect some starred pictures and print a physical album, several if it involves family (one album for them). If I am browsing photos on my phone and I see a bad one, I will delete it (will then sync the delete automatically), but only when I casually run into them.


I make an album of the photos I like after an event. I'll make another pass after adding them, and if I don't love it or it doesn't make me feel good again, I remove it from the album (but don't delete it).

I have a few albums that are a category as opposed to an event and I'll occasionally add to those randomly.

I use google photos and backup using the same.


Both Apple and Google have good photo organizers in their cloud suite. I use both. I assume offline tools exist as well. Did you Google “photo organizer?”

This isn’t really a philosophical problem. It’s the outcome of too many photos, easy to take and store, versus personal preference. I don’t pay much attention and rely on the cloud tools for organizing and searching. I know some people carefully curate their photos.


> How do you go about managing your photos?

1. Saved all Photos in PC directories as follows: $HOME/Pictures/<YYYYMMDD - Event>

2. Ensured '$HOME/Pictures' is regularly backed up to at-least one more disk.

3. Just use the File Manager (with Thumbnails) & Image Viewer to view the Photos.

> Does it feel like digital clutter?

No, not one bit.

> How do you approach memory making through photos?

Capture as many as possible, delete duplicates/similar. Retain good ones.


PhotoPrism[0] and some ugly plumbing[1] to semantically tag all images in the gallery.

[0]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism [1]: https://github.com/marklr/labelizer


Overall, photography is fascinating because it captures instances that remain forever and helps to preserve memories.(https://ivypanda.com/essays/photography-as-quick-paced-creat...)


I’ve been toying with the idea of creating physical coffee table books with accompanying digital / online version (think photo blog) to document both pictures and thoughts for a particular trips for example- I think it’s much better approach than old school albums.

All I need is a mini-press operation


Synology Nas with Photos, I have an app on smartphone or upload by webUI https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos


> Finally, any cool tech solutions are welcome.

The cool tech solution to talk about is the fact that we now have the computing power to do facial recognition over all of our cloud saved pictures, so we can just have a collection of all of the pictures you have of that person!


Whenever you are bored (e.g. waiting in line, commuting to work, stuck in a waiting room) use the time to "curate" the photos in your phone, removing duplicates or photos of things you don't want to remember.


https://thedambook.com/ by Peter Krogh is not a bad read if you want to develop a workflow that works (available on archive.org to borrow)


We are printing a photobook every year, giving copies to parents as Christmas gift. It retraces the event of the year

It takes effort to choose photos and make the book, but it is pleasant to see ourselves quickly over the years


I just take pictures and share them via Whatsapp with my wife/other family. I know they are not the best quality they could be, but I am fine with that.

I don't know how it is backed up. It feels great, not knowing.


I do not like memories, as change can hurt my heart. I try to look back only about a year and just take a lot of photos anyway because my memory of events isn’t so good.


You're the first person I met who feels the same way I do. I don't like looking at old photos. Nothing to do with "regret" everything to do with those lovely times are never going to happen again.


Yes, exactly! 0 regrets, all about some moment literally never happening again until the end of time.

Furthermore, the person I'm with is extremely emotionally intelligent, and she has experienced deep loss of over 20 people... she is an extreme veteran when it comes to emotionally accepting death/change.

For me, I feel like looking at memories is only a reflection how I can be hyper intelligent, but emotionally I feel like I'm 12 sometimes with how I deal with certain things. Maybe that it takes me a long time to integrate things which are painful. Above all else, daily, I feel perfectly capable and sharp, and I know deep down I will be fine, but then there is always this otehr side... hard to explain


No one has mentioned Lightroom yet, it really is quite good. I say this even with some bitterness for the death of ‘classic’.


Use slidebox to sort phone photo's into relevant folders, then sync those directories to onedrive using android app


Just repeating my comment from a recent DSLR/film thread [1]:

I don't shoot film anymore since about 15 years, it's totally not worth the hassle. However, I did stick to this mindset of first trying to figure out whether it's worth it overall and only then taking a picture (except when shooting plants/insects for later determination etc, then different metrics come into play). It has a lot of advantages for me, mainly because I really despise what the OP also does (shooting pretty much everything, taking x rounds of the same scene then figuring out the best one). Instead I end up with a sort of pre-curated list and then go through it once to delete what wasn't a good shot or turned out to not evoke any emotion whatsoever when seeing it again. Sure, I might miss something somewhere, but that still hurts a lot less then the mind-numbing and time-wasting alternatives.

tldr; I can get a strong feeling of attachment, but it takes a really good picture or a certain subject, preferrably the combination, before that feeling kicks in. And then I do get back to look at them, because it's worth it.

I did in the past try to not do that and just keep a lot more pictures, but it just feels boring to look at them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369490


Will it matter in a few years?

We ll be able to AI-generate photos of ourselves in the past, in any location.


I would honestly compress the photos. You don’t need ultra hd pictures for your memories.


I started using Google photos first but then stopped using it after I found out that they completely lock you in and you can't really export all your photos seamlessly while still having the time stamps. Now I have all of my photos on onedrive but will migrate to immich in a few months. Open source and selfhosted btw. https://github.com/immich-app/immich


From what I understand, the correct time stamps are maintained in the EXIF data when you export from Google Photos, and you can use tools like exiv2 on Linux to set the file modification timestamp to match the EXIF one:

  exiv2 -T rename image.jpg
I don't think this is Google being actively malicious, but just file systems in general handling dates in a confusing way.

You can easily encounter exactly the same problem e.g. if you are copying images between systems with an external USB drive and you are not careful about how it's done. E.g. Windows Explorer will change the date to "now" if you do a simple copy, to avoid this you need to use "robocopy" or do a move instead of a copy.


At one point right after college I went berserk on my digital clutter (yup those identical photos and useless photos and mostly useless videos). 90GB (iirc) to 3.x GB (this I am sure). This was around a decade ago.

I never looked back.

Now I rarely take photos, videos are even rarer. I actually realised it doesn’t matter if I have too many of them. And even among those few captured media, I do regular cleanups. Those are so few now that cleanups take no time.

The trick is to do the clean up once and make sure you never have to do that kind of cleanup ever again. There’s no other way. Literally none.

No, I lied - there’s another way. You forget about it. Just keep clicking, keep hoarding, keep paying for storage. I mean this is fine as well on the lines of whatever floats one’s boats.

Hint: If I am looking at a great scenery, or a building, or a spectacle I look at it right then and there with just my eyes and nothing in front of it. What I mean is I do not let my phone look at it and then go back home and look at what my phone saw or not.

I know you didn’t ask for it. But you did mention philosophy ;-)

> cool tech solutions

tl;dr. There’s no hack to cure this. It’s all about discipline or preference and being okay with it, either way.

Own your digital clutter/garbage. Don’t let it own you.


Everything i snap gets transferred onto my server running photoprism.


iPhone can automatically classify your pictures to different group. google can mark your pictures with date and GPS, sometimes this is enough


I use a background switcher on the phone.


You must be young. You are not interested in your own photos. Your children will be mildly interested, but only around the time they have children. They will display some photos of you at your funeral. Your great-grandchildren will not even know your name. All forgotten.

The world is full of phones, which are full of photos, that nobody will ever look at.

Look more intently, see more, evaluate and remember, photograph less.




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