Ask HN: How do you organise photos?

2 points by barbequeer 2 years ago | 7 comments

Ever since I became a father a few years ago I have taken a lot of photos, and because local storage is cheap I tend to keep everything. I'm now in a situation where I have ~5GB of photos and videos of my kids per year going back a few years. I got into a habit of just backing up every single photo on the phone every few months, and removing the duplicates.

I'm finding managing and backing stuff up to be a bigger time sink. Managing and finding photos is tricky with such a large collection.

Is anyone else out there in the same boat? What solutions have you come up with?

k310 2 years ago |

I took countless photos before tags existed, so I'm not about to retroactively tag and rename over 500 GB of photos.

It would help immensely to have some reasonable (not named Adobe or Google) software just to categorize photos on the computer.

As it stands, I only file photos into • Very Best, • Illustrations for posting, • Family, • Documents, • Home and property, and • Other (anonymous) and I use color tags to indicate what to review later after doing the "upload from camera and quick scan/adjustment". That takes a lot of my evening time, after the hiking around to get the photos. (mostly landscapes, flora, sunrises and sunsets at this time.)

I rename bulk folders when the SD card folder names roll over, so primary sort is on date and camera model or phone. But since it's a manual sort, only the above.

Backups to spare disks from time to time.

t312227 2 years ago |

personally i use yearly folders + a sub-folder for the occasion :)

software: any common filemanager of your choice will do - be it GUI or text (for example midnight-commander :)

eg 2024/some-place-or-important-event/

btw. i know multiple people who organize their photos in this way and some of them have far larger collections than "just" 5 GB... ;))

just my 0.02€

ps. as with every "important" data, follow the well-known 3 - 2 - 1 rule for backups (at least: 3 generations, 2 different medias, one copy "offsite")

for example i know someone losing their entire childrens photo-collection due to dropping an external hdd...

barbequeer 2 years ago | |

I have three HDDs with clones of the same folder structure, but I'd love to add another media type to that, maybe optical

pestatije 2 years ago |

i put them in yearly folders...if theres too many in one folder then maybe 2022grannyVisit, 2022easterHolidays, etc

brudgers 2 years ago |

and removing the duplicates

Not worrying about duplicates makes my photo management easier. [0]

But not worrying about culling changed everything for the better. [1]

Basically, I treat photographic storage as write-only. Since every digital photograph is tagged with a date when it is made, date is the primary key. Sure sometimes it's wrong. So what? Being wrong is not going to launch the missiles.

Survival is why we manage photographs (otherwise we would just delete them and make our life easier). Dealing with duplicates and poor images when searching/viewing is a distant second. It is not the thing to optimize around (outside of commercial uses).

Deduplicating and culling are massively time consuming, require mental focus and our mistake prone. The mistakes are not just technical the are aesthetic and editorial. Editorial mistakes are of the "Now that they are dead I wish I had more pictures of them" variety.

Aesthetic mistakes are because my current aesthetic judgement is worse than my future aesthetic judgement...or my current aesthetic judgement is better than my past aesthetic judgement. I went through a period where I took a 25k photos a year and rated them all. In the years since, many many of those ratings were naive. Lower rated pictures are often much better than higher rated ones.

Thankfully I kept the lower rated ones and bought more storage to solve that problem. [2]

Good luck.

[0] The more copies you have the more likely an image is to survive.

[1] The only culling I do is of total garbage (e.g. the lens cap was on) and then only sometimes because usually it doesn't matter.

[2] and fortunately I don't do much video because then culling and deduplicating is economically more important.

macartain 2 years ago |

Really badly - I was a huge fan of piacasa, basic though it was, until those grifters at google canned it so that I had to send all my photos to their DC. Now I have a horribly fractured collection across phone uploads, a NAS backend and some scattered portable HDs. Looking for that wet weekend to combine them all, at least from a storage perspective. But as to what I use to index them, I have just never found a replacement I liked, paid or otherwise. Looking forward to your responses.

barbequeer 2 years ago | |

I also was a Picasa lover! you can still find v3.9 for download but no active development. I don't understand why someone hasn't stepped up with an alternative in the 8 years since it was canned.