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Comment by raamdev | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox also has a pretty good mobile photos backup feature if you're a Dropbox user.

My problem hasn't been where to backup photos but how the heck to manage (and make use of) tens of thousands of photos. I mean, 50 years from now when each of us has several hundred thousand photos, what exactly are we going to do with them all? And our children and grandchildren? Those are going to be pretty big (and ever-increasing) photo albums. We need better ways of managing and making use of them. Apple has made good progress here with Moments and facial recognition and grouping by location, but all of that is siloed in Apple's infrastructure.

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Why would your grandchildren want to view several thousands of your photos? Just find the best ones, and backup to multiple locations. Print the best of the best and make a physical album. Scribble some notes under the photos with an actual pen. Your grandchildren will love it. By doing that you are giving importance and meaning to the images, which otherwise would be absent in an ocean of dropbox archives.

Hwo would your grandchildren be able to view outdated digital file format that no one knows how to use anymore ?

They'll probably be busy trying to find clean air, clean water, food and shelter scrambling to face the consequences of overpopulation in a climate changing world out of cheap oil more than looking at photos they don't care. You don't even look at your own photos from a few years ago.

> Just find the best ones,

The best for which purpose? Your descendants will probably not be looking at your pictures with the same ends in mind as you (if they are looking at all).

well lets be realistic

tagging is key now facebook has shown us it can automate tagging people at least with face recognition maybe it will be able to auto tag locations ... maybe it already does

so the solution will be a combination of

1- discipline, spend the time tagging your own photos (technology can help here by making this task more user friendly and easier)

2- be reasonable, dont take or save 10s of thousands of photos .. learn and accept to delete (again technology can help here by suggesting what to delete , offer you almost identical photos and suggest to delete some)

3- automated tagging

4- skimming, loading and browsing should be super fast to allow photo skimming

i dont see solution outside of those 4 elements two rely on you .. manual tagging and deleting (and they can be technology assisted) two rely on technology .. auto tagging and skimming

Dropbox was barely recommendable and has become a hard no-no when they got Condoleeza Rice on their board of directors.

http://www.drop-dropbox.com/

google has had the same functionality for years now in their google photos service.

they randomly create compilations of your photos (if its enabled) and send you google plus updates like "do you remember that visit to [location] on [date]? we made an album for you!"

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