Ask HN: How do you organize all your photos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you organize all your photos?

8 pointsrajesh-s14 comments

There's a drastic change in the number of pictures we take of every memory. What tools/flow do you use to organize and build a db of photos? Maybe even backups too.

There are ways to organize movies, shows, music that I've come across but nothing solid for photos.

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I've struggled with this for the last 18 years, and quit my tech job to build a solution. It's in closed beta right now, but I'm going to send out another wave of invites next week. Read more and sign up here: https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/

I just dealt with this crap storm of a project last month. We had 40k photos scattered across three laptops, old hard drives, and sd cards. First I just crudely copied all of the folders on to an external hard drive and ran a freeware duplicate remover to clean out about 20% of them. Then I used a python script to go through this giant pile of pics and copy them in to folders by year and month based on the created date. It also added yyyy-mm-dd to the beginning of each file name. Now we are slowly going through month by month and adding simple tags in the file name (event, location, names). It’s far from perfect, but I didn’t want to deal with keeping everything synced in a database or locked in to a certain OS or app, plus it should still be searchable in 15 years when we are all running Windows 30 and Mac OS Ozarks or whatever.

Exactly! For me the pile keeps building up. I feel this is a problem that's still not addressed well. Sure you could save compressed ones to Instagram/Google Photos, but manually saving this is still a big hurdle for later retrieval. Need a simpler approach to tag and sort them into albums rather than just folders

May I ask, how are you saving the tags? Are you writing to sidecars?

Be careful with overwriting your originals. Many years ago I used jpegtran to rotate losslessly, but didn't realize it was removing all the metadata as well.

I added a bunch of heuristics to PhotoStructure to infer missing tags based on sibling files, specifically because I'd borked so many of my own photos.

FWIW, I've tried to make design decisions that will hopefully allow libraries to be very long-lived. PhotoStructure can copy unique (by SHA) originals into a dated subdirectory, and has what may be the most advanced duplicate image detection around (just added in the newest version). Your library is cross-platform (for example, stored on your NAS, created on your mac, then opened on your Windows box, and everything just works). The sqlite database is a straightforward schema.

I just put the tags in the file name, like “2019-12-25_xmas_bob_grandma.jpg”. Obviously you can’t go crazy with a bunch of tags, but I think I can get by with 2 or 3 tags at most. I was afraid to use sidecar info or xattr because I think that data can be lost if the files get moved between file systems (ie eventually moved from the current hdd to the nas I have yet to buy, etc). I definitely kept my raw unorganized folder on the ext hdd for now, but I’ve run several scripts to make sure I didn’t inadvertently overwrite or miss anything.

At the moment, I use iPhoto and iCloud photos. But this method does not scale.

I would love to have a more scalable cross-platform solution. Maybe something like Adobe Lightroom that didn’t require a huge monthly subscription, plus all the storage costs.

Yeah when dealing with files this volume I'd prefer a self-hosted or local storage

1) Photos taken from my mobile phone (android) are backed up to "Google photos". This allows me to search by dates/objects/people/location etc. Google also allows me to cast (screensaver) it to the television using chromecast.

2) Photos taken from DSLR are backed up to the folder on external drives(2) and also synced with google photos.

This set-up is working fine for many years. I haven't explored any other tools in recent times.

Just FYI, Google Photos backups will not retain most of the metadata in your images and videos when you try to recover your originals using Google Takeout.

I created http://gallery.hd.org back in the day (a) to make photos available for free when there weren't many eg for school projects and (b) to origanise my own photos!

I am not taking many at the moment, so it's been less of an issue...

I mostly have them backed up using backblaze. I just dump a lot of them into my hard-drive from time to time.

Also, google now offers unlimited photo storage (as long as you are okay with compression) if you have google photos. Its free.

I sync them to my laptop and keep them there for 30 days. Within those 30 days, I either post them in Whatsapp/Facebook stories or send them to family/friends. Then, I just delete them.

I copy the photos to my laptop and also leave them on SD-card :) If I need more space for new photos, I just take another SD-card.

Please do not use SD cards as a long term backup.

Most cards will suffer bitrot in 5-7 years, and may be completely unreadable in 10+ years.

None of my several handful of cards that are 10+ years old are viable anymore (and they were stored in a climate controlled, low humidity, antistatic bag).

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