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Comment by mceachen | Hacker News Reader

You're certainly welcome to try PhotoStructure! It's got very robust de-duplication, supports portable libraries (so you can automatically sweep your photos scattered across many drives and computers into a single timestamped folder structure), and a novel UI showing a random sampled view of your library.

There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out.

https://photostructure.com/

Disclaimer: I'm the (only) author.

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I have an unRaid server and I found your app to be the easiest to use, but I had to switch to photo prism because you don’t have an easy way to tell the difference between photos and videos.

I know you previously responded that people should upvote that feature, but the inability to distinguish video from photo just seems like a must have fix over other potentially over engineered stuff that others are asking for.

(I just had a family member ask for this feature today in our family's PhotoStructure library: I'll get it into the next beta build which I hope to release in a day or two)

I implemented this after dinner tonight: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/show-video-icon-and-or-vi...

I really didn't have much luck with the de-duplication. I tried photostructure for about 3 weeks and since stopped. I was trying to pull photos from multiple different drives/folders into one central organised place. A few issues:

  - The de-duplication didn't seem to work, it at least was defeated by my messy files. I spent many hours manually going through the results and finding many dupes. Then I lost interest in doing that and gave up.

Edit: I've just realised, was this (by design) simply copying each photo into the merged tree but then if I browse using the photostructure app it will hide the dupes? Can I prevent it making a copy? I want to use other file/photo browsers also.

  - can't use datestamp info in the filename?

  - very, very slow to sync from my external USB 3 drive. I'd be happy with that if the de-duplication worked. Also the status about what it's doing seems sporadic and half the time appears to be doing nothing at all. Maybe my laptop is too slow? 
 
  - no map view

I did like the feed of random photos. I saw loads of great old snaps I'd forgotten about. Somewhat bizarrely, when I wanted to share them quickly with others I ended up taking a photo of the photo(s) with my smartphone and sharing that via WhatsApp. That's more my failing but it did seem a bit silly that I resorted to doing that.

> if I browse using the PhotoStructure app it will guide the dupes

Yes: out of an abundance of caution, the unique (by SHA) variations of each asset are copied into your library. There are heuristics that pick which is the "best," and although those heuristics seem to be robust for most beta users, I didn't want to be the source of want data loss.

> datestamp info in the filename?

The metadata in the file is trusted more than any date extracted either from the filename or the directory hierarchy. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/

If you use the info tool, it'll tell you how it's extracting the date from any given file: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/#file-information

> slow to sync

PhotoStructure scales imports to accommodate current hardware, in Ann effort to keep the system responsive. Parallelism is limited by available RAM and CPU count. If you think it was being too conservative, please send me a screen shot of your about page (it includes both system metrics and what is thinking for scheduling limits), and if you want, debug logs, and we can look into what's going on. https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/#how-to-manuall...

> no map view

This is a popular feature request that I'm looking forward to building: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...

The metadata for some of my filew is total junk. If I used another tool to strip that bad metadata would it then use the datestamps in the filename? I think this was defeating the de-duplication also. In an ideal world I'd be able to configure everything from a particular source folder to use filename datestamps.

Yes: you can use `exiftool -all: $file` to strip all metadata, but please have backups before you do anything: ExifTool is both powerful and fast.

FYI I just went to look for videos on YT showing off PhotoStructure and was amazed to see exactly 0 hits for "photostructure"[1]. Seems like a big opportunity waiting.

- [1] <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22photostructu...>

Oof, yeah, I've got to sit down and record some screencasts. Thanks for the reminder.

Thank you for building this. I was thinking of building my own but I think I'll try this out!

Oh. Deduplication across all drives! Consider me interested. Will try this out later.

I had boxes and boxes of old drives that I wanted to get organized which drove that feature: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/...

It's also why I implemented bitrot detection and metadata inference. A beta tester just called the date parsing heuristics "freaking awesome and so close to black magic…" :)

https://forum.photostructure.com/t/combining-images/524/7

(And if you prefer the command line, know you can do tons of things via the CLI: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/ )

Hey, PhotoStructure looks amazing. I'm intrigued. How and when does bitrot detection work? I couldn't find it on your site. I spend a decent amount of time making PAR2 volumes so I can detect failures as I've not come up with a better idea.

The bitrot detection is via libjpeg, libraw, and ffmpeg (to handle both photo and video validation): they can be run in verbose modes that can report decoding errors which are due to file truncation or outright corruption.

Wow - this sounds amazing. How does one set it up; does it automatically occur?

Yeah, it's part of automatic organization:

https://photostructure.com/getting-started/automatic-library...

How do you compute the duplicates? Does it detect rotated dupes, and resolution differences?

I tried a few things with ImageMagick, but ran into problems. I'll have to try your app!

Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-dedupe/

WARNING! Be aware that this is an Electron app. I tried it, and using the interface was like swimming in glue. I presumed this meant "Electron app" and a quick check confirmed it.

WARNING! Some users don't know that there are two other editions of PhotoStructure (docker and "bare metal" node) that run on macOS, Windows and Linux, all of which don't include Electron.

https://photostructure.com/server/photostructure-for-servers...

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