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Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

Managing large volumes of digital photos is still an unsolved problem.

I have tens of thousands and they are probably my most treasured possession.

It’s quite concerning that they are languishing on Google Photos, with a few partial backups floating around that I’m not confident in.

I have had a few attempts at cleaning it up but haven’t found the right software.

I would also like to print my favourites, which probably also amounts to thousands of pictures, but working through the sheer volume is quite intimidating.

Feels like the whole thing needs a better workflow around it.

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I feel the same exact way. I have 60,000+ photos to go through, edit, and remove.

Where do I even begin? What app do I use to go through them all?

I've searched and tried out many apps and I still don't have a good workflow.

I truly don't understand how the pros do it.

Lightroom. Import all photos from all sources and have lightroom MOVE THE ORIGINALS into a new root folder with the following structure YYYY/MM

Keep this folder backed up! It's more important than the metadata catalog but now all the raw imagery is in one place.

Then maintain the lightroom catalog with lots of metadata, including using the facial recognition system for offline person recognition, the flag system enabling a 2-pass deletion review, star system for ranking photos by desirability, and add tags to everything. Go through each filter mechanism and develop a strategy for using each filter.

Use the image gallery filter system to the limit.

If you go through images by date & time captured you can usually bulk tag images much more quickly than if you have to switch between events.

I tried and used Lightroom for a while. I didn't want to keep paying Adobe so I tried to switch to darktable[0].

https://www.darktable.org

Maybe I'll give lightroom another try.

I've got my photos in a directory that I sync between all of my devices (that have a large enough hard drive) and a VPS using Nextcloud. I have Photoprism installed for organizing and viewing my photos on the web/Android. Daily backups with Restic to Storj DCS via an s3 API, and monthly manual backups with Restic to my USB hard drive. My photos are currently about 100GB and VPS/s3 storage is cheap.

I think it's a solved problem, just lacking in good turn-key solutions.

Big hard drive locally, plus Backblaze online backup. It's not that expensive.

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