Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challenge is finding the good ones | Hacker News Reader

Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challenge is finding the good ones

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Honestly, I'm astounded how good Apple got with it. And I say this at the risk of coming across like a fanboy which I'm definitely not. I'm very, _very_ rarely delighted by features that get pushed into my face, but the automatic categorization of "Moments" and unobtrusive integration into the UI is something I really enjoy a lot.

It really gets the mix incredibly well between editorial ideas (i.e. "Among the trees" with lots of very different adventures in the forest), machine learning aided curation (including cutting videos to cue scenes!) and overall format: Fitting, vibrant but non-annoying music in the background, the format isn't too short or too long. Plus, at the end you can choose between more pre-curated moments.

The privacy-preserving curation that just takes some background cycles on my mobile GPU while it's charging is the cherry on the cake and I think Apple really got a bullseye there.

I'm also pretty impressed with the 'Over the Years' and 'Your Story' vignettes that my iPhone periodically creates, which was probably developed in direct response to that realisation that people take an incredible number of pictures (I know I do, especially since kids..) and very rarely actually consume them in any meaningful way.

I just wish it wouldn't select pictures of my ex-gf so often :/ Should probably delete them, but.. nostalgia.

If pictures of people you don’t want to see get selected, you can block them from being selected.

Select the person and it’s something like “Include this person less” that you’re after.

It’s not perfect, but it’ll allow you to keep the photos and not have them pop up in memories

I'd just save the ones I didn't want to see somewhere else not on the phone. That way, the ones that are good memories can stay, and the ones that aren't can just go.

I love these features, but am absolutely flabbergasted that Apple removed the ability to turn off the music that plays when you view the memory slideshow! It's not on-device music, it's not any sort of music that I chose, it's just some Apple-chosen soundtrack that I absolutely do not want, yet the only option is to turn my volume all the way down. I would label it hostile design.

This is something I have anecdotally heard from many people, regardless of their age or experience with tech. I myself set up a widget for my parents (in their 60s) to surface photos and memories on their iPhones, and they derive more daily delight from that single feature than from any other technology.

It's impressive, but as someone who recently broke up with their partner, the vignettes of our relationship highlights were a bit of a stab of pain.

I feel your pain, I’ve been there. If you go to the person in the photos app, there’s an option to feature that person less in memories.

It was actually a beautiful vignette, though seeing it pop up on my main screen while I was on a date was a bit of a weird experience.

The search function in Apple and in the Google photos apps are good. Text searches for “Turkey” or other terms is surprisingly good.

Same. I use the Home Screen widget on my phone that surfaces a pic each day, and it's almost always good.

Even better, searching works well. I can generally find whatever person, thing or place I’m looking for in my collection.

I am not an Apple fanboy either, more like a hater. I have never owned a single Apple product, and I have a lot of bad things to say about them. But I have to admit that when it comes to user experience, they can be way ahead of the competition. They can screw things up, but when they decide to do things well, they deliver.

Since it isn’t explicitly mentioned here, I’d like to add that the music transitions match the photo transitions…to put it another way, the photos transition in sync with the transitions or beats in the music.

Another good thing to do with these photos is to add a nice large widget on the Home Screen to look back everyday.

I would have far preferred being able to pick a default folder or tag to put photos in so they're organized when I take them without the need for any ML. That's what the camera script I wrote for my Pinephone does. Important photos get human readable names when after the first time I use them.

It turns out if you actually use your computer intelligently it's very pleasant to use.

Most people are not organizers.

It helps to consider the smartphone as an "input device" rather than as storage and presentation device. You know you've got a real winner of a photo if right away you want to share it with someone. A backlit cluster of leaves on a beautiful fall day - off to my sister who is a master of such shots. A really great photo of the kids - off to a particular Whatsapp group (Facebook has long ago faded for this sort of thing - yes, I know, Whatsapp is still Facebook). And so on.

But at the end of the day, or the week anyway, download all the new stuff to my old-school computer and cull ruthlessly. Only the parts that survive that go into the real collection. Which is still a lot, but cross-referenced by date taken and subject matter, the fulfill the "digital diary" role, not the "art gallery" role.

Immediate culling is important. Once the photos are a month or two old, for one thing they seem too important to cull any more; for another so many have accumulated that you'll never catch up anyway.

My ultimate storage system - homemade and not publishable quality - has a web accessible, rudimentary full screen, swipeable presentation layer, so I can still show off the photos from it in a similar way to showing off photos actually stored on the phone. But it has the culled collection that is merged together from two phones, several old school digital cameras, and even motion capture surveillance cameras watching the front and back yards.

Am I ever the opposite. Every photo or video anyone in my family takes goes to the local NAS and that's the end of it. I think of that media more like a diary. It's all sorted by date, and that's it; but it's also enough.

Backups? One advantage of the culled collection (with the pix also downscaled from the original resolution to 2500px on the longer edge) is that I can afford to keep it in quadruplicate. On the main machine, on the server that exposes it to the web (password protected), and on two portable hard disks, one of which is always kept offsite in alternation.

I've got about 13 years of photos and videos and it's still under a single terabyte. That's pretty easy to keep one copy of in Raid 1 and one remote. If I had 10x... I'd probably just spring for more hard drives and move to Glacier for backup.

Every year or so I go through my photos since the last time and cull whatever photos I’ve taken in a manner similar to what he describes at the end of this article. While I agree the process largely needs to be done by hand, there are components that could be automated and technology could aid in the process.

For example, rather than showing me all my photos in chronological order, it would be amazing if there was a way to group photos first by event - say someone’s birthday party. As a parent of young children, I don’t want to have no photos of a certain visit with grandma, but I also don’t want or need 50 photos of that visit. If my photos were first grouped by event, I could aim to keep 1 or 2 photos and be a lot quicker and more ruthless and culling photos from that event.

Once shown as events, technology could certainly highlight or group the photos that were all taken in quick succession. Often I take a lot of photos while trying to hit the exact moment my children are all looking.

Then, technology could likely intelligently highlight photos that are blurry or maybe even all the shots that I accidentally hit while putting the phone back in my pocket and so show only the floor or something. Seeing these highlighted would make it much quicker to delete photos.

I am sure there are more simple processes that could be included that would allow people to cull photos down from 1000s to 10s in a short period.

I use the App Flic to sift through my photos. It lets you pick a month (or I think day) and then you go through your photos right swiping (keep) and left (trash bin to review once again before emptying.)

Another app, Gemini, can help you find photos of nothing (floor shots, sky shots, pocket shots) and blurry shots and duplicates.

I used to like the android app Slidebox that walked you through your gallery and swipe left or right to keep photos. Unfortunately it seems like abandonware since 2016 and doesn't support SD storage.

> For example, rather than showing me all my photos in chronological order, it would be amazing if there was a way to group photos first by event - say someone’s birthday party.

Shotwell[0] automatically orders your photos by date, which is quite useful.

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell

Honestly the challenge for me, as an iPhone user but not a complete Apple cloud ecosystem user, is getting the damn things off my phone. Is there anyway to do this that isn't trash yet? So many of the processes I've run through either fail randomly, or Apple has broken. At one point I remember being able to just plug into a linux box, do some mounting magic, and transfer the files over just like any USB device, but I feel like that didn't work the last time I tried.

It's downright hostile.

https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse - used it literally 2 days ago to back up a couple tens of GB of photos and videos. Works great.

I don't know about recently, but historically, "idevicepair" or whatever it's called on the Linux box, and then the iPhone photos come down quickly and reliably. Android is OK these days, but used to be really dodgy to download via USB cable.

But recently I just use a wifi file server app. "Sweech" on Android. A couple of taps and I can download the newest stuff as a zip file via web browser.

I use photosync to automatically push all photos and videos to my NAS over Samba.

Photosync has a ton of options, webdav, ftp you name it. Costs a few bucks one-off and worth every penny. Not affiliated in any way, but definitely feel gratitude and want to support the app creator by spreading the word, to make sure they keep maintaing it.

Scrapbooks. Seriously.

Pay the money to have photos printed, and put them into a scrapbook. If you have kids, this is a fantastic weekend project that everybody loves. If not, just having them in a physical photo album is good too.

Quantity is a quality on its own, but not when it comes to photographs. Edit ruthlessly.

Did you reply to the wrong parent? How is this even remotely related to how to transfer files from your phone to another device?

My point is don't transfer, extract.

Precisely because I noticed this, I wrote a small tool (open source) which can be used to organize pictures.

https://github.com/dataf3l/open-photo-organizer

the main idea is that you can assign keyboard bindings to folders, so one can efficiently:"watch a folder", "press a key" and automatically organize the pics, for example:

press x to delete press f for family press c for cat pictures

these bindings are configurable, so you can setup your own folders based on your own needs.

feel free to use it and I hope it can help you guys with your pictures :)

I humbly request feedback:

This sounded cool, so I tried to set it up. It gave me a compilation failure (something about self.url doing something bad because of implementing Drop). I didn't put any more effort after that and I'm no Rust developer, so maybe it's on me, but I'd let you know anyway.

Sounds interesting but I didn't know what to do when I arrived at github.

I remember an early discussion with an engineer from either Smugmug or Dropbox, circa 2011-2012. Something like 99% of photos backed up online were pretty much never retrieved. I'd guess it's almost the same today.

I wonder how many petabytes of Google's storage is filled with blurry pictures of fish in aquariums that will never be viewed.

Or sunset photos with a camera flash washing everything out…

More cynically, I wonder if that is why they don't give us the tools on our phone to easily prune our photo collections? Too much money being made in cloud storage.

I must say, I really like using (the weirdly-named) Hash Photos (https://www.hashphotos.app/) for quickly finding which photo in a bunch of similar photos to keep. You can choose which photos to compare, then keep marking the comparison photos as best until you have decided. Zooming is synchronised, and you can delete particularly bad photos as you go. It does that one thing very well.

Thank you for the recommendation, that’s an insta-buy from me. I love that it’s well integrated to the system photos library

Looks useful. Is there any such app for Android or Linux?

Maybe this one? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.want.imagec...

As a professional photographer, I delete over 90% of smartphone photos I take right away. Noone will ever have time to look at all of it.

Even for commercial portrait shoots I end up using maybe 5% of the photos. Weddings are different - over 25% is usable.

Maybe I'm not the best person to talk about this, because I simply don't take photos and I'm a bit of a sociopath when it comes to stuff like this.

I get photography, will probably get back into it that one day (film photography though, the darkroom/development process is something I enjoy)

but I don't get photographing everything that happens in your life. It happened, that's enough for me, onto the next thing that will happen.

and, disliking clutter on my phone and disliking the notion of wasting data or battery power with superfluous background processes to mirror my photos on iCloud, I turn off all the iCloud auto-uploading stuff, take photos sparingly and purge them regularly. I've had the same 40-ish photos on my phone for the last 4 years and I'm cool with that.

I think the problem being discussed is one that was created by us in the first place when someone decided that manually uploading a good photo was too much work.

I feel similarly. But to add onto this I also hate my photo being taken. It makes me insanely uncomfortable as I'm posing for the picture. and if its someone else taking it I feel uncomfortable knowing they now have a picture of me they'll probably put online, on Facebook or something.

In this day and age I do look like some kind of nutter avoiding it, so sometimes I just suck it up and let it happen. I'm not sure how to go about telling people - because I fear I'll be shunned as a wierdo, because I have been before.

The Gemini app by Macpaw (paid) does a great job of helping me cull my 40k-sized photo library over the years. Especially duplicates, blurry shots, and the hundreds of photos of restaurant menus that I never want to see again.

One big thing to be careful about with these massive photo libraries is making sure you aren't collecting an unfortunate pile of PII like passport copies, drivers licence copies, credit card photos, etc. If the wrong person were to get your phone, it's not ideal they can get that level of detail on you. Use an encrypted password manager or the like for those.

> Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challenge is finding the good ones

Google already did this for you.

One thing I do when I want to make a selection of similar photos is to sort them by size (in kilobytes) and keep the largest one(s). That selects for the photos with the most details.

I don’t advocate automating that, though. You still want to at least glance at all of them because there may be a technically inferior one that jumps out to you.

I think this is one of the big unsolved problems in consumer tech.

Everyone has a smartphone and everyone has this visual documentation of all of the significant events over their entire life.

We extract so little value from our photos though. There are too many photos to even look at.

Our Sony TV (GoogleTV based) plays a slideshow of recent photos as a screensaver (where "recent" seems to be up to a year ago), which is a nice way to review photos when you're walking by the TV and a photo catches your eye.

But it's missing a key feature to "star" a photo that you like, and it doesn't even seem to have a way to see metadata to find out when the photo was taken, so you can't easily find it in your library on your phone if you want to share it.

There was a time when cameras had a roll of film in them, usually 35mm limited to 36 shots per roll. You had to put thought into shooting because there was no preview, undo or delete. Once the films was exposed, it was done. Mistakes costed money.

Now you can shoot until your 1TB+ SD card is full, preview, delete, edit, etc, right on the camera as it is now a general purpose computer with a digital camera hooked to it. So photography is a now a cheap afterthought for many. Point, click, forget.

Speaking for myself, out of the photos I take, I probably have maybe 10-20% that are "good". So I have a "favorites" folder containing sub-folders (related to the location/occassion/topic) to which I move the good ones. Since the percent of good ones isn't high, this isn't a lot of work and can be done gradually anytime I'm looking at "unreviewed" photos.

I must be an old person. I still upload my favorite stuff to Flickr and periodically delete everything else. Even in 2022 Flickr is still an excellent shoebox for photos and videos.

This has been my workflow for over 15 years and I am close to accruing 20,000 items that I believe to be reasonably searchable.

I hope you have a local backup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30401241

I wish that Apple had pulled just a few of the organisation features from Aperture into Photos before they canned it.

For example, the concept of “stacks” — letting us condense a group of highly similar shots and choose a “winner” to represent them all, but not actually have to delete the others.

Are there any open source programs (on the desktop) which can do as others have suggested that Apple and Google do?

Essentially, filtering the good photos from the gazillions collected?

Yeah. Apple has made the perfect photo workflow for me via their smart albums. I can manage a 100K library with the ease of something 100 times smaller.

the better the camera of my phone the less I use it. there are so many good photos of everything, it's just, what's the point ?

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