Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

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Our photo library currently consists of 300,000 photos. It goes back 20 years, and while i would like to say it is curated, the sheer amount of photos makes that task pretty much impossible.

We take a lot of photos, both of family/friends/pets, but also landscapes and nature, and when curating the photo library, i often find myself deleting the landscape photos of 10 years ago. We don't need to keep 200+ photos of sunsets. Yes it was a pretty sunset, but there are hundreds of those every year, and unless it includes photos of our family or something else "special", the photo doesn't stand out, and will eventually be a candidate for being deleted.

I just finished the years curating, and have deleted almost 60,000 photos from the library. Sunsets, blurry photos (that doesn't have any other value), screenshots, and lots more.

Eventually i will however have to curate it even more. When our kids eventually "inherit" the photo library, they'll most likely be overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and simply discard it. On the other hand i don't want to leave them without photos of their childhood, and who's to say what matters to them as memories.

If you can code, you can run them by AWS rekognition to do face recognition. It works amazingly well (you need a score >98 for a match). Where I am impressed is that it is also remarkably resilient to faces aging, and in some case identify some toddlers from an adult face. In your case if it only goes 20 years it is maybe less critical, but in my case I have photos going back to late XIX century, and good luck guessing who was that toddler without a legend!

Hilariously, Google photos is really bad at this. It's decided that my daughter and I are the same person, and refuses to let me update this (i keep trying and it keeps getting set back to my name).

I had a similar experience with Google Photos where it merged the "profiles" of my two children. Like you, I tried separating them back out manually, with no real success. Ultimately, I turned the face identification feature off entirely (which has the effect of deleting all of the face data), and then turned it back on. It took a day or so for Google Photos to start re-indexing the photos in earnest, but that fixed the issue for me, and it was less work than the manual re-tagging that I had tried before.

Huh, interesting. I'll try that thanks!

Here's how I do it while preserving sanity:

DSLR photos are for art, not memories. I use only my Android phone for memories (among other things).

I have a daily job that transfers photos from my phone to my PC.

Once a month, I copy all the photos/videos of the previous month into a directory. I fire up a simple Flask web app I wrote that builds a page showing all the photos/videos that are in a directory. Under each photo/video, I have:

- A checkbox on whether I want to keep it

- A textbox for putting a caption. Here I write whatever was going on that day (or when I took the photo)

- A field for entering tags (plain text, tags separated by commas).

When I hit a button:

- It copies all my selected photos/videos to another directory.

- In a static site generator, it creates entries for each day there is a photo/video. It adds rich text (e.g. Markdown) to the SSG entry with links to the copied photos/videos, and "captions". The tags I had entered apply to the blog entry/day (not to the individual photo).

That's it. I'm done.

Separately, I have a daily cron job to build the site, and make a new page showing me all entries for today's date (i.e. all photos/videos taken on Jan 27th). This way I can see what I was doing on this day 4 years ago, etc.

I keep whatever I want. If I go for a monthly book club meeting, I take a picture of the building it's in and note down what book I read.

It's very manageable. At one point I had a bug and didn't update it for several years. When I finally got around to fixing the bug, it didn't take long to catch up on that backlog.

I don't curate my DSLR photos. No time for that. It's why I don't use it for memories.

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