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Ask HN: How do you manage your photo/video collections?

by thojest on 10/22/20, 10:15 PM with 5 comments

The question is mainly about photos/videos from friends and family. In the recent years I always dumped the photos from my mobile phone onto some external hd every few months.

But I notice that things get complicated because they are not really accessible anymore.

Further more, if you have a family, how do you join the photos taken from different smart phones of your family members?

Do you burry them in WhatsApp?

Do you choose a cloud solution, dropbox or google photos?

Do you care about privacy and self host something, or do you not care at all and just print them into photo albums on paper?

  • by mikewarot on 10/23/20, 12:05 PM

    I've got a set of folders, backed up on an external drive, a server I just built for our family, and soon (and again) on Backblaze. All of my photos and videos are in a folder of the form \masterarchive\source\yyyy\yyyymmddd The camera puts things in folders, I put those folders in as subfolders.

    Long ago, I lost the best portrait ever of a friend because I saved the 1/4 size over the original.... so now I ALWAYS save files with a new name before doing anything else in GIMP, etc.

    Google's Picasa was awesome until they killed it, because it did facial recognition... but the last version has a bug and gets confused if there are multiple faces in a photo. 8(

    Digikam also does faces, but the UI is weird, and it just quits way too often... so I'm looking for a better manager.

    I'll probably suck it up, and fork over the money for ThumbsPlus again... I like it, even if I can't afford it right now.

  • by matthieuvlan on 10/23/20, 1:13 PM

    I use Google Photos (Android user btw). Works perfectly, auto-back from my phone, can scroll through them via the web interface, and easy to find back pictures of dates/places/people/...

  • by Maha-pudma on 10/23/20, 4:41 PM

    I've a bunch of year folders from years ago when I only produced what's now seemingly a month's worth of pictures in a year.

    Now I'm dumping pictures onto a harddrive every 6 months or so. I'm planning on dumping everuthing into one folder and writing a shell script to sort them into 'yyyy/mm/yyyy-mm-dd'. Just need to work out how I'm doing that.

    I don't use or trust online storage.

  • by aprdm on 10/23/20, 7:46 AM

    Apple photos, Apple hasn’t betrayed my trust so far

  • by mceachen on 10/23/20, 2:51 AM

    I mean, I've got my favorite app.

    Our photos from our phones get copied to the home NAS via Resilio Sync where they get picked up by PhotoStructure.

    (I wrote PhotoStructure).