Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

Because of the number of boxes sitting there, selectively scanning becomes harder than scanning it all and sorting digitally. No easy wins...

And while shooting digital over the last 20 years resulted in ~60k images, I can store that 2TB in the same volume as a single roll of prints, with the benefits of near-instant retrieval and offsite backups...

I have it setup to automatically backup from my phone to a NAS. Then the NAS backs up routinely to Backblaze. It's all automated, I don't even think about it. And it gives me great piece of mind, so it doesn't feel like clutter or a burden.

I routinely cleanup the photos from my phone, but even then, some photos I really like and I keep them on my phone. I try to keep at least a couple of photos from each 'memorable' moment I've captured, to look when I feel like it.

Keeping some photos on my phone helps when impromptu, in a conversation, you want to show something, e.g. Chatting with a barber recently, he asked about my summer and told him about a vacation I took, he was intrigued by some places I described, so he asked if I had some pics, I showed him the few I had on my phone from that.

Many photos I take, I won't keep on my phone because they go to the NAS and I clear them from my phone, but every once in a while, I open the folder in my NAS and it's cool to see and remember all those moments. That 'feel good' increases with time, so I expect the older I get, these will be more valuable. I don't do photos only, I also sometimes record a conversation with a loved one, just because I know one day they won't be there and I'd like to capture their voice.

Recently an aunt was telling me about a prank/revenge thing she did to an ex of her when she was a teenager, I was in tears laughing, and recorded that secretly. In a few years, when she's no longer with us, I'll be damn glad to have captured that and revisit that memory.

I don't manage my photos, which I take a fair deal of as i've been living more or less nomadically for 6 years now. I just organize them by year, as the filenames are datestamped.

If a particular photo is something I know will trigger a negative memory, for better or worse I put those in a folder called "lockbox" with no sorting - the idea being I know what i'm getting into when I look in there.

I very rarely review my photos, sometimes once a year when i'm coming up with my plans for the year.

This also matches my journaling - which I treat the same way. I've been journaling almost daily for 20+ years. It's a huge treat to go back to points in time and see what I was thinking and what was going on. I'm regularly surprised on how bad our memory is of what happened vs what we remember happening. I'll often visit it when i'm in a low spot / trapped in a rut.

But my wife takes a gazillion photos of everything. I organize them in a directory hierarchy by date, on my NAS. I also run a private wiki at home, and have pages of "special collections" of certain photos by subject matter/event/ whatever that link into the hierarchical directory collection.

Yes.