Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

timelinize.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 172 posts

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#81

Post by mholt »

apitman wrote: post #75
mholt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. About 5-6 years ago, Timelinize actually used only the Google Photos API. It didn't even support imports from Takeout yet. The problem is the API strips photos of crucial metadata including location, and gives you nerfed versions of your data. Plus the rate limits were so unbearable, I eventually ripped this out. But yeah, an app that runs on your phone would be a nice QoL improvement.

Is takeout the only way to get the original photos out?

As far as I know, yes. ("Original" is a strong word, but it's pretty close if you don't have space saver enabled / pay for storage.)

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#82

Post by mholt »

hexagonwin wrote: post #77

Looks awesome! Btw, it would be nice if it can also support audio files, I frequently make multi hour long recordings (meetings, presentation etc) and it would be very useful to see pictures and other stuff from a specific time together with the audio from that timing.

Oh it actually does support audio files :) Haven't tested them in a couple years but a player should appear.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#83

Post by mholt »

sdotdev wrote: post #58

Nice work. I’ve been frustrated with how closed off location history tools have become lately. This looks like a solid step toward giving people real ownership of their data again. Definitely checking this out.

Thank you. Yes, I feel the same!

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#84

Post by mholt »

aetherspawn wrote: post #66

This seems like the perfect thing to mix with financial records (ie bank feeds) and a local LLM. I’m not sure what you’d use it for … exactly … but it could probably reconcile and figure out all your credit card charges based on your message history and location, allocate charges to budgets, and show more analytics than you’re probably interested in knowing. People with a cloud connected car such as a Tesla could pro…

Yeah, I hear this a lot, I would love to have my financials and an LLM integrated as well!

Could make for a very interesting/useful/private personal assistant.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#85

Post by msylvest »

mholt wrote: post #40
wizzard0 wrote: post #37

Wow that's great! Interesting if it's possible to use not just a folder but like a s3-compatible backend for photos and for db backups as well (I don't think all my photo/video archives would fit on my laptop, though the thumbnails definitely would, while minio or something replicated between my desktop plus a backup machine at Hetzner or something would definitely do the thing)

I don't think sqlite runs very well on S3 file systems. I think it would also be insufferably slow. I even encountered crashes within sqlite when using ExFAT -- so file system choice is definitely important! (I've since implemented a workaround for this bug by detecting exfat and configuring sqlite to avoid WAL mode, so it's just... much slower.)

Would https://litestream.io/ perhaps help?

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#86

Post by mholt »

LelouBil wrote: post #68
mholt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want it to also be a nextcloud and zotero replacement, storing all my documents and books and documenting when I added, opened, edited them. I want it to store all notes that I write. Sounds in-scope so far. Long-term, perhaps, and maybe optional add-on features rather than built-in, but we'll see. > I want it to record and display all browser tabs I open, when I do so, everything I copy and paste, every key I pr…

I feel like nextcloud replacement is out of scope ? I mostly felt like Timelize was about being *behind* data-generating applications and showing and cross-referencing their data when reading the website. I think the way is to do some sort of nextcloud extension that puts data into Timeline. I also saw it tracks "documents" on the website but I didn't try it yet, and I would hope it can use external document sources…

Well, I don't plan on 1:1 feature parity with NextCloud or any comprehensive cloud suite. But I think in terms of what was mentioned: "storing all my documents and books and documenting when I added, opened, edited them. I want it to store all notes that I write," I think that's in scope.

So yes, Timelinize sits behind your current work flows. It's more of a resting place for your data (which you can still organize and curate -- more features to come in this regard), but I also can see why it might make sense to be one's primary photo library application, in the future, with more development.

As for document storage, this is still WIP, and the implementation could use more discussion to clarify the vision and specifics.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#87

Post by mholt »

sureglymop wrote: post #64
mholt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want it to also be a nextcloud and zotero replacement, storing all my documents and books and documenting when I added, opened, edited them. I want it to store all notes that I write. Sounds in-scope so far. Long-term, perhaps, and maybe optional add-on features rather than built-in, but we'll see. > I want it to record and display all browser tabs I open, when I do so, everything I copy and paste, every key I pr…

> That is possible in theory, but for me personally that's just too detailed. :D I wouldn't need all that granularity, myself. I do see that. I think for that reason it would be cool to support a kind of extension system for arbitrary "collectors". And then solid filtering to filter data. The vision is definitely similar. I am very pleasantly surprised to see your project. And I also like your ideas/roadmap on the we…

Wonderful, I'd love to collaborate!

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#89

Post by mholt »

whacked_new wrote: post #78

Super interested in this as well (and thank you for Caddy) How does this handle data updating / fixing? My use case is importing data that's semi structured. Say you get data from a 3rd party provider from one dump, and it's for an event called "jog". Then they update their data dump format so "jog" becomes subdivided into "light run" vs "intense walk", and they also applied it retroactively. In this case you'd have…

Glad you like Caddy!

> How does this handle data updating / fixing?

In the advanced import settings, you can customize what makes an item unique or a duplicate. You can also configure how to handle duplicates. By default, duplicates are skipped. But they can also be updated, and you can customize what gets updated and which of the two values to keep.

But yes, updates do run an UPDATE query, so they're irreversible. I explored schemas that were purely additive, so that you could traverse through mutations of the timeline, but this got messy real fast, and made exploring (reading) the timeline more complex/slow/error-prone. I do think it would be cool though, and I may still revisit that, because I think it could be quite beneficial.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#90

Post by dav43 »

mholt wrote: post #32
TheTaytay wrote: post #22

I really like the local storage of this. Files and folders are the best! (When noodling on this, I’ve also been wondering about putting metadata for files in sidecar files next to the files they describe, rather than a centralized SQLite database. Did you experiment with anything like that by any chance?)

Why sidecar metadata files? In general I've tried to minimize the number of files on disk since that makes copying slow and error-prone. (A future version of Timelinize will likely support storing ALL the data in a DB to make for faster, easier copying.) We'd still need a DB for the index anyway, which essentially becomes a copy of the metadata.

Don’t know if you have seen the work DuckDB is doing on ducklake. Maybe there is an overlap in vision for versioning data across multiple data sources - and similar to SQLite it’s not proprietary and easily drilled down on. I’m sorry, don’t have technical knowledge :/
Post reply on HN