Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

Random iPhone snapshots stay in iCloud and end up on Google (when I remember to open the app). I don’t really care about them after sharing on social media.

I own a small photography business. Anything I really care about—almost everything captured on my DSLR or drone—starts life in Lightroom. After images are edited, and uploaded to appropriate online sites (e.g. Flickr), they are moved to an external 2TB drive.

The external drive is cloned to a separate drive to ensure I have a physical backup. My laptop and the primary external drive are backed up to CrashPlan.

It cost me $2700 to learn that one physical backup is not enough. When I bought my two drives a few years ago, they cost $99 each. That’s nothing relative to the value of my time/work.

Google photos is the best I've found. Your privacy feature seems to be a "nice to have", so I would use that. The UX and cross-device syncing is far better than anything else I've used.

To your bonus points: Google photos web UI is truly impressive even ignoring the awesome search capabilities. They wrote an article[0] on how they built it and since then I've been keeping an eye out to use similar techniques in different applications.

[0]: https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1

Google Photos has been my goto for a while now. The search feature is great and I use it frequently. For example, I was recently looking for a blue screen error code I'd taken a picture of months ago, and was able to find it within seconds by searching "monitor". It's really incredibly good, I'd say whatever model is on the backend is probably close to state-of-the-art. I recently hit the free limit, but for ~$3 a month I now have 100gb which I don't expect to reach for years to come.

I don't typically take photos of really private things, so the convenience of quick automatic backups from my phone and the availability of the search feature outweigh any privacy concerns I might otherwise have. I do also take local backups occasionally to my external hard drives in case Google somehow suffers major data loss.

I use a Synology NAS.

They've got that decent photo library app called Moments, which is available on mobile devices to upload your pictures from your phone directly. They also have another app called Drive, on mobile and desktop to upload photos and files. It's basically a closed source Google drive.

The NAS itself can very easily be plugged to Amazon S3 for encrypted incremental backup (I do a weekly backups).

This! I’ve tried every option under the sun at least twice and google photos wins. My current system has been this for the past 2 years or so:

1. Create a family gmail account (ex. house-yourlastname@gmail.com)

2. Install Google Photos on the both you and your spouse’s phone and set the automatic photo upload to upload to the house-yourlastname@gmail.com account.

3. Create a new account on your local home server (ex. house-yourlastname)

4. Install and login to the google drive client for the house@yourlastname.com account. DON’T do any of their photo upload nonsense. Just use the app to sync your google drive contents.

5. Go to https://photos.google.com and set the "Sync photos & videos from Google Drive” to “true”.

6. Go to https://drive.google.com and set the "Automatically put your Google Photos into a folder in My Drive” to true.

7. Install hazel on your home server and have it monitor the automatically created “Google Photos” folder that shows up in your Google drive (this folder shows up as a result of step 5). This folder is where all auto-uploaded photos from your phone(s) end up by default.

8. Have hazel move all auto-uploaded photos out of the “Google Photos” folder in Google Drive and into a folder structure of your choosing in Google Drive (Ex. “Google Drive/Photos/2018/11/2018-11-25-1234.jpg”). Because of step 4 the photos we move into our own folder structure will show up in https://photos.google.com.

9. Copy fancy camera photos into the same folder you are monitoring with hazel. The same hazel rules will rename and place photos into the same Google Drive directory structure.

10. Done - you have a pretty good shared family library. All family members can view all photos using the google photos app OR by visiting https://photos.google.com. And, any management (deletes, etc) are propagated to Google Drive. For example, I’ll triage on https://photos.google.com and all deleted photos end up n the trash can of my iMac by the time I happen to check.

Some general reasons why I landed on this:

1. I have a family and whatever I chose had to work for the whole family without jumping through manual copying at home. This basically nixes Apple photos, as they haven’t yet figured out we have families.

2. The only graceful way I’ve found to have a family library is to have spouses share an account. You could do that with an iCloud account, but there are lots of downsides to that. Google apps support multiple account gracefully, which allows you to be logged into a different account for Google Photos vs. Gmail (or whatever).

3. Most photo management solutions require you go sit down on the “shared family computer” to manage them. Google Photos bootstrapped off of using Google Drive lets you manage photos from anywhere (your phone, your spouse’s phone, the website, etc). The changes are synced back to Google Drive and back to your “source of truth” on your home server, Synology, etc.

4. The above solution only relies on the home server for sake of moving photos around to the folder structure of your liking. Even if your machine is turned off for a week, all your photos end up in the family library pretty quickly. Whenever you happen to start the server again, all the photos sitting in the “Google Photos” folder will then get organized into your preferred folder structure. This is appealing, as I didn’t like any solution I tried that relied on a server being up 24/7 to have all photos show up in the family library.