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

Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

amazonforum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 357 posts

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#241

Post by briffle »

exitb wrote: post #152
8fingerlouie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data. That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc). I also maintain a…

As a fellow small ARM machine owner, what's your strategy for getting the photos from iCloud? Is there a tool one shouldn't feel weird to give their iCloud credentials to?

I pull mine from Google Photos, with a docker image running a tool: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

Its not perfect, but as a backup, it works well.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#242

Post by lostlogin »

yardstick wrote: post #74
bayindirh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local photo library is a folder, disguised as a package. One of the folders store all the originals on the device. Copy that folder, and you're good to go. You can also get the full folder hierarchy, if you wish.

If you enable iCloud for the photo library, and even if you select store originals, I have found that Photos still offloads some pictures. It’s just not guaranteed. I really wish Apple had a complete export button, similar to google takeout. Or at least a good CLI tool to get the original images one by one. Fwiw my library is ~200k files and close to a TB.

Agreed.

I rsync images out of Apple’s weird file structure that’s in the bundle. It’s horrible, but with ‘download originals’ enabled it works well. It’s particularly frustrating with large libraries as they occupy nearly all an SSD. For this reason I do it all on a VM that’s on a Synology.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#243

Post by capableweb »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #99
capableweb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I found in my previous search is that either they're really good at managing large collections of photos, or they're really good at doing various AI/recognition, but none of what I've found have been good at both. Hence my interest in DigiKam as their management features for large collections is second to none.

Isn't that OK? You should be able to find some reasonable workflow around using the recognizer to tag the photo in its EXIF/IPTC metadata, and then load that into the organizer.

It's not not OK :) Just not what I'm looking for, I spend enough time professionally with writing glue code, that I'm looking for a good out-of-the-box experience for something like this.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#244

Post by aftbit »

delfinom wrote: post #160
VLM wrote: post #158

From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos? I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born... Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some ser…

They could be a photographer. Often they'll take numerous photos in a very short time span to capture a bunch of movement and angles just so they can pick the best of the bunch later Why do they keep everything? Idk, /r/datahoarder is a subreddit that exists though so the mindset is out there

IMO... why not? 250k photos at 10MB each is only ~2.5 TB. That easily fits on modern hard drives. You can even buy SSDs that would fit that for under $500. If you are a professional photographer, then you absolutely should keep everything you ever shoot, just in case one photo is ever worth it. Even if you're an amateur though, that's not really that much storage in the grand scheme of things.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#245

Post by Nextgrid »

luckylion wrote: post #232
Nextgrid wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately? The warning served its purpose quite well though - the majority of people including smokers concede that smoking is harmful. If they are still smoking despite that, it's on them. The same cannot be said of cloud services. Very few people outside of tech think that the cloud can fail (whether technical failure or just randomly ban you…

> If they are still smoking despite that, it's on them. That's my point: the warnings don't lead to reasonable decisions. "If you don't pay for it, you are the product" has to be one of the most echoed sentiments of the last few years, and people still demand everything for free, and prefer to pay with their data instead of paying for the content they consume (e.g. on newspapers). If Amazon gave them a choice of "you…

> the warnings don't lead to reasonable decisions.

The warnings lead to informed decisions. They may not always be reasonable, but at least the person knows what they're getting themselves into.

My intention is not to outlaw "best effort" cloud storage or legally compel the providers to offer an SLA, but merely to make the limitations clear so that customers, including non-technical ones, can make an informed decision.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#246

Post by InCityDreams »

warner25 wrote: post #226
VLM wrote: post #158

From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos? I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born... Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some ser…

A quarter million is still a big number, but I'll admit to my family having 60,000 photos in storage. They're mostly since we started having kids in 2014, which works out to 20 per day. Of course, some days we take zero photos, and other days we take a bunch on burst because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera. When we go out somewhere, I don't…

>because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera.

But those nose-picking moments can be so easily utilised...usually when the kids get to 17-20yo and their partner 'Of course wants to see pics of when their loved one was a child'.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#247

Post by nicoburns »

jwineinger wrote: post #206
nicoburns wrote: post #162

Amazon have been sending me repeated email telling that it’s photos service is shutting down for over a year now. Have you not been getting those?

From what I can find, Amazon Drive is shutting down at the end of 2023 but Photos is not. So you've got until end of year to download non-photo/non-video files from your Drive before they're gone. https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23943055011

You seem to be right. I wasn't actively using either product so I didn't pay too much attention to the details.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#248

Post by sagebird »

When I hear individuals on talk about their backup routines they have developed, home nas servers, scripts that keep things synched, etc, I can’t help but to think about failed crypto ux attempts.

I don’t like relying on monolithic monopolized corporate services as much as the next hacker— but I think there should be an easy to understand service for the 98% of basic users.

If someone could make a service that detects and requests permission to connects to all of your cloud services and provides full backup service that includes whatever the best practices are it would seem like a win for those who don’t want to roll their own.

A marketable “sticker” Ala “intel inside” ie - “open backup compatible” would be good to have with a simple but serviceable api.

I think today there is little financial incentive for storage providers to make the data easy to access via machine.

Ideally an api would not only allow incoming data to be quickly compared and synched… but would allow graceful and intelligent transfers or splits or duplication levels among stores, in the case that you want to change services or have your own backup.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#249

Post by aftbit »

luckylion wrote: post #54
Nextgrid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup. That's common knowledge among tech people but blaming the victim is not the solution here. These services are marketed as safe, reliable, and not needing backups (in fact sometimes they make it difficult to take backups, even more so for a non-technical use…

Nobody is blaming the victim, they're saying that you should have a backup outside of your cloud provider. I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium, until something happens to their data. But by then it's too late. The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately?

Man, if I smoked, I'd buy a cigarette case and transfer those bad boys over. I don't wanna look at gross lungs every time I go for a cig. Of course that's the point, but yuck.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#250

Post by mr337 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #174
ALLTaken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

And packaged as a docker container to run daily, weekly, or monthly backups. https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd
Post reply on HN