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Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

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Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#1

Post by oldsklgdfth »

My parents have physical photo albums from the film days. The albums are curated for events and memories, such as vacations and weddings etc.

When I got a new phone, I bought 128GB thinking it would be more than enough. But it's not.

I find that I just snap photos of things I want to remember. Some photos are nearly identical, but I don't delete them. I feel a sense of attachment. Though I never go back and look at them. Periodically, I offload a bunch to an HDD and then I definitely don't look at them.

I don't have social media to post photos. I have a digital frame I upload pics to, but that also just fills up over time.

How do you go about managing your photos? Does it feel like digital clutter? How do you approach memory making through photos?

Finally, any cool tech solutions are welcome.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#2

Post by gregjor »

Both Apple and Google have good photo organizers in their cloud suite. I use both. I assume offline tools exist as well. Did you Google “photo organizer?”

This isn’t really a philosophical problem. It’s the outcome of too many photos, easy to take and store, versus personal preference. I don’t pay much attention and rely on the cloud tools for organizing and searching. I know some people carefully curate their photos.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#3

Post by eternityforest »

I do delete near-identical ones, otherwise... I do pretty much what you do. I have lots of photos I took to mostly to show someone in one email somewhere, etc.

I use SyncThing for a lot of stuff, if I have a small file of any kind that I really want to keep, it goes in a sync folder.

Until recently, device storage just kept growing, so I never needed to think about getting rid of anything, the folder just followed me on every device.

Now phones are unfortunately ditching microSD, which I hate, so available storage is actually smaller than before.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#4

Post by Zanni »

If you have an iPhone (and iCloud), you can save a ton of storage space by enabling Optimize iPhone Storage. Your original photos will be moved to the cloud, but you'll get low-res proxies on your phone (good enough for the phone display).

Alternate, low-tech solution: my sister goes through her photos (print and digital), curates a decent selection and turns them into print-on-demand photo books. Much more compact than a physical album, yet more accessible than a digital frame (and giftable too). Does require quite a bit of time investment though.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#5

Post by shortcake27 »

I’m also now past the 128gb mark. I rarely go back through my old photos, and the more time that passes the less connection I feel scrolling through my library.

Occasionally I post to Instagram (with an accompanying caption), and I like going through that more because each post is highly curated and annotated with my feelings at the time. Not too dissimilar to a physical photo album. So even if you did that privately, it’s worth a go.

Other than that, I figure that one day I may want to look at them, eg when I no longer have any mobility. The cost is so low that it doesn’t make sense for me to delete photos.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#6

Post by k310 »

I copy everything, cameras, phone, scans, to disk, organized by device. Some stuff gets organized, such as scans of old family photos, documents, faceplates, devices and so on. I have organized some in relation to the home and property should I sell.

Mainly, as I transfer from sd cards, photos get ranked (not tagged or renamed) and the best make it to a "gallery" folder, or an "illustration" folder for posting on the other aggregator site I use. Only two for me.

The phone photos are transferred in giant blobs, so they never get sorted. I won't host my photos outside the home because of the great internet copy machine and hacking plague. And so I have yet to find any desktop tech that will categorize photos even in the simplest way. iOS image search is insanely dumb and useless. It finds people, but the few other categories are not helpful to me and often hilariously wrong in identification.

I don't use Apple's photos app because in the past, it failed to do anything but create a giant album with phony virtual folders, and the underlying files were organized by date in a tree that made access to the actual files a fright. And with cryptic names.

So I organize, to the extent I do, in the simplest ways. A few categories, but otherwise, some big bags, and a "best" folder that I copy to the iPad Pro for showing off. No third party involved. Benefits not worth the perceived risk.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#7

Post by quintex »

I wouldn’t describe myself as a photographer so take with a grain of salt. A combination of iCloud and self hosted PhotoPrism [1] is perfect for me. My phone automatically backs up everything to both locations so I’m not worried about loosing anything and both do a good job of organizing by date/location/event. I can happily take photos without worrying that I’ll need to sift through them all at a later date. When I happen to use a camera that isn’t my phone (Mavic Mini being the most frequent), I can add the photos to both locations from my laptop. Apple does a great job of packaging and presenting ‘memories’ at a later date.

[1] https://www.photoprism.app/

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#8

Post by beardyw »

Google Photos works well for me. There is unlimited storage (with compressed, but perfectly usable format).

I archive the originals to backups and can happily delete them from my phone. I have scanned all my old pictures, given them backdated exif dates (a bit fiddly), and, again, archived them and uploaded to Google Photos. I can scroll all the way back into the 1970s!

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

#10

Post by ikornaselur »

Me and my wife wanted something to better categorise memories, so we actually yearly go through the lady 12 months of photos and out together an album with 80-120 pages that we order.

We he done this since our first year dating and now have multiple "Year X" albums that we sometimes pick up and go through.

We do also have a Google Home Max that is connected to a shared album we add photos to, which we keep in the kitchen and see latest photos pop up there, which we love seeing. But the physical albums are great because we hand picked those photos while going through the events of the year.

So in my opinion, there's no reason not to also have physical albums

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