We make one print-on-demand photobook for each year of holiday trips. It's very nice, no worry at all about data getting lost or whatever (of course you can keep your files too) and the process of making a book is also a nice way to curate and go over all the memories again. Making a new book is always a good occasion to have a look at the earlier ones too. You can show it to people without instigating a looking-at-phones party. If you're into photography at all it's also just nice to see them in physical format.
Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#22I put eveything in a folder named YYYY-MM-DD_XXXX where XXXX is an general identifier of the pictures, usually a place, sometime an event or a person. When there are several days that belong together I use YYYY-MM-DDstart_YYYY-MM-DDend_XXXXXXXX/YYYY-MM-DD
It's more difficult since I have a cellphone that take good pictures, since I can have a lot of day with one or two pictures instead of sevral in few days like before, but it's also an opportunity to get rid of unwanted pictures
For photo scanning, I'm just using a batch number that I also add to the physical media
My plan is to make some albums for memory in the future
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#23I stopped making photos after I realized that I never watch none of 100GB photos I have. In case I make them, I don't care about doing anything to them, most of photos I do I use immediately. And I even do not care about deleting some photos I have already used. Just push all of them to the HDD in case I need to clean some memory. After I have losed one of HDD because of dropping, I have a cool tech solution to store HDDs as close to floor as possible.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#24I star/favourite some photos after taking them. If I lost everything except the starred ones I would be ok. Backup on dropbox, and dropbox in n computers.
Once in a blue moon I collect some starred pictures and print a physical album, several if it involves family (one album for them). If I am browsing photos on my phone and I see a bad one, I will delete it (will then sync the delete automatically), but only when I casually run into them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#25I started using Google photos first but then stopped using it after I found out that they completely lock you in and you can't really export all your photos seamlessly while still having the time stamps. Now I have all of my photos on onedrive but will migrate to immich in a few months. Open source and selfhosted btw. https://github.com/immich-app/immich
From what I understand, the correct time stamps are maintained in the EXIF data when you export from Google Photos, and you can use tools like exiv2 on Linux to set the file modification timestamp to match the EXIF one:
exiv2 -T rename image.jpg
You can easily encounter exactly the same problem e.g. if you are copying images between systems with an external USB drive and you are not careful about how it's done. E.g. Windows Explorer will change the date to "now" if you do a simple copy, to avoid this you need to use "robocopy" or do a move instead of a copy.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#26Just repeating my comment from a recent DSLR/film thread [1]:
I don't shoot film anymore since about 15 years, it's totally not worth the hassle. However, I did stick to this mindset of first trying to figure out whether it's worth it overall and only then taking a picture (except when shooting plants/insects for later determination etc, then different metrics come into play). It has a lot of advantages for me, mainly because I really despise what the OP also does (shooting pretty much everything, taking x rounds of the same scene then figuring out the best one). Instead I end up with a sort of pre-curated list and then go through it once to delete what wasn't a good shot or turned out to not evoke any emotion whatsoever when seeing it again. Sure, I might miss something somewhere, but that still hurts a lot less then the mind-numbing and time-wasting alternatives.
tldr; I can get a strong feeling of attachment, but it takes a really good picture or a certain subject, preferrably the combination, before that feeling kicks in. And then I do get back to look at them, because it's worth it.
I did in the past try to not do that and just keep a lot more pictures, but it just feels boring to look at them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#27I have not found any solution that even approaches Google Photos. That is: a reverse chronological feed with shared and private albums around events or interesting sets.
Google also identifies people and pets which is useful but not terribly reliable. Search works reasonably well which gives a forth avenue for accessing memories.
I do love the automatic retrospections which solves the problem of photos being stored and never looked at. That's the fifth avenue.
Finally, integration with maps gives you the ability to find photos from a given area. Even though it relies on simple meta data from the photo, this does not seem to be replicated well anywhere else.
Overall, I am very worried that Google removed the option to buy additional storage for legacy Workspace and don't know what to do when I inevitably fill up my current subscription.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#28At one point right after college I went berserk on my digital clutter (yup those identical photos and useless photos and mostly useless videos). 90GB (iirc) to 3.x GB (this I am sure). This was around a decade ago.
I never looked back.
Now I rarely take photos, videos are even rarer. I actually realised it doesn’t matter if I have too many of them. And even among those few captured media, I do regular cleanups. Those are so few now that cleanups take no time.
The trick is to do the clean up once and make sure you never have to do that kind of cleanup ever again. There’s no other way. Literally none.
No, I lied - there’s another way. You forget about it. Just keep clicking, keep hoarding, keep paying for storage. I mean this is fine as well on the lines of whatever floats one’s boats.
Hint: If I am looking at a great scenery, or a building, or a spectacle I look at it right then and there with just my eyes and nothing in front of it. What I mean is I do not let my phone look at it and then go back home and look at what my phone saw or not.
I know you didn’t ask for it. But you did mention philosophy ;-)
> cool tech solutions
tl;dr. There’s no hack to cure this. It’s all about discipline or preference and being okay with it, either way.
Own your digital clutter/garbage. Don’t let it own you.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#29> How do you go about managing your photos?
1. Saved all Photos in PC directories as follows: $HOME/Pictures/
2. Ensured '$HOME/Pictures' is regularly backed up to at-least one more disk.
3. Just use the File Manager (with Thumbnails) & Image Viewer to view the Photos.
> Does it feel like digital clutter?
No, not one bit.
> How do you approach memory making through photos?
Capture as many as possible, delete duplicates/similar. Retain good ones.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#30https://thedambook.com/ by Peter Krogh is not a bad read if you want to develop a workflow that works (available on archive.org to borrow)