I gave up on photos, I never looked at them and never felt the want to look at them. I only ever took photos because other people were wo I thought that's what I was supposed to do.
Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#32Somewhat less philosophically: there is a huge technological problem in keeping photo archives. We entrust our photos to companies like Apple and Google with the attention span of a fruit fly — nobody seems to give any thought to long-term archival. Solutions appear and disappear within several years.
Also, all current photo library solutions are deficient and built mostly for a single flashy keynote presentation, not for managing actual photo libraries. Sharing with your family has only recently started arriving at Apple, for example. There is no good and reliable way to manage and keep metadata with your photos (like extended descriptions), and it seems everybody at Apple believes that the EXIF date in an image is the actual date that the photo was taken (apparently nobody at Apple used older digital cameras, or scanned anything from paper/film).
I was severely bitten by this approach, because I entrusted my archives to Aperture, which Apple later discontinued. I am not left with a large library which I can't migrate anywhere: first, because there is nowhere to migrate it TO, and second, because I know of no other programs that can manage photo stacks: groupings of several related images (like the front and back of a scanned paper photo, or several versions of a scan). I still don't know what to do about this library. I'm thinking about writing my own exporter that will read the Aperture sqlite database and export the pictures with all the metadata.
I thought about writing my own long-term photo archival and sharing software and making it open-source, but when I realized which particular group of lowlives this will be very useful for, it gave me pause and I'm reconsidering. Perhaps I'll write something for my own use.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#33Photos as reminders of times past are a double edged sword. Sometimes it can be healthier to forget. Photos may not just be reminders of happier times, but reminders of things that can never be gotten back.
Social media and sharing isn't very positive either, I think. There's a tendency to try and represent a more idealized existence, and when other people do it too, you can end up with envy for a fiction. Not an original insight.
Brief, occasional reminders of past times can be nice. Google Photos' alerts about X years ago isn't bad, and can sometimes generate a smile, without risking getting stuck into a 30+ minute nostalgia session.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#34I think we can write a big article on this.it drills down to 2 option
1. Upload all your photos to personal cloud such as google/apple/dropbox 2. Self host a similar cloud service such as photoprism (https://www.photoprism.app/)
Both have pros and cons and depending on your technical skills you can opt for option 2 of self hosting.
Option 1 will cost but privacy and getting locked out of account by company is big problem.
I personally use option 2 and feature wise its similar to big companies. let me know if you need more details about option 2.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#35This sounds insane, but hear me out. If you take photos on film, it's less overwhelming. Film is expensive, so you can't spray and pray, you have to think about what's worthwhile to take a photo of. This also means you're more present in the moment.
The more manual the camera is, the more you have to think about what you want to shoot because it takes more skill, but it's also more rewarding when you take a great photo.
You end up with fewer pictures, but you value them more because you worked for them and they're not as disposable.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#36Everything goes in iCloud Photo Library so it's always available to me on my phone or computer. There's about 2 TB of photos. It gets backed up to my Synology NAS via icloudpd in docker, and then uploaded to Amazon Glacier (3-2-1 backup)
For photos of our kids, we have an iCloud shared album that is shared with family (grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends, etc) so that becomes the curation of all the photos of the kids. Not ideal since it's in lower resolution.
Every year for the kids birthdays I make a collage of their highlights of the past year and print it in A2 as birthday banner and these make for nice memories.
For memorable trips after the trip I go through and create an album and put it in an album. I like looking back at these when I'm feeling nostalgic or anxious about my place in life.
For stuff I like to refer to like hobby projects, stuff around the apartment (device setup/model numbers/wiring etc) etc I create albums and sort them in folders.
When I need to find a photo, if it's not in an album 80% of the time I find it through the geotagged world map feature. "that campsite that weekend was over here somewhere, oh there's that photo of the nice stream we bathed in". The other 20% is mostly through text search (Photos does OCR on all your photos) or date.
I do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired...
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#37I’ve been toying with the idea of creating physical coffee table books with accompanying digital / online version (think photo blog) to document both pictures and thoughts for a particular trips for example- I think it’s much better approach than old school albums.
All I need is a mini-press operation
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#38Use slidebox to sort phone photo's into relevant folders, then sync those directories to onedrive using android app
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#39I have found out that iPhone automatically organizes photos pretty well, given the location services enabled. So I leave the photos I took with my phone alone, and can find anything I want, when I need it. It also creates memories for me, which is pretty nice.
For the photos I took with my camera, I use Digikam with an external hard drive, since they're relatively big images. I put them to folders named YYYY-MM-DD-$EVENT_NAME, merging multi-day events into a single folder, using the date of last day.
Digikam has tons of features, and allows me to organize and browse photos the way I want. For RAW processing, I use Darktable, which is fantastic.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?
#40> Finally, any cool tech solutions are welcome.
The cool tech solution to talk about is the fact that we now have the computing power to do facial recognition over all of our cloud saved pictures, so we can just have a collection of all of the pictures you have of that person!