Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

I use DigiKam to do face tagging. A photo of people without names is effectively useless to anyone else. Recently, I've recently started discussions about what photos my family want to keep after I'm gone. I don't want to leave them with a ton of things they won't care about, and don't want to make them feel guilty when deleting them.

I used to keep everything, but I've started clearing out the lesser quality images.

My workflow is to import all photos onto the computer into an Import folder, sorted by day for the SLR and month for the phone (using the SLR creates higher volume but only for some days). I use Photosync to move from phone to PC as it only moves new photos and sorts into folders. Apple cloud wants to put everything in one folder, which is awful.

After that personal photos & memories go into one parent folder divided by year/month/ or year/occasion and all the random photos, photos of notes, similar photos where somebody blinked, etc... are removed at this stage. This leaves me with a lower number of meaningful photos to be able to look back on (or be surfaced by the On This Day feature of OneDrive).

Non-personal photos, e.g. nature, graffiti, whatever go into a different folder with theme based sub-folders. This can mean that if I go on holiday somewhere I have photos of the family in a different place to photos of cool things that I saw but that's what I'm after. Non-personal photos are the one most likely to have future editing & posting on photo sites or used as a background.

Previously used iPhoto on a MBP, but even on the latest hardware it seems far slower than Shotwell. So I no longer bother.

I then tag those with date/event and compress the folders with 7-Zip. Those archives are then duplicated across 2 different local drives and 1 remote drive. I don't really tag the contents or store other metadata apart from the event name, if one exists.

For videos about software development or YouTube/Twitch streams, I render them with Kdenlive and put them on my PeerTube instance as acceptable quality backups. I actually needed those once because the OBS audio setup was messed up and YouTube only included my voice in some videos, not the computer/other audio track.

In short, do the simplest thing that meets your needs, but ideally also have backups. Drives occasionally fail, data loss is unpleasant.