Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

[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.

[kalleboo]

Everything 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...

[gerdemb]

Nice to hear from someone else with a huge iCloud Photo Library--we've got about 1.2 TB! After a lot of experimentation with Google Photos, Synology's photo APP, etc. we finally settled on going all in on the Apple ecosystem (we're an all-Apple family). The game-changer for us was when Apple finally supported shared photo libraries between users.

The ability to search the photo library has been steadily improving (in my experience, Google still has an edge over Apple in this area) and with the advent of new AI technology I only expect it to get better. Except for special occasions I don't even attempt to "organize" or "tag" my photos. It reminds me of how Google Search surpassed early 'library catalog' style indexes like Yahoo.

The biggest downside of iCloud is the lack of an API to access the data programmatically for backups etc. I've experimented with `icloudpd` and it worked OK, but I'm not sure about the long-term stability as it's basically just "screen scraping" iCloud.com to download the photos from the web which is not officially supported by Apple and is sensitive to any changes to the website as well as the (remote?) possibility of getting your account banned. The performance is also bad as it has to download all photos even the ones that are already stored locally.

There’s also `osxphotos` (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) which works by reverse engineering the undocumented sqlite database in the photos library that Apple uses for storing the photos metadata. This avoids the performance problems of accessing the library through iCloud.com like `icloudp` does and enables many more features like searching by faces, places, etc. and they have an export function with a ton of options to backup your library.

Finally, I have a side-project working on a simple set-it-and-forget Mac app for backing up your entire photo library (including iCloud Photos) to a local disk, network share, NAS, etc. Unlike the above options, it uses the official Apple PhotoKit library to access the photos and doesn’t require setting up a Python environment, running command-line tools, etc. If you’re interested check it out here: https://www.ibeni.net

[evansj]

Thanks for the pointer to icloudpd[1]! Looks very useful. Do you actually run it on your Synology?

I've enabled the "Download originals to this Mac..." option in Photos, which then gets backed up using Backblaze, but obviously that takes a ton of space on my Mac that I could be using for something else.

[1] https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd

[amerkhalid]

> I do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired

I used to take a lot of time organizing my photo library in Lightroom Classic. Now I have similar philosophy, just leave it. I am sure soon enough we will have AI that will organize photos decently, fix minor issues in photos, and delete dupes and really bad photos.

[jwr]

Somewhat 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.

[marssaxman]

It has been years since I was involved with this company, but at the time I worked there, Mylio was very much concerned with this problem:

https://mylio.com/

[sergimansilla]

Current Photos app can actually import these libraries. Click on “import” and select the aperture file. It should keep all the albums, metadata, etc.

[KolenCh]

https://cyme.io/avalanche-photo-conversion/

I haven't used it personally, but worth checking out. It supports Aperture in the past and worth checking if they still support, or if you can download an older version which supports it.

[poulpy123]

I 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

[deely3]

Heh, my solution exactly the same. 20 years of photos, and so far I pretty happy with this structure.

[julian55]

I do pretty much the same but I also use EXIF data to add place names to the folder name.

[benterix]

I'm doing almost the same except that I add a tag or two to the name of the folder.

[barrkel]

Photos 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.

[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

[tetris11]

We do this too. I have a very bad memory overall, mostly due to my willful desire to forget the past. As a result I reflect very seldom, and never really take time to smell the roses. I also just dump my photos into backups without thinking.

Since my gf and I have been doing our yearly photo albums, my outlook has greatly improved, and you get to summarise your entire year (albeit with some cherrypicking) - which in itself is a fantastic bonding exercise - as well as present it to visitors.

It's a testament to our love, to our shared past, and to our continuing future.

[Freak_NL]

I actually assembled a photo album using an online service to collect a few years worth of rather piquant¹ photos my wife and I made. I went all out with fancy options (faux leather cover with embossed title and high quality paper on museum cardboard stock). It made a great present for her.

The market for this service of online printing on-demand of photo albums is actually really mature at this point, with many options and many tiers of quality at surprisingly competitive prices.

We were already planning on getting albums printed for our child's first few years too, by collecting the digital originals ordered by year.

1: Putting it euphemistically.

[altacc]

I take photos with an SLR & phone so have built up quite a large collection of photos and quick early sorting & review is the key for good future usability of your photos.

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.

[ofrzeta]

Sometimes I wonder why people need to capture every supposedly special moment in a picture. Is it worse to "just" keep it in mind? There's propably some fear of losing or forgetting that moment in play.

We have thousands of photos of our children who were born when smartphones were prevalent. Opposed to my own childhood (early 70s) were only a dozen or so photos of me exist. Then I am beginning to calculate the time it takes for someone to watch the 10.000 or so photos that will be made of our kids until the are grown up. Are they supposed to go all through this mess of duplicates? And no one will ever have the time to go through all photos and bring order to it.

So yes, it feels like digital clutter but on the other hand it really does revive a lot of (mostly positive) emotions to go through a huge collection of family photos.

[JohnFen]

I don't take many photos, because the act of taking a picture removes me from being present for whatever it is I'm taking the picture of, and thus reduces my enjoyment of things.

But my wife takes a gazillion photos of everything. I organize them in a directory hierarchy by date, on my NAS. I also run a private wiki at home, and have pages of "special collections" of certain photos by subject matter/event/ whatever that link into the hierarchical directory collection.

[iamhamm]

I think that's an interesting point about being present. I actually love the act of taking photos, adjusting the colors and lighting to capture how it looked, and then I rarely look at them again. My wife thinks it's bizarre, but it's not the reflection on the past, but the act of photography I like. I've turned some into prints and have a digital picture frame to scroll them through, but sitting down to reflect and look through them rarely happens.

[syncbehind]

Unless, of course, you take pictures very mindfully vs. just taking snapshots. I think the ease of which we can take photos now makes it very easy to cheapen photography. But we can still bring ourselves to be very present and mindful when doing so.

But if you're out there and your intent isn't to take a picture (but you're doing so anyway), I agree that'd also take me out out of the moment and reduce enjoyment of things.

[korse]

"The act of taking a picture removes me from being present for whatever it is I'm taking the picture of, and thus reduces my enjoyment of things."

Yes.

[xdennis]

This 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.

[scottapotamas]

While I agree 100% on the change of shooting behaviour and film experience, I've had to spend a non-trivial amount of time and money recently trying to scan in a decade (1990-2000) of negatives (~10k?).

Because of the number of boxes sitting there, selectively scanning becomes harder than scanning it all and sorting digitally. No easy wins...

And while shooting digital over the last 20 years resulted in ~60k images, I can store that 2TB in the same volume as a single roll of prints, with the benefits of near-instant retrieval and offsite backups...

[t0bia_s]

Just use a 1 or 2 GB card in your digital camera if you want to think more during shooting process. It's less complicated and result is the same.

[nonameiguess]

Yes, I think it's digital clutter. I expect this is not a widespread behavior, but I haven't taken a photo in 15 years except when required to in order to make a home insurance claim and I snap the parking lot at the airport every time I travel in order to remember where I parked. I'm not going to forget my kids and, frankly, I think they deserve some level of autonomy and privacy not often granted to children. You have no idea how embarrassed they may be in the future and whether they really want those pictures to exist. But when I said this publicly to a friend who was constantly spamming naked photos of her twins to social media, she became no longer a friend, so I understand it's a sensitive subject.

You said yourself you never look at these. People storing multiple terabytes to a NAS and cloud backups likely don't have the time left in their remaining lifespan to ever look at everything they're storing. It's digital hoarding.

On the other hand, I don't think it's completely valueless to at least record a few special occasions. I appreciated a few Christmases back after my mom digitized all of the Betamax tapes from when I was a kid that she had taped my sister's birthday where one of my very first friends was present and singing along and playing with us, since that friend died when we were 12 and I haven't seen her in three decades. One video was enough, though. I don't need a number of photos I couldn't look through if I had until the heat death of the universe.

[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.

[hdarshane]

I think it definitely feels like clutter in some ways. I use Google Photos, and I practically back-up every picture I take, including screenshots. Indirectly, I find screenshots to be just as important to memory-making as pictures I capture.

Clutters up pretty quickly so I star pictures I like. If there is a special event/vacation, I tend to save all pictures in a folder and later upload that to cloud.

Definitely looking forward to using Apple's new Journal app on iOS 17 to journal special events and memories.

[rawgabbit]

I pay for Google Photos additional drive space. I back up favorite photos and videos to Apple iCloud.

The primary reason I use Google Photos is that I have android smart TVs. With android smart TVs, during the ambience screen saver mode... I can choose which Google Photo album to display. That is I use my smart TVs to display my photos. Unfortunately, they do not display the videos.

My parents also have a google nest hub. I also set that up to display the same google photos albums.

[jf93ap29sh]

I'll answer the technical & philosophical, technical to address your clutter question.

I have it setup to automatically backup from my phone to a NAS. Then the NAS backs up routinely to Backblaze. It's all automated, I don't even think about it. And it gives me great piece of mind, so it doesn't feel like clutter or a burden.

I routinely cleanup the photos from my phone, but even then, some photos I really like and I keep them on my phone. I try to keep at least a couple of photos from each 'memorable' moment I've captured, to look when I feel like it.

Keeping some photos on my phone helps when impromptu, in a conversation, you want to show something, e.g. Chatting with a barber recently, he asked about my summer and told him about a vacation I took, he was intrigued by some places I described, so he asked if I had some pics, I showed him the few I had on my phone from that.

Many photos I take, I won't keep on my phone because they go to the NAS and I clear them from my phone, but every once in a while, I open the folder in my NAS and it's cool to see and remember all those moments. That 'feel good' increases with time, so I expect the older I get, these will be more valuable. I don't do photos only, I also sometimes record a conversation with a loved one, just because I know one day they won't be there and I'd like to capture their voice.

Recently an aunt was telling me about a prank/revenge thing she did to an ex of her when she was a teenager, I was in tears laughing, and recorded that secretly. In a few years, when she's no longer with us, I'll be damn glad to have captured that and revisit that memory.

[winstonrc]

I have two places I store photos: a gallery[0] of curated photos on my personal website, and a larger stream of photos backed up to my NAS.

The photos on my NAS replicate what I capture with my phone. I actively delete photos of the mundane such as a random snap of food I cooked. I let the iOS photos app automatically create albums of people and places and display those as a widget on my home screen. I go through it every now and then to clean it up from bad photos that accidentally got uploaded. This collection has survived a transfer from Android to iOS since it is platform agnostic.

My gallery on my website is for hosting things I want to be shared and has a higher standard for what I select. I also don’t have social media, so when people ask where they can view photos of my trip, I point them to my website. Right now it has photos from vacation trips that were mostly shot on film. It’s more artistic in nature and features landscapes rather than humans. The idea is to capture the essence of the photo albums of the past that my older family members have. I can always go to my website and view photos from a trip. Shooting those photos on film makes the shots more deliberate and more limited in nature. I could always get them printed physically to place into a photo album, but I’m happy with storing them digitally for now to reduce clutter. The gallery feature itself is something I really enjoyed building.

I like the balance of viewing subjectively more interesting photos in my gallery but also being able to see the behind the scenes photos with my family in my digital collection. I’m waiting for a way in the future to more conveniently display my photos locally on a digital photo album such as a docked iPad.

[0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/gallery

[syncbehind]

I used to have a limit of 3-4 photos a day (or one photo per event that day). If I took more than that, I would go through and delete the others. That's changed a bit since I started WFH.

The concept for me was that the point of the photo was to remind me of the event/ memory, and one photo did that for me. If I had 10-20-30 photos from a day or an event, I found that I was not mindful of each individual photo and just glanced at them (ignoring details and remembering memories). With a limited photo option, I was forced into mindfulness more. The added benefit, of course, was that it resulted in a conservative use of my phone's storage.

As for backup, I have syncthing running on my phone. It copies my photos into my laptop which funnel it into a time-machine storage and I have it up on google - photos. I would like to add one more syncthing instance (preferably out of my home) for redundancy, but that's about it for now. Maybe I'll start burning them on optical media or SD-Cards, once I have kids.

[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!

[unforeseen9991]

I'll just address my philosophical approach - which is that of a scrapbook.

I don't manage my photos, which I take a fair deal of as i've been living more or less nomadically for 6 years now. I just organize them by year, as the filenames are datestamped.

If a particular photo is something I know will trigger a negative memory, for better or worse I put those in a folder called "lockbox" with no sorting - the idea being I know what i'm getting into when I look in there.

I very rarely review my photos, sometimes once a year when i'm coming up with my plans for the year.

This also matches my journaling - which I treat the same way. I've been journaling almost daily for 20+ years. It's a huge treat to go back to points in time and see what I was thinking and what was going on. I'm regularly surprised on how bad our memory is of what happened vs what we remember happening. I'll often visit it when i'm in a low spot / trapped in a rut.

[apricot13]

I've finally decided on a system that works for backups and devices that don't have image recognition as well as Google photos and iCloud!

I have two types of folder:

Folders for specific events or activities

And folders for common themes for the year.

The themed folders can change throughout the years which is interesting to see but I tend to have the same core few.

I found if I grouped too many things into YYYY-MM(-DD) format I couldn't find the photo of a night out from ten years ago because I didn't remember the month (or year!) But I did know that it was with uni friends or work friends which narrowed down the folders greatly! Ofc iCloud and Google photos make that much easier now but I prefer to have my primary backups managed by me!

YYYY-MM Christmas YYYY-MM Holiday to abc YYYY-MM-DD day out at the zoo YYYY-MM House YYYY-MM Food YYYY-MM Gaming YYYY-MM Travel - days out YYYY-MM [Name of town i live in] YYYY-MM PC and tech YYYY-MM Inlaws YYYY-MM Family YYYY-MM Guinea pigs

Etc

One of the interesting things I found was that I was taking photos of random things around the house, some flowers, or the light at a particular time of day was interesting. Previously I'd have tried to organise those by month or more granularly but I now have a 'house' (or flat) folder for each year which I really enjoy looking back through to see how the house has changed. It's also useful for before/after photos I forgot to take! I have one of these folders for other houses or locations I visit often or take photos of random objects in like my parents or in law's house! I also have one for my local area.

I also have a series of Outbox folders for memes, references etc. In more recent times I've started removing screenshots and images I've saved from places from my phone and albums since they're not useful in a photo album!

[KronisLV]

I typically take photos and videos on my phone. I periodically manually copy all of those to my computer: camera pictures, screenshots, downloads, WhatsApp or other app media and so on.

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.