[bdz]

I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site.

I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.

[cantor_S_drug]

You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.

[npteljes]

I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.

The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.

[tmountain]

I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album. Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with friends/family.

[ifdefdebug]

I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+ years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once during my lifetime :)

[kristofferR]

I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.

As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.

[kccqzy]

Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took. Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is enough for me.

[ge96]

I compulsively take pictures of the sky, same never to be looked at

[anticodon]

I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.

[johnisgood]

Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories vs. Snapchat memories?

Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have text on it, so probably need OCR.

> You are a digital hoarder.

Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too, i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space for me.

[nsonha]

> do we ever?

We have AI to sort them so it will payoff, or already does.

[blarg1]

I started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.

[ajsnigrutin]

Or because someone else made them take them off. Or because they were deemed 'too dangerous'. Or worse.

Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.

[underlipton]

There was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a different title. I can't even remember how it went.

[doublerabbit]

Some of the old YTPs were fantastic. They don't exist now.

Generations of talent & creativity just gone.

[chrsw]

Anything you see on the Internet can be gone in a moment. If something is important to you, you must save it to guarantee you want to see it again.

[underlipton]

The problem then becomes organizing and resurfacing content, especially when it'll likely be outside the context you originally found it.

[lyfy]

Wasn't expecting to see a fellow sumo hoarder on HN...there's dozens of us, dozens!

[mynameisash]

I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.

[bdz]

Archive.org has it at least, everything from 2009 until 2023. But that's also need to be mirrored because can be taken down https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-archive...

[trallnag]

Do you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I start to journal, track, or just document something, after some time I notice again and again that most of the value has already been created the moment I finish working on a specific entry. Even with something seemingly very important like medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are recordings of memories involving people close to you

[f_devd]

I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.

[bdz]

I actually do! I have a perpetual VLC playlist which plays those videos randomly if I need some background noise.

[dylan604]

I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all

[rob]

I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.

[halapro]

With more content than we need being produced regularly, do you really need to store everything you've ever watched?

I used to be an MP3 and movie hoarder, then somehow I realized it was not worth my time.

Now I only hoard my photos and I keep them all on my phone (slash cloud) for me to actually scroll through regularly.

[moralestapia]

Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever.

I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.

Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.

So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.

And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...

[FergusArgyll]

I have a script that calls out to a small llm

  artist = llm_call("return the name of the artist based on this title", title)

etc. with some stripping of newlines etc. It works well! they can often infer the correct answer even if it's not present in the title

[dylan604]

I doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.

[anamexis]

> And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...

Isn’t that the YouTube Music app?

[niutech]

Can you upload some most interesting deleted YT videos to Web Archive or even Dailymotion, so that they are preserved for the next generation?

[politelemon]

What is your storage setup, do you have lots of hard drives, or does this go online somewhere?

[hexagonwin]

how do you manage the archive? I mean the file hierarchy structures etc. i started archiving youtube videos recently, now saving descriptions and other metadatas too, but simply having them all in one directory doesn't seem to be a good idea.

[nicman23]

do you have a cron job or something? i know it is probably trivial but eh

[ivanjermakov]

Popular self-hosted solution: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

[bdz]

No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly

[fi-le]

What percentage, in numbers?