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I've been trying to document my "local-first" approach to managing photos. I've made it a ways through but am not sure when I'll finish. Posting here since it i

I've been trying to document my "local-first" approach to managing photos. I've made it a ways through but am not sure when I'll finish. Posting here since it is relevant. A Pragmatic Photo Archiving Solution: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JzqT-DJFlS2e8ZC00HrsQITq_ukORcH9icXTGKeWQYU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JzqT-DJFlS2e8ZC00HrsQITq... It's the culmination of software I've written [1] + a workflow that's resulted from it [2, 3, 4, 5]. [1] Elodie - https://github.com/jmathai/elodie https://github.com/jmathai/elodie [2] Understanding my need for an automated photo workflow - https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-automated-photo-workflow-a2ff95b46f8f https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto... [3] Introducing Elodie; Your Personal EXIF-based Photo and Video Assistant - https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-automated-photo-workflow-a2ff95b46f8f https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto... [4] My Automated Photo Workflow using Google Photos and Elodie - https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google-photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724 https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin... [5] One Year of Using an Automated Photo Organization and Archiving Workflow - https://artplusmarketing.com/one-year-of-using-an-automated-photo-organization-and-archiving-workflow-89cf9ad7bddf https://artplusmarketing.com/one-year-of-using-an-automated-...

geolgau 7y ago
This looks great and feels a lot like beets [1] for music, only that they use a database. I'll try it when I have the time to re-organize ~20 years of photos. [1] http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/
emilburzo 7y ago
elodie looks amazing! I definitely need to try it out it was just the thing I was thinking of building recently as it was getting really tiring to manually organize photos one extra idea that I had: there's a cool project that would enable offline geocoding[1], which would help get rid of API limits while making the reverse geocode queries almost instant (the included dataset is pretty limited, but it's not hard to extend from an openstreetmap planet dump) [1] https://pypi.org/project/reverse_geocoder/ https://pypi.org/project/reverse_geocoder/
- jmathai 7y ago
  I had looked into local geocoding databases but did not want to add a database file in the git repository. reverse_geocoder looks really interesting though and I may have a look at adding that. For the time being, elodie does cache responses from the MapQuest API. And to reduce the number of API calls it does some approximation by seeing if an entry exists in the cache within 3 miles of the current photo --- if so, it uses that instead of looking up the location. [1] [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/75e65901a94e14e6fd1ff7ad7a6e0f1c42edccc4/elodie/localstorage.py#L147 https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/75e65901a94e14e6fd1ff...
neLrivVK 7y ago
Just read through your google doc, interesting! But what about additional family members, with their own cameras, and no interest in any clever workflow activities :) I'm currently using Google Photos as my main service, and it's working good enough for now: each family member has the Google Photos app which uploads pics automatically, to their own account. We all share our Google Photos with each other. This way I (as main curator) have access to everyone's pics, without anyone having to do anything. Google lets you store the original size pics, so that is great (not like iCloud that resizes all pics!). Google also adds face recognition, which is very practical, and also provides a good interface for everyone to view the pictures. Regarding safekeeping: I use the Google Drive interface to backup all my photos to my local linux storage (combination of rsync and https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse to mount Google Drive). This way I always have all original photos locally. Finally I backup everything offsite using BackBlaze. All this relies heavily on Google Photos, but I have my own local backup of all original files. So if I need to change service, it should just be a one-time effort to migrate.
- Moru 7y ago
  I'm using resilio sync on all phones to sync to a computer. All the family needs to do is start Sync and wait until it's done. Does not matter on what network they are on, it still syncs.
- diggernet 7y ago
  I cringe at the thought of what Google is using that face recognition for.
- emilburzo 7y ago
  > I use the Google Drive interface to backup all my photos to my local linux storage I thought this was killed recently[1] (this = google photos appearing in google drive) Does it still work for you? If yes, how? :) [1] https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/ https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-p...
  - 7y ago

geolgau 7y ago

This looks great and feels a lot like beets [1] for music, only that they use a database. I'll try it when I have the time to re-organize ~20 years of photos. [1] http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/

emilburzo 7y ago

elodie looks amazing! I definitely need to try it out it was just the thing I was thinking of building recently as it was getting really tiring to manually organize photos one extra idea that I had: there's a cool project that would enable offline geocoding[1], which would help get rid of API limits while making the reverse geocode queries almost instant (the included dataset is pretty limited, but it's not hard to extend from an openstreetmap planet dump) [1] https://pypi.org/project/reverse_geocoder/ https://pypi.org/project/reverse_geocoder/

jmathai 7y ago
I had looked into local geocoding databases but did not want to add a database file in the git repository. reverse_geocoder looks really interesting though and I may have a look at adding that. For the time being, elodie does cache responses from the MapQuest API. And to reduce the number of API calls it does some approximation by seeing if an entry exists in the cache within 3 miles of the current photo --- if so, it uses that instead of looking up the location. [1] [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/75e65901a94e14e6fd1ff7ad7a6e0f1c42edccc4/elodie/localstorage.py#L147 https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/75e65901a94e14e6fd1ff...

neLrivVK 7y ago

Just read through your google doc, interesting! But what about additional family members, with their own cameras, and no interest in any clever workflow activities :) I'm currently using Google Photos as my main service, and it's working good enough for now: each family member has the Google Photos app which uploads pics automatically, to their own account. We all share our Google Photos with each other. This way I (as main curator) have access to everyone's pics, without anyone having to do anything. Google lets you store the original size pics, so that is great (not like iCloud that resizes all pics!). Google also adds face recognition, which is very practical, and also provides a good interface for everyone to view the pictures. Regarding safekeeping: I use the Google Drive interface to backup all my photos to my local linux storage (combination of rsync and https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse to mount Google Drive). This way I always have all original photos locally. Finally I backup everything offsite using BackBlaze. All this relies heavily on Google Photos, but I have my own local backup of all original files. So if I need to change service, it should just be a one-time effort to migrate.

Moru 7y ago
I'm using resilio sync on all phones to sync to a computer. All the family needs to do is start Sync and wait until it's done. Does not matter on what network they are on, it still syncs.
diggernet 7y ago
I cringe at the thought of what Google is using that face recognition for.
emilburzo 7y ago
> I use the Google Drive interface to backup all my photos to my local linux storage I thought this was killed recently[1] (this = google photos appearing in google drive) Does it still work for you? If yes, how? :) [1] https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/ https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-p...
- 7y ago