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As a post semi professional photographer, I want to go on a divergent path here for a moment. As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To

As a post semi professional photographer, I want to go on a divergent path here for a moment. As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. Second, never ever ever use any cloud based back up unless you are just using it for a back up of your multiple hard drive backups. In essence, if she only be a back up of your back ups. And never a back up of your daily workflow. In my opinion, we are heading for a time of fiscal turmoil that will either make these cloud backups too expensive or obsolete.

davidy123 3y ago
I don't know who this mysterious person who would want to see my photos in 50 years is, but I keep photos for myself. Storage is cheap enough that I really don't worry about paying for it, and I don't think that's going to change at my scale. The privacy and control issues are something to worry about, though.
leokennis 3y ago
> (...) ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now If you have any guiding principles based on which to answer this question, I'd love to know them. There is one photo in existence of my great-grandfather. That makes it the most interesting photo of him by default. There are hundreds of photos of my son. Which one(s) should be preserved so my great-grandchildren in 2123 can still see them?
- Podgajski 3y ago
  Several people, for example, have 5 to 20 photos of their son or family at the same outing. It’s those redundant photograph I’m talking about mostly. I would say, keep the photos with the most context, look in the backgrounds of photos for items, and things that are interesting, not just the main subject. A photo of a person standing in a field would be much different than a person in a photo sitting inside of a house That they own. And you are right, I think the rarity of the photos is what makes them more beautiful, more valuable.
robviren 3y ago
I find this incredibly hard to do. Mainly because what I have found interesting in my parents collection of media probably would have been thrown out. I found one of the more interesting videos to be of my grandfather just recording a random dinner with my parents mid week. He was an avid tech fan and always needed the newest equipment. To test this one out he setup a tripod and just recorded. They chatted about the weather, family, news and they made several jokes, told stories about family, and it was just this fly on the wall moment for me watching a taste of what that relationship was like. This little slice of life moment really stuck with me and I made it a point to take similar recordings on my own. Weddings are great, but they are a performance. It is an abstraction from who people are. I enjoy a more candid style which I feel like gets tossed a lot more these days in pursuit of what we consider perfection. Storage is cheap so I keep almost everything.
- Podgajski 3y ago
  What your parents kept in the past was related to how difficulty it was to take in store the media. The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. Surely not every moment in your life can be as significant as that moment that your family was around the table talking about the news and the weather. The best photo presentations I did for clients was when there were fewer photographs presented, not more.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. I don't think this is true. Otherwise we wouldn't treasure photos of our great grandparents, or even of ourselves when we were babies.
    - etrautmann 3y ago
      the relationship between you and the photo will change if you took it, a friend/family member took it but you were there, or an ancestor took it. I disagree with the parent that there's one purpose for photos, but I agree with them that less can be more. Curating your photos improves signal-to-noise and makes them more likely to have an emotional impact on you, family, or someone discovering them after you've passed.
chii 3y ago
> go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. This is how you lose historical records, because the critical eye of the day is going to be very different in 50 years. have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM , which is a video of the British Library's archive. They collect published material, no matter how mundane it might seem to be, because only someone from the future looking back can tell whether it was worth preserving. Digital data is trivial to preserve compared to physical materials! Don't delete the digital photos!
- Podgajski 3y ago
  I don’t believe we could ever capture enough photographic and visual data to perfectly re-create the past. So where do you personally stop? That’s the question I was asking. It’s sort of a future fear of missing out your suffering from.
  - wantoncl 3y ago
    To offer a counterpoint: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosynth_can_connect_the_world_s_images https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn... Around the 3:30 mark, while discussing Notre Dame Cathedral, consider how useful all those photos (and however many taken since) would be in its post-fire reconstruction. Would anyone present at that demo in 2007 think there were too many photos, especially if they knew it would burn down?
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  When I read that I just thought I should just delete everything then.
  - Podgajski 3y ago
    Ha! I’m curious, why is that? I’m curious because in the mid 90s, I burned all my black-and-white film negatives in a rage of creativity. I felt like all my old work was dead and I was just relying on that and not creating anything new. I look back at that moment with both her and liberation so it’s hard to say whether it was good or bad.
ddmf 3y ago
For the first part I can't do this at the time, but I find that going back over my old photos a few months or even a year later I can easily delete the similar photos and find the most pleasing version. As for the second, I've become lazy - going to investigate syncthing.
midasz 3y ago
I'm selfhosting Immich (Google photos clone) on my NAS which has a 70TB's+ of storage. Every night a backup to Glacier runs (which is pennies to store, expensive to retrieve). Every so often I hook up an external hdd and just copy the backup over. I've had some pretty severe data loss a few years back where I had photos on a cloud service that shut down and I was too careless to properly back them up. Once I got kids I stepped it up a notch and vowed to never let that happen again (the Glacier backup is for when my house burns down or something). Still need to write some proper instructions for my family to retrieve the data if I am unable but they're basically files on a hdd. As for curating them, I'll leave that to the next person. I think I'd have loved to comb through pics my parents took of us. I do select pictures that are super great and add them to an album. Throwing away isn't worth the effort imo.
- etrautmann 3y ago
  I've been meaning to set this up. which NAS do you use, and do you like it? how do you sync it with local copies for editing? I shoot 10k raw photos a year and editing with remote storage is too slow, but it gets unwieldy locally.
  - radlad 3y ago
    Not OP but I use an NVME enclosure with a 4 TB drive in it for my main staging area (I have about 100,000 photos from 4 years on it right now.) This offers fast storage for editing. I highly recommend against the Samsung T7 as it would get hot and throttle way too easily. I try to rsync the drive to my homebuilt NAS any time I add photos. At this point I feel comfortable formatting SD cards. The NAS is set to backup to Backblaze using restic every night at 3am. I'd like to add one more backup into the mix, but cloud storage is expensive.
    - etrautmann 3y ago
      Thanks, that's helpful. I've had a number of NVME enclosures and have thermal issues with most of them. As a one-off hack, it can be helpful to lightly spray with rubbing alcohol if you need to cool one off during a large transfer.
globular-toast 3y ago
> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. This is so true. It doesn't even need to be with a super critical eye. People take multiple shots of the same subject then keep all of them. IMO if you are keeping all of them then none of them are special so delete them all. If you insist it is special but can't pick then just pick one at random and be done with it. People are such hoarders when it comes to pictures and it means they never, ever look through them because there are far too many.
lxgr 3y ago
> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. Photography is a hobby for many people. I don’t think you get to prescribe people how to spend their time (curation takes a lot of it!) and/or money on their own enjoyment as long as it doesn’t harm others. I have two close friends, both of them quite into amateur photography. One takes about 10 times as many photos as the other and never deletes any of them, the other is quite selective in what they shoot and even more selective in what they keep; their camera roll is their curated gallery. They sometimes have a very hard time empathizing with the other’s approach, but both seem pretty happy with their choices :)
- Podgajski 3y ago
  I was not offering Commandments, just advice.
theshrike79 3y ago
> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. Johnny Harris has a good video about this: https://youtu.be/GLy4VKeYxD4 https://youtu.be/GLy4VKeYxD4 Basically it's just going through your old photos every now and then and deleting everything you deem not worthy ("doesn't spark joy"). The one innovation is that your definition of "worthy" will change as time progresses, some photo might be essential to you now, but in a few years you'll go "meh" and delete it.
hengheng 3y ago
I'm a similarly semi professional photographer, and I have to agree. Most photos are stored for decades just to never be looked at again. Sure it might be interesting to retrieve a picture of that random piece of furniture or that car one future day, but seriously how many photos of their dog will people retrieve from storage? I'm taking pictures everywhere. At the supermarket, on the road, in the kitchen, it's more than words. All these photos are super ephemeral, they will literally expire within 30 minutes. I think it is actually correct to store low resolution copies only, as they are just enough to trigger my own memory. I would gain nothing from a RAW copy of that photo. I would lose nothing from deleting them from the archive, but it's a hassle. My non-professional photo library is at around 50 GByte, excluding astrophotography projects and photogrammetry runs. It's a really handy size for backups, and it indexes quickly with whatever service. I'm using Google Photos as a dumping ground, but PhotoPrism also indexes quickly. I'll also note that geotags and a correct clock matter much more for archiving than high dynamic range and raw file formats. "Real cameras" suck for easy archiving. I want to zoom into a map of places I've been, and GPS is way too flimsy to be reliable on my Canon gear.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
I have too many pictures to sort through now. I've tried multiple times; I don't have enough time to go through them all. The only way I can find anything is by Google Photos' AI labeling and search, or timestamps.
strunz 3y ago
I deleted so much stuff from my old PCs due to disk space constraints at the time, and I wish so badly I had just bought another disk. It would be so great to still have some of that stuff, of not purely for historical record. You don't know what you'll miss 10 years from now.
dangus 3y ago
> Second, never ever ever use any cloud based back up unless you are just using it for a back up of your multiple hard drive backups. Sorry, no, this is signing me up for too much work, never mind all my non-technical family members. The whole point of cloud photo services is to eliminate the technical challenge of file management.

davidy123 3y ago

I don't know who this mysterious person who would want to see my photos in 50 years is, but I keep photos for myself. Storage is cheap enough that I really don't worry about paying for it, and I don't think that's going to change at my scale. The privacy and control issues are something to worry about, though.

leokennis 3y ago

> (...) ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now If you have any guiding principles based on which to answer this question, I'd love to know them. There is one photo in existence of my great-grandfather. That makes it the most interesting photo of him by default. There are hundreds of photos of my son. Which one(s) should be preserved so my great-grandchildren in 2123 can still see them?

Podgajski 3y ago
Several people, for example, have 5 to 20 photos of their son or family at the same outing. It’s those redundant photograph I’m talking about mostly. I would say, keep the photos with the most context, look in the backgrounds of photos for items, and things that are interesting, not just the main subject. A photo of a person standing in a field would be much different than a person in a photo sitting inside of a house That they own. And you are right, I think the rarity of the photos is what makes them more beautiful, more valuable.

robviren 3y ago

I find this incredibly hard to do. Mainly because what I have found interesting in my parents collection of media probably would have been thrown out. I found one of the more interesting videos to be of my grandfather just recording a random dinner with my parents mid week. He was an avid tech fan and always needed the newest equipment. To test this one out he setup a tripod and just recorded. They chatted about the weather, family, news and they made several jokes, told stories about family, and it was just this fly on the wall moment for me watching a taste of what that relationship was like. This little slice of life moment really stuck with me and I made it a point to take similar recordings on my own. Weddings are great, but they are a performance. It is an abstraction from who people are. I enjoy a more candid style which I feel like gets tossed a lot more these days in pursuit of what we consider perfection. Storage is cheap so I keep almost everything.

Podgajski 3y ago
What your parents kept in the past was related to how difficulty it was to take in store the media. The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. Surely not every moment in your life can be as significant as that moment that your family was around the table talking about the news and the weather. The best photo presentations I did for clients was when there were fewer photographs presented, not more.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory. I don't think this is true. Otherwise we wouldn't treasure photos of our great grandparents, or even of ourselves when we were babies.
  - etrautmann 3y ago
    the relationship between you and the photo will change if you took it, a friend/family member took it but you were there, or an ancestor took it. I disagree with the parent that there's one purpose for photos, but I agree with them that less can be more. Curating your photos improves signal-to-noise and makes them more likely to have an emotional impact on you, family, or someone discovering them after you've passed.

chii 3y ago

> go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. This is how you lose historical records, because the critical eye of the day is going to be very different in 50 years. have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM , which is a video of the British Library's archive. They collect published material, no matter how mundane it might seem to be, because only someone from the future looking back can tell whether it was worth preserving. Digital data is trivial to preserve compared to physical materials! Don't delete the digital photos!

Podgajski 3y ago
I don’t believe we could ever capture enough photographic and visual data to perfectly re-create the past. So where do you personally stop? That’s the question I was asking. It’s sort of a future fear of missing out your suffering from.
- wantoncl 3y ago
  To offer a counterpoint: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosynth_can_connect_the_world_s_images https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn... Around the 3:30 mark, while discussing Notre Dame Cathedral, consider how useful all those photos (and however many taken since) would be in its post-fire reconstruction. Would anyone present at that demo in 2007 think there were too many photos, especially if they knew it would burn down?
davidmurdoch 3y ago
When I read that I just thought I should just delete everything then.
- Podgajski 3y ago
  Ha! I’m curious, why is that? I’m curious because in the mid 90s, I burned all my black-and-white film negatives in a rage of creativity. I felt like all my old work was dead and I was just relying on that and not creating anything new. I look back at that moment with both her and liberation so it’s hard to say whether it was good or bad.

ddmf 3y ago

For the first part I can't do this at the time, but I find that going back over my old photos a few months or even a year later I can easily delete the similar photos and find the most pleasing version. As for the second, I've become lazy - going to investigate syncthing.

midasz 3y ago

I'm selfhosting Immich (Google photos clone) on my NAS which has a 70TB's+ of storage. Every night a backup to Glacier runs (which is pennies to store, expensive to retrieve). Every so often I hook up an external hdd and just copy the backup over. I've had some pretty severe data loss a few years back where I had photos on a cloud service that shut down and I was too careless to properly back them up. Once I got kids I stepped it up a notch and vowed to never let that happen again (the Glacier backup is for when my house burns down or something). Still need to write some proper instructions for my family to retrieve the data if I am unable but they're basically files on a hdd. As for curating them, I'll leave that to the next person. I think I'd have loved to comb through pics my parents took of us. I do select pictures that are super great and add them to an album. Throwing away isn't worth the effort imo.

etrautmann 3y ago
I've been meaning to set this up. which NAS do you use, and do you like it? how do you sync it with local copies for editing? I shoot 10k raw photos a year and editing with remote storage is too slow, but it gets unwieldy locally.
- radlad 3y ago
  Not OP but I use an NVME enclosure with a 4 TB drive in it for my main staging area (I have about 100,000 photos from 4 years on it right now.) This offers fast storage for editing. I highly recommend against the Samsung T7 as it would get hot and throttle way too easily. I try to rsync the drive to my homebuilt NAS any time I add photos. At this point I feel comfortable formatting SD cards. The NAS is set to backup to Backblaze using restic every night at 3am. I'd like to add one more backup into the mix, but cloud storage is expensive.
  - etrautmann 3y ago
    Thanks, that's helpful. I've had a number of NVME enclosures and have thermal issues with most of them. As a one-off hack, it can be helpful to lightly spray with rubbing alcohol if you need to cool one off during a large transfer.

globular-toast 3y ago

> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. This is so true. It doesn't even need to be with a super critical eye. People take multiple shots of the same subject then keep all of them. IMO if you are keeping all of them then none of them are special so delete them all. If you insist it is special but can't pick then just pick one at random and be done with it. People are such hoarders when it comes to pictures and it means they never, ever look through them because there are far too many.

lxgr 3y ago

> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. Photography is a hobby for many people. I don’t think you get to prescribe people how to spend their time (curation takes a lot of it!) and/or money on their own enjoyment as long as it doesn’t harm others. I have two close friends, both of them quite into amateur photography. One takes about 10 times as many photos as the other and never deletes any of them, the other is quite selective in what they shoot and even more selective in what they keep; their camera roll is their curated gallery. They sometimes have a very hard time empathizing with the other’s approach, but both seem pretty happy with their choices :)

Podgajski 3y ago
I was not offering Commandments, just advice.

theshrike79 3y ago

> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. Johnny Harris has a good video about this: https://youtu.be/GLy4VKeYxD4 https://youtu.be/GLy4VKeYxD4 Basically it's just going through your old photos every now and then and deleting everything you deem not worthy ("doesn't spark joy"). The one innovation is that your definition of "worthy" will change as time progresses, some photo might be essential to you now, but in a few years you'll go "meh" and delete it.

hengheng 3y ago

I'm a similarly semi professional photographer, and I have to agree. Most photos are stored for decades just to never be looked at again. Sure it might be interesting to retrieve a picture of that random piece of furniture or that car one future day, but seriously how many photos of their dog will people retrieve from storage? I'm taking pictures everywhere. At the supermarket, on the road, in the kitchen, it's more than words. All these photos are super ephemeral, they will literally expire within 30 minutes. I think it is actually correct to store low resolution copies only, as they are just enough to trigger my own memory. I would gain nothing from a RAW copy of that photo. I would lose nothing from deleting them from the archive, but it's a hassle. My non-professional photo library is at around 50 GByte, excluding astrophotography projects and photogrammetry runs. It's a really handy size for backups, and it indexes quickly with whatever service. I'm using Google Photos as a dumping ground, but PhotoPrism also indexes quickly. I'll also note that geotags and a correct clock matter much more for archiving than high dynamic range and raw file formats. "Real cameras" suck for easy archiving. I want to zoom into a map of places I've been, and GPS is way too flimsy to be reliable on my Canon gear.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

I have too many pictures to sort through now. I've tried multiple times; I don't have enough time to go through them all. The only way I can find anything is by Google Photos' AI labeling and search, or timestamps.

strunz 3y ago

I deleted so much stuff from my old PCs due to disk space constraints at the time, and I wish so badly I had just bought another disk. It would be so great to still have some of that stuff, of not purely for historical record. You don't know what you'll miss 10 years from now.

dangus 3y ago

> Second, never ever ever use any cloud based back up unless you are just using it for a back up of your multiple hard drive backups. Sorry, no, this is signing me up for too much work, never mind all my non-technical family members. The whole point of cloud photo services is to eliminate the technical challenge of file management.