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How I Almost Lost Every Family Photo I Have
- mavhc 13y agoIs there a script/application to sync a hierarchical folder of 100,000 photos to Flickr, now it has so much storage? One set per subfolder. I found a few Windows apps, but they mostly baulked at that many files.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sameer_sundresh 13y agoI can't help you with Flickr, but the tools the author mentions in the article (Dropbox for backup file storage and Everpix for auto-organization/exploration/mobile access/selective sharing) can handle 100,000 photos, no problem. Personal bias: I pay for Dropbox and work at Everpix.
- ams6110 13y agoA case study in first-world "problems"
- VLM 13y agoAs a first worlder myself, I'd say its a weird prioritization any goof could have, not limited to 1st world: "horrifying realization that I had failed as a parent" Hmm I worked with a guy who's teen son died. When I was a kid, I worked with a girl who had a couple kids as a teen and was actively pursuing a career in welfare motherhood. I've known a couple drug addicts, alkies, burnouts. Yeah I can see how some parents feel they failed. Some probably did, some probably didn't but feel that way anyway, sometimes. "lost some photos" doesn't quite make the cut, 1st world, 2nd world, or 3rd world. The 3rd world version would be something like a dad in a shanty town is freaking out because he lost his favorite polaroid, meanwhile, his neighbors son was just beheaded by the local drug gang, now thats a real problem. Priorities, priorities...
- derekp7 13y agoI've never taken a formal debate class, but I think what you are arguing falls under the Fallacy of Relative Privation. Can someone more skilled than me in logical fallacies verify this?
- VLM 13y agoThat would be a correct analysis IF I used the comparison in something totally unrelated to parenting, like my preference of JVM virtual machine memory management options. He failed as a parent when he lost a horde of 16 bazillion pictures, because an even worse scenario is he allocated 1 gig each to multiple separate JVM instances on a 1 gig image (guess what I just fixed...) You might be able to get me on some zenos paradox / continuum fallacy basis but thats going to take some serious sophistry. Or maybe get me on a false dilemma strategy where having a dead kid and a drug addicted kid are hardly mutually exclusive although anecdotally they were two distinct kids. But I don't think the relative privation strategy is going to work well.
- mikeash 13y agoWhat, do you think people in third-world countries don't care about family photos?
- ArtDev 13y agoWrong. Obviously you have never traveled. People in third-world countries that are lucky to have a few photos will keep them as their most prized possessions. When you do ever travel and take photos, make sure to share the photos with the people you photographed. Have extra prints make and mail them when you return from your trip.
- mistermcgruff 13y agoHad a similar experience with iphoto. Now I dump straight to a folder, scp to my raided synology NAS, and make another copy on a usb drive that I store at work.
- PaulHoule 13y agoCatastrophies like this probably will happen to most people. For a long time I've used Flickr as an archive for my better photos, but I may be moving that to something else because the new Flickr interface is intolerably slow to use. I was working on a presentation last week and I wanted to use my own pictures, but the time in the time I'd spend waiting for Flickr to load to put one image in my presentation I could find and insert five images from Bing or Google Image Search.
- RexRollman 13y agoI just want to pipe up and say I agree with you about the new Flickr interface. I find it intolerable.
- gaius 13y agoMy offsite backup is to Amazon Glacier via Arq. Slow, but cheap, and insha'Allah reliable.
- RexRollman 13y agoWhat tool are you using to back up?
- gaius 13y agoArq http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
- RexRollman 13y agoThank you. I did not realize that Arc was the name of the actual program. Stupid me.
- StavrosK 13y agoI'm currently (both as in "these days" and "right now") trying to add file-level encryption to rdiff-backup. Hopefully, this will make backups as easy as rdiff-backup already is, while still providing strong security, and the advantage over duplicity is that you don't need to create full backups of your set from time to time (encryption is file-level so it should only upload the changed files).
- zacinbusiness 13y agoYou're an asshole if you think that "just losing some photos" isn't a big deal. Minimizing or person's trouble by giving a hypothetical example is not only mean spirited, it's also stupid. For instance, the OP could have lost his family in a fire but at the same time someone else in the world could have that while also being tortured. Dumbasses Beyond that, our photographs help to serve as a link to out memories, and to many people they are just as important as the memoirists themselves. Even more important later in life when our memories are failing and when we have lost those that are important to us. So while you're bitching about first world problems, consider yourself lucky that your biggest problem today is that someone else suffered a near misfortune and that you are lucky enough to bitch about it from the comfort of your air conditioned home. You ignorant, useless fucks.
- redacted 13y agoCompletely agree. I think the negativity on HN stories is this site's manifestation of karma whoring. A family thought they lost a lifetime's worth of photos and cherished memories? Easy to make a snarky comment about first world problems and watch that number increase. pg: if you read comments like that, do you ever regret not giving downvote access earlier? I feel that having top-rated comments be so unremittingly negative (and frankly dickish) hurts HNs image.
- zacinbusiness 13y agoI do dislike the community system on HN. It rewards inflammatory posts and trolling rather than reasonable and rational discussion. And for that matter, it rewards sensationalistic posts. I think the main issue is that HN is a really high profile community, and with that you get stupid people like these "1st world haters."
- mikeash 13y agoIt's especially asinine because it implies that third-worlders don't care about family photos. What, you think that just because their standard of living is lower, they don't feel the attraction of visual media of their loved ones? I get the impression that a lot of people who comment on this site don't comprehend how anyone who isn't a relatively wealthy programmer actually lives. Anyone who doesn't make at least $60,000/year is engaged in a daily struggle to survive and can't possibly have time to care about things like photos of their mother, apparently.
- gmac 13y agoNow Flickr offer a free terabyte of storage, offsite backup for photos is free. I wrote this script to upload my iPhoto pics: https://github.com/jawj/iphoto-flickr https://github.com/jawj/iphoto-flickr
- avalaunch 13y agoThis is an awesome script. I just used it to upload 3600 photos/videos. I might suggest utilizing the async options to speed up the upload process. Also I noticed one issue regarding photos taken by non Apple camera apps - opening an issue on github now.
- kalleboo 13y agoI have a mix of Backblaze online backup, Time Machine local backup, Flickr for a selection of non-private photos, and Dropbox for documents/financial stuff. Before I started doing backups, I was really lucky that every time I got burned it was by having a decently new (<2 months) old drive blow up, and I had most of my data on the old drive.
- ArtDev 13y agoHaving an extra drive offsite is a great idea. The terms of service for Everpix are shady.. "By displaying or posting any Content on or through the Everpix Services, you hereby grant to 33cube a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content in or through the Everpix Services to you and to those other users with whom you choose to share such Content."
- nekopa 13y agoI don't think that is shady. Just means they don't have to pay him to show him (or his friends) the pictures on the service.
- sameer_sundresh 13y agoThat's correct. It's legalese for an almost tautological statement: "we are allowed to do what you tell us to do with your photos." We take privacy seriously.
- ArtDev 13y agoIt effectively gives them the right to use your photos however they please.
- sameer_sundresh 13y agoNo, that's not true. It only gives us the rights to (a) display your photos to you and those with whom you share them, (b) auto-organize your photos for you, and (c) delete photos stored on our serivce (when you click delete photo or delete source or delete your account). We can't (and don't want to) use your photos commercially, browse through your photos, distribute them to people you haven't authorized to see them, turn them into ads, etc. And we've never had any sort of government request to access an account.
- wslh 13y agoI use two exact equal external USB HDs to backup all my photos (twice) since the 2.0 megapixel era. The main issue now is how to organize photos from multiple devices I do it semimanually.
- zacinbusiness 13y agohave you thought about using a simple web server and making a basic web interface? might be a bit nerdy but would be a fun weekend project :-)
- Aardwolf 13y agoMy archive of photos has always been files in directories. Nothing "mysterious" can go wrong with those... Copy as many times as you like to whatever medium you like, and not dependent on any particular software.
- xpda 13y agoMine too. I'm still unclear on how OP lost the photos in the first place.
- prawn 13y agoiPhoto has some sort of archive/database file that can get corrupted, I think.
- RexRollman 13y agoAgreed. I keep all of photos in a directory and I use a program called Jhead to rename the files based on jpeg metadata. Example: 20130101_12-13-34.jpg (YearMonthDay_Hours-Minutes-Seconds) I chose this scheme because it works on all the OSes I use and, having no spaces, tab-completes nice with Bash.
- StavrosK 13y agoI'm unclear on a point: If you have a Time Machine backup, and it used to work at some point, why can't you restore that from Time Machine? I saw you say that that database was empty, but if you just go back a few days (to a point when you know it worked), then it will work. Time Machine backs the entire drive up.
- bcl 13y agoHere's how I handle photo backups: http://www.brianlane.com/automatic-backup-of-files-to-s3-and-glacier.html http://www.brianlane.com/automatic-backup-of-files-to-s3-and...
- aaronbrethorst 13y agoI have probably a couple hundred gigabytes of photos on my iMac at home, which I manage with Lightroom. A couple months ago, my iMac died unexpectedly. I didn't panic, though, as I had an external drive constantly doing Time Machine backups, plus Backblaze syncing everything. It turned out the logic board was dead, so I just bought a new iMac, restored everything, and went about my business. No fuss, no muss, and absolutely no fretting.
- mrleinad 13y agoJust share everything on Facebook. No matter how much you want something to be deleted, once it's up there it's never coming down.
- eksith 13y agoWith all the solutions thrown about here from multiple SD drives, cloud storage and even a "simple web server and web interface" (while I agree that would be a fun project) to sync between them, I'm forced to wonder why old-school ways of backup aren't considered. How difficult and awkward would it be to have an external DVD/Blu-ray writer, a spindle of disks and a permanent marker? It's not like you're doing the backups in one go, after all. A disk every couple of weeks to a month for the average Joe isn't too much. This isn't a professional photographer after all.
- sameer_sundresh 13y agoFrom our research at Everpix, most photos taken today are on mobile phones, and most people very rarely connect their phones to their computers. So you really need a solution that starts on the mobile device, and cloud services work the best for that.
- eksith 13y agoI usually select and dump my photos/videos to a shared drive on my laptop over wifi, so cloud is still an ancillary feature for me. After all, what if I'm in an area with no reception? I can still use Bluetooth to transfer files. Edit: Here's what I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mori.androsamba https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mori.andro...
- sameer_sundresh 13y agoThanks, I'll have to try that out. So far, I haven't had great experiences accessing my Android devices from my Linux laptop. That said, your workflow isn't representative of most users, if only for the fact that most users don't really have a workflow per se, they just do whatever's easiest at the moment. People have photos all over the place (mobile devices, multiple computers/drives, social networks, email, etc.), and Everpix pulls them together into one unified collection.
- satyap 13y agoYep. My old phone used to plug in on USB, show up as a disk, I can use standard tools to copy the pics and vids. New phone, no of course not. Progress. Feh. Clue: Everyone is not itunes compliant! Grr!
- aaron695 13y agoBoogles my mind people find this photo collecting/hoarding behaviour normal. You only have one life, live it, don't waste it behind a camera trying to fake it. Even if OP's kid died the next week, as if there wouldn't have been hundred of other photos around. I think wasting a birthday on a triviality would be what really mattered then. Life is about experiences not collecting things.