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The Best Photo Organizing App? I’m Still Looking

47 points by user_235711 12y ago

Spearchucker 12y ago
It's interesting to me that the author has photos on multiple devices. I sync mine to my PC, where they get placed in folders named yyyy.mm.dd - [location/event]. Since my kid was born I started adding folders named yyyy.mm, which contain the day-to-day photos for a month. Given that I've been doing this ever since I started amassing digital photos, and that the author doesn't, and that her NY Times post is on HN, I have to wonder what others do with their photos.
- rbritton 12y ago
  I'm a bit different in that a significant part of my income is from professional photography. Here's how I'm organized: Each year has a folder: YYYY. Inside that folder is an Aperture library per category (e.g., Weddings, Portraits, Personal, etc.) Inside each Aperture library there are projects for each grouping of photos (e.g., Valley of Fire). Every file has a unique name that includes the date photographed and the frame number. I do allow Aperture to keep the image files internally because it simplifies backups. Aperture does not support XMP sidecar files like Lightroom and others do, so the only benefit I feel I'm losing out on by not storing them separately is having a file structure that matches the library structure. The libraries themselves are OS X packages, so it is possible to extract the files relatively easily if I'm no longer able to open Aperture in the future. I also do not care to have most photos on multiple devices. I have the ability to remote into the computer with the photos from anywhere I have an internet connection, so I'm able to grab a file if needed. With multiple terabytes of photos it's impractical to make them universally available to all of my devices anyway.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  I don't really "amass" photos that much, but for what it's worth, I auto-rename all photos to yy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss first thing I do after deleting the ones I don't want to keep. From then on out it's pretty much just a tree of folders, with the ones that have a lot of photos in them having additional subfolders per year. So far I never even had use for using tags, and my main tool is still the delete key followed by enter :)
  - DanBC 12y ago
    How do you find all the photos of Bob?
    - Spearchucker 12y ago
      That's a great question and one I haven't solved for my scenario other than knowing who was with me when I did x at y. The idea is to tag photos in a database (photo location and name, plus tags). One of many things on my todo list.
    - java-man 12y ago
      Does anyone know of an open source (BSD/Apache) face detection/recognition algorithm? It would be relatively easy to plug it in into my Secure Digital Archive tool.
      - dunham 12y ago
        OpenCV does detection. I haven't found anything to do recognition, I suspect it's a much harder problem. It's not open source, but in the past I've used picassa to do recognition. You let it run, interact with it to resolve ambiguities, and then pull the face assignments/rectangles out of the .picasa.ini files that it drops next to your photos. (There was also a contacts.xml file somewhere that provided the mapping from a guid to name/email.)
      - rokhayakebe 12y ago
        Jason Calacanis interviewed this company (http://www.kairos.com/pricing http://www.kairos.com/pricing) last week. While not OS, you can implement their product and get 5000 free api calls per month which should take care of your personal library.
- bane 12y ago
  I mostly shoot photos when traveling. So I do year\year-month location Then under that yyyymmdd, then sorted by camera (I have multiple) and then location or subject and under that pictures of people I'm with (I like taking pictures of things more than people so my pictures of friends/family go in their own folder, while my wife likes pictures of people more) sorted by person or group of people. So for example 2010\2010-11 Paris\2010-11-27\Nikon\Louvre Is where all the pictures of the Louvre I took on that day are. If I need to find pictures of the Louvre, I just use Everything on the top level folder and search for "Louvre". It works well enough, and I just sort everything back at the hotel while I'm copying off of my camera onto my laptop. I'm not super strict about the specific locations, sometimes under "Nikon" will just be a pile of pictures. Depends on how motivated I am to sort. I'm usually really good about filtering out pictures of people from stuff though, and I post pictures of people to my G+ account so my friends and wife and can enjoy them, and I use my flickr for stuff. The best quality stuff I then publish through Getty. Maybe less than 1% gets professionally published, but I have almost 120,000 photos organized this way. I spend lots of time editing metadata in flickr and even more for the Getty material since they have very high quality control. I don't really make much money at it, but it's a hobby and I get to call myself a "professional photographer" in some settings.
  - jwr 12y ago
    How do you deal with multiple versions of a single photo? Ones with vsrious adjustments, or cropped in different ways?
    - PavlovsCat 12y ago
      I'm sure other applications can do that too, but Bibble (since bought by Corel and named Aftershot or something) allows for several sets of settings to exist as "versions" of a RAW file, so it doesn't actually create "physical files" (the cropped/edited etc. JPEG/PNG version, that is) until it's time for the batch to output them how and where you want them, which means you can always delete and recreate the output files at will.
    - bane 12y ago
      I don't. I just dump them all in the same pot and look at them. If I need to select some out for some purpose (making an album or something), I just make another folder inside there and copy out the ones I need for that purpose. The ones I publish, I go through, pick the best shots from the group and when I go through and edit the levels and crops and such I usually do a little pruning of that set along the way and the edited versions go in yet another folder deeper (so I have a non-destructive copy). It's useful for me to publish several variations (like different zoom levels or crops) so they buyers can buy one that fits their need the best.
java-man 12y ago
What do you guys think of one of my creations (still in development stage) - Secure Digital Archive: http://goryachev.com/products/archive http://goryachev.com/products/archive While not strictly a photo organizer app, it does have a photo gallery, timeline, and raw file format support.
- miahi 12y ago
  Trying it now. Opinions/bugs (not very well organized, sorry): - please allow multiple folder selection for volume source folder - the analysis phase is really slow and it looks CPU-bound on the ImageScaler.resize() method; try to find a faster resize library or at least allow user setting for scaling (smooth is quite slow) and multithread the resize - right now I have 7 idle CPU cores and you have a really slow application. This is bordering on unusable. I have ~2TB of jpg and raw photos, it would take at least half a month to resize them - and I didn't even ask for a thumbnail. - A snapshot cannot be stopped (there is no "stop" button/menu entry). - the persistent mode is called "Persistent" in one place and "Archival" in another - Not sure I understand the "persistent/archival" setting; I would expect that I can access the old/deleted files as long as they are in the repository files even if the source is deleted/unavailable. I now have a 2GB repository "backup" but I cannot access anything from it because I removed the volumes (the repository did not shrink). At least make it the default with a big warning if you disable it. - 64MB file chunk for the repository is quite small for something containing photos that cannot ever be deleted (a raw file can easily have 10 or 20MB); file access in folders with a lot of files is slow - please read EXIF data - it's way more important than Hex views; the metadata-extractor library[1] is stable and fast (I'm using it for my photo organizing application) - please rotate the thumbnails by EXIF data - corrupting/deleting a backup file doesn't give any warning (just that the backups don't work anymore and I cannot see the photos) - not providing a name for the volume in step 1 gives a warning when you want to leave step 2 (and not when you leave step 1) - raw image decoding is painfully slow; processing an 8MP Canon RAW takes 40 seconds; it estimates 6 hours for 480 photos. - try to buffer the DBInput/Output as RAF can be quite slow; check MappedByteBuffer So it looks like a good idea but it's really slow and it can fill up disk space with files that cannot be recovered. [1] https://code.google.com/p/metadata-extractor/ https://code.google.com/p/metadata-extractor/
deet 12y ago
The author didn't look very hard considering the article doesn't mention Picturelife. (Disclaimer: I work there, but my position is supported by many other reviews.)
- taftster 12y ago
  Thanks for the mention. I didn't know about Picturelife, but now I do. This is pretty close to what I want. Namely, a "cloud" product that let's me get all my photos into the same account, download them back when I want them, and organize online. I don't want ever want to "sync" to local storage, nor rely in anyway on local storage. Local storage is temporary. I want durable "cloud" storage. But note, I want to be able to safely backup my entire digital collection wherever I choose. Perhaps backing up the Amazon Glacier, or something like that. I don't trust that a new dotcom is going to necessarily survive. Thanks for the pointer, going to check it out.
  - citruspi 12y ago
    > But note, I want to be able to safely backup my entire digital collection wherever I choose. Perhaps backing up the Amazon Glacier, or something like that. I don't trust that a new dotcom is going to necessarily survive. I completely agree. One of the features that I love about Picturelife is the ability to setup your own storage. Instead of paying for the service, you can connect it to an Amazon S3 bucket. All the photos you upload are stored in a bucket that you own and you only pay the S3 bills. Then, because you have complete control and access to the bucket itself, you could setup a backup to Glacier every week or something.
    - hsshah 12y ago
      This is great. Had I known about this couple of weeks back, I would have opted for this instead of singing up for Dropbox and going to the initial painful step of uploading ALL my local photos (hundreds of GB) to it. Do you know if PictureLife works with Dropbox?!
      - 12y ago
qohloinc 12y ago
Good Albums - Photo Organizer app: Easily organize your pics and safely show them to your friends. 1. First of its kind to group photos by moments. 2. Easy to organize your pics into awesome albums. 3. SafeView, brilliantly hide your personal photos, and only show relevant photos to your friends Get from Google Play: http://goo.gl/L1myRJ http://goo.gl/L1myRJ
- swrobel 12y ago
  Are you the author? Here's my 2* review, just posted on Play: - Moments just seems to be organized by day instead of by month as in Timeline view. - No easy way to bulk-select photos to add to an album. - Curious overuse of radio buttons. Did not like.
  - qohloinc 12y ago
    I am the author :) It's a valuable feedback. Thanks. Moments are to group photos by event (taken in short span of time) and timeline view to group photos by month. Do you suggest me to switch the functionality, like timeline to show photos by event and moments by month? I'll revise the app to use other UI pattern instead of radio buttons. Also, bulk selection is very important. My mistake, I thought about it, must have implemented it, at least :(
  - qohloinc 12y ago
    We fixed UX based on your feedback. And implemented bulk selection of photos. Please get new update (1.1.13). Moments is meant to group photos in small clusters (photos taken in a short span of time) in a day. We're happy to receive your thoughts! Please write to us for free promo-code (qohloinc@gmail.com), as a token of gratitude for the feedback
rokhayakebe 12y ago
Xoopit. It does not exist anymore, but this was by far the best plugin I ever used. In fact it was one of the best software products I ever used, period. It would go through your email, and organize every photo, pdf, document you ever received and let you search through them. Xoopit search was better than gmail search. Significantly. Xoopit created a "personal media," [1] not social media, out of my inbox. This felt better than Facebook to me; when I had FB that is. [1] I heard the term personal media from Tyler Crowley, which helped to change how I thought about this space.
andmarios 12y ago
Best DAM software is digiKam imo. From online services I like (and fear) Google+ which let you search your photos via context without any prior tagging (e.g “show my photos of cats”).
bane 12y ago
I'm a travel photographer in my spare time. I don't really need a photo organizing app, what I need is a photo metadata app. I already have a great way to organize my photos via the file system, but I don't have a good system to put metadata on each photo (where it was shot, what it is, etc.), personal rating (so I can grab the top shots and public them), etc. The old flickr was perfect for me, I could group things by continent/country/city give a title, drop it on a map to geolocate it, etc. But now they've flattened out the structure a bit and it's not as good for my purposes.
- privong 12y ago
  > I don't really need a photo organizing app, what I need is a photo metadata app. I completely agree. I also liked flickr's system, but I left a year or two ago, after deciding I would rather not put my photos on someone else's server. I would love a good desktop metadata system that felt like it would be long-lived and widely useable. gthumb and darktable both have tagging capabilities, for example, but I have not gotten the sense that either of their systems are worth going back and tagging the past 10+ years of photos I have taken. A great metadata system would have me doing that.
- clarkm 12y ago
  Is there something like ID3 tags for pictures?
  - th0ma5 12y ago
    Yes, EXIF metadata.
    - clarkm 12y ago
      I totally forgot about that. Though I thought EXIF just had technical info like resolution, camera mode, date, and location. Is it really as flexible as ID3? I know next to nothing about photography, so maybe there tons of tools out there to manage your photo library EXIF tags that I have never noticed.
jscheel 12y ago
i consider myself a fairly smart and technical human being, but a good photo storage solution is something I still haven't figured out. I want all my photos on an external drive that is also backed up to backblaze. But I also want that external drive backed up to dropbox so that I can access my photos from my phone. Between dropbox wanting to auto-sync my phone pics, itunes backing up my phone, lightroom's photo library management, my external drive issue, etc, I'm at a loss how to organize everything.
- rakoo 12y ago
  Camlistore (http://camlistore.org/ http://camlistore.org/) is kind of an answer to that: just stuff all your data into it, and get back to it by searching. You shouldn't have to care about where to put what: what you have is Photos, Music, PDFs, and all are accessible through a search box. The content can also be synced between your computers, and there's some work started to sync with the phone (as far as I know, there's a photo uploader for Android at the moment). The project is still in its infancy (as in "not widespread yet") but it's advancing at a good pace. For the moment the focus is put on how to run it in the cloud, so that people can install a simple instance somewhere for them, for their family or even for business (so you can run a public instance). But if you want to see it for yourself, you'll see that a good amount of work has been put on images (the golang's stdlib for image was improved from camlistore work) as you can see in the videos.
uvee 12y ago
If you store your images on a bunch of online storage locations, you could use http://mazira.me http://mazira.me to see them all at one place (even from inside your email).
monksy 12y ago
What I'm looking for is a way to have multiple contributers to a photo album. I've got photos from a lot of difference sources, so I need the ability to merge those into one album.
- surreal 12y ago
  We're doing exactly that at FOMO - we were fed up of missing out on great memories just because someone else happened to press the shutter. www.fomo.fm Get in touch if you need anything and/or have feedback :) shai@fomo.fm
bobosha 12y ago
are there any visual search i.e. search-by-example tools? or tools that automatically cluster images?
GreatCrane 12y ago
Check out Mylio http://mylio.com/ http://mylio.com/ It has automated cataloguing, organization, and offline backup of large number of photos all synchronized across multiple devices. Disclaimer - I work for the company, but I really feel that the product can help people manage their photos.
ajcarpy2005 12y ago
Photoshop Elements has really great tagging functionality for people, places, events, time, etc.
espinchi 12y ago
We tried at Photofeed, but decided to close it earlier this year. It's not easy to make ends meet in this market: the percentage of users that are willing to pay a monthly/yearly subscription fee is too low to make up for the cost of storing the photos. The big players provide online photo storage for free, so the user's position is understandable. But it doesn't make it any easier for a small business that wants to, well, make business.
- icefox 12y ago
  Where you able to find anything users were willing to pay for related to photos? Maybe more on the physical side with prints, photo books, posters, postcards, etc?
  - espinchi 12y ago
    That's a good idea. We did some research on that and, still, the net revenue we would generate out of those wouldn't make up for the costs either. We started pushing some cool features like auto-magic clustering of photos into moments. Now Google and a few others do it too, so I know it doesn't sound all that impressive now.
    - icefox 12y ago
      Reading over all of the comments it sounds like trying to have a company that is simply providing a place to store photos is a losing proposition. The revenue would have to come somewhere else. * By default the photos can be re-sold and the user gets part of the profit. * Services such as photo restoration * Selling physical goods such as mugs, tshirts, postcards, posters, puzzles, Christmas cards, photo books, etc * Ads on top of a chat system based around photos ;) * A social network that uses the photos to get your friends to join the network * Now that you are backing up your photos for $ we could back up all your data * Daily advertising games such as 1 random users that uploads a photo today featuring Taco Bell gets $1000 (aka advertisers pay for everything). In fact any company that derives revenue secondary from having photos, but not from the users storing the photos is incentivized to let the users store the photos for as cheap as possible if not free (when possible). This is probably the number one problem with any company that is trying to sell storage for photos and will no doubt force them to pivot or close down eventually. Alternatively the other option is to only cater to users that are willing to pay and have no free option at all. You would want to interview those users and make sure the problem they have is being solved.
veidr 12y ago
I've tried them all too, including the ones that cost $100+ (Lightroom, Aperture), the free ones (iPhoto and friends), and the doomed web apps (Everpix, Picturelife, etc.), and I fully agree that there is not one workable solution in this space -- which is crazy since there are more than a billion people who need this. This problem cannot be reasonably solved with a web app. Or even a native app running off a mechanical hard disk. With 20MB photos common these days, you need the data coming off a blazing fast local SSD. Otherwise, you can't flip through your photos in a reasonable way. It takes too long to move from one to the next, and every web app does that thing where they load this horrid blurry version first while waiting for the full-resolution version to load. Unacceptable (to anybody who's ever experienced instantly flipping through a hundred pics off a fast SSD, anyway). So a web app can't do it, but you do need a web app component, and cloud storage strategy, to solve this problem. People's local SSDs are typically too small to store all their photos. Plus, you want your photos everywhere, on all your devices. So not only do you do need to architect a web/cloud component, but you either need to create a native app for all devices, or at least create an integration with the local photo management facilities on each platform, so that the subset of photos people want are in fast local storage. It's a hard problem. Meanwhile, my own 500GB of photos (I used to have only maybe 20GB, but then my kids were born) are just sitting in a big folder, with no organization at all, waiting for somebody so solve it.
- Veratyr 12y ago
  Picturelife + Lightroom works pretty well for me. Lightroom lets me do all the adjustments and metadata correction locally (something that only has to be done once anyway) and Picturelife gives me the cloud storage and browsing/sharing capabilities I need. It's not one application but it is a workable solution. As for webapps being 'doomed', there's a pretty large spectrum between 'horrid blurry version' and 'full-resolution version'. Considering that my photos are generally ~4K in resolution and I don't own a monitor that can display them in full resolution, a 1080p scaled version is fine and loads entirely fast enough, even on my terrible ~8Mbps ADSL connection. Sure it's not as great as flipping through an SSD locally but I think it's definitely acceptable and 'a reasonable way'. I think you're just setting your standards too high. Most of the world doesn't even own an SSD, let alone demand that speed in every application they use. Most users are entirely happy just flipping through albums on Facebook.

47 points by user_235711 12y ago

It's interesting to me that the author has photos on multiple devices. I sync mine to my PC, where they get placed in folders named yyyy.mm.dd - [location/event]. Since my kid was born I started adding folders named yyyy.mm, which contain the day-to-day photos for a month. Given that I've been doing this ever since I started amassing digital photos, and that the author doesn't, and that her NY Times post is on HN, I have to wonder what others do with their photos.

rbritton 12y ago
I'm a bit different in that a significant part of my income is from professional photography. Here's how I'm organized: Each year has a folder: YYYY. Inside that folder is an Aperture library per category (e.g., Weddings, Portraits, Personal, etc.) Inside each Aperture library there are projects for each grouping of photos (e.g., Valley of Fire). Every file has a unique name that includes the date photographed and the frame number. I do allow Aperture to keep the image files internally because it simplifies backups. Aperture does not support XMP sidecar files like Lightroom and others do, so the only benefit I feel I'm losing out on by not storing them separately is having a file structure that matches the library structure. The libraries themselves are OS X packages, so it is possible to extract the files relatively easily if I'm no longer able to open Aperture in the future. I also do not care to have most photos on multiple devices. I have the ability to remote into the computer with the photos from anywhere I have an internet connection, so I'm able to grab a file if needed. With multiple terabytes of photos it's impractical to make them universally available to all of my devices anyway.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
PavlovsCat 12y ago
I don't really "amass" photos that much, but for what it's worth, I auto-rename all photos to yy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss first thing I do after deleting the ones I don't want to keep. From then on out it's pretty much just a tree of folders, with the ones that have a lot of photos in them having additional subfolders per year. So far I never even had use for using tags, and my main tool is still the delete key followed by enter :)
- DanBC 12y ago
  How do you find all the photos of Bob?
  - Spearchucker 12y ago
    That's a great question and one I haven't solved for my scenario other than knowing who was with me when I did x at y. The idea is to tag photos in a database (photo location and name, plus tags). One of many things on my todo list.
  - java-man 12y ago
    Does anyone know of an open source (BSD/Apache) face detection/recognition algorithm? It would be relatively easy to plug it in into my Secure Digital Archive tool.
    - dunham 12y ago
      OpenCV does detection. I haven't found anything to do recognition, I suspect it's a much harder problem. It's not open source, but in the past I've used picassa to do recognition. You let it run, interact with it to resolve ambiguities, and then pull the face assignments/rectangles out of the .picasa.ini files that it drops next to your photos. (There was also a contacts.xml file somewhere that provided the mapping from a guid to name/email.)
    - rokhayakebe 12y ago
      Jason Calacanis interviewed this company (http://www.kairos.com/pricing http://www.kairos.com/pricing) last week. While not OS, you can implement their product and get 5000 free api calls per month which should take care of your personal library.
bane 12y ago
I mostly shoot photos when traveling. So I do year\year-month location Then under that yyyymmdd, then sorted by camera (I have multiple) and then location or subject and under that pictures of people I'm with (I like taking pictures of things more than people so my pictures of friends/family go in their own folder, while my wife likes pictures of people more) sorted by person or group of people. So for example 2010\2010-11 Paris\2010-11-27\Nikon\Louvre Is where all the pictures of the Louvre I took on that day are. If I need to find pictures of the Louvre, I just use Everything on the top level folder and search for "Louvre". It works well enough, and I just sort everything back at the hotel while I'm copying off of my camera onto my laptop. I'm not super strict about the specific locations, sometimes under "Nikon" will just be a pile of pictures. Depends on how motivated I am to sort. I'm usually really good about filtering out pictures of people from stuff though, and I post pictures of people to my G+ account so my friends and wife and can enjoy them, and I use my flickr for stuff. The best quality stuff I then publish through Getty. Maybe less than 1% gets professionally published, but I have almost 120,000 photos organized this way. I spend lots of time editing metadata in flickr and even more for the Getty material since they have very high quality control. I don't really make much money at it, but it's a hobby and I get to call myself a "professional photographer" in some settings.
- jwr 12y ago
  How do you deal with multiple versions of a single photo? Ones with vsrious adjustments, or cropped in different ways?
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    I'm sure other applications can do that too, but Bibble (since bought by Corel and named Aftershot or something) allows for several sets of settings to exist as "versions" of a RAW file, so it doesn't actually create "physical files" (the cropped/edited etc. JPEG/PNG version, that is) until it's time for the batch to output them how and where you want them, which means you can always delete and recreate the output files at will.
  - bane 12y ago
    I don't. I just dump them all in the same pot and look at them. If I need to select some out for some purpose (making an album or something), I just make another folder inside there and copy out the ones I need for that purpose. The ones I publish, I go through, pick the best shots from the group and when I go through and edit the levels and crops and such I usually do a little pruning of that set along the way and the edited versions go in yet another folder deeper (so I have a non-destructive copy). It's useful for me to publish several variations (like different zoom levels or crops) so they buyers can buy one that fits their need the best.

java-man 12y ago

What do you guys think of one of my creations (still in development stage) - Secure Digital Archive: http://goryachev.com/products/archive http://goryachev.com/products/archive While not strictly a photo organizer app, it does have a photo gallery, timeline, and raw file format support.

miahi 12y ago
Trying it now. Opinions/bugs (not very well organized, sorry): - please allow multiple folder selection for volume source folder - the analysis phase is really slow and it looks CPU-bound on the ImageScaler.resize() method; try to find a faster resize library or at least allow user setting for scaling (smooth is quite slow) and multithread the resize - right now I have 7 idle CPU cores and you have a really slow application. This is bordering on unusable. I have ~2TB of jpg and raw photos, it would take at least half a month to resize them - and I didn't even ask for a thumbnail. - A snapshot cannot be stopped (there is no "stop" button/menu entry). - the persistent mode is called "Persistent" in one place and "Archival" in another - Not sure I understand the "persistent/archival" setting; I would expect that I can access the old/deleted files as long as they are in the repository files even if the source is deleted/unavailable. I now have a 2GB repository "backup" but I cannot access anything from it because I removed the volumes (the repository did not shrink). At least make it the default with a big warning if you disable it. - 64MB file chunk for the repository is quite small for something containing photos that cannot ever be deleted (a raw file can easily have 10 or 20MB); file access in folders with a lot of files is slow - please read EXIF data - it's way more important than Hex views; the metadata-extractor library[1] is stable and fast (I'm using it for my photo organizing application) - please rotate the thumbnails by EXIF data - corrupting/deleting a backup file doesn't give any warning (just that the backups don't work anymore and I cannot see the photos) - not providing a name for the volume in step 1 gives a warning when you want to leave step 2 (and not when you leave step 1) - raw image decoding is painfully slow; processing an 8MP Canon RAW takes 40 seconds; it estimates 6 hours for 480 photos. - try to buffer the DBInput/Output as RAF can be quite slow; check MappedByteBuffer So it looks like a good idea but it's really slow and it can fill up disk space with files that cannot be recovered. [1] https://code.google.com/p/metadata-extractor/ https://code.google.com/p/metadata-extractor/

deet 12y ago

The author didn't look very hard considering the article doesn't mention Picturelife. (Disclaimer: I work there, but my position is supported by many other reviews.)

taftster 12y ago
Thanks for the mention. I didn't know about Picturelife, but now I do. This is pretty close to what I want. Namely, a "cloud" product that let's me get all my photos into the same account, download them back when I want them, and organize online. I don't want ever want to "sync" to local storage, nor rely in anyway on local storage. Local storage is temporary. I want durable "cloud" storage. But note, I want to be able to safely backup my entire digital collection wherever I choose. Perhaps backing up the Amazon Glacier, or something like that. I don't trust that a new dotcom is going to necessarily survive. Thanks for the pointer, going to check it out.
- citruspi 12y ago
  > But note, I want to be able to safely backup my entire digital collection wherever I choose. Perhaps backing up the Amazon Glacier, or something like that. I don't trust that a new dotcom is going to necessarily survive. I completely agree. One of the features that I love about Picturelife is the ability to setup your own storage. Instead of paying for the service, you can connect it to an Amazon S3 bucket. All the photos you upload are stored in a bucket that you own and you only pay the S3 bills. Then, because you have complete control and access to the bucket itself, you could setup a backup to Glacier every week or something.
  - hsshah 12y ago
    This is great. Had I known about this couple of weeks back, I would have opted for this instead of singing up for Dropbox and going to the initial painful step of uploading ALL my local photos (hundreds of GB) to it. Do you know if PictureLife works with Dropbox?!
    - 12y ago

qohloinc 12y ago

Good Albums - Photo Organizer app: Easily organize your pics and safely show them to your friends. 1. First of its kind to group photos by moments. 2. Easy to organize your pics into awesome albums. 3. SafeView, brilliantly hide your personal photos, and only show relevant photos to your friends Get from Google Play: http://goo.gl/L1myRJ http://goo.gl/L1myRJ

swrobel 12y ago
Are you the author? Here's my 2* review, just posted on Play: - Moments just seems to be organized by day instead of by month as in Timeline view. - No easy way to bulk-select photos to add to an album. - Curious overuse of radio buttons. Did not like.
- qohloinc 12y ago
  I am the author :) It's a valuable feedback. Thanks. Moments are to group photos by event (taken in short span of time) and timeline view to group photos by month. Do you suggest me to switch the functionality, like timeline to show photos by event and moments by month? I'll revise the app to use other UI pattern instead of radio buttons. Also, bulk selection is very important. My mistake, I thought about it, must have implemented it, at least :(
- qohloinc 12y ago
  We fixed UX based on your feedback. And implemented bulk selection of photos. Please get new update (1.1.13). Moments is meant to group photos in small clusters (photos taken in a short span of time) in a day. We're happy to receive your thoughts! Please write to us for free promo-code (qohloinc@gmail.com), as a token of gratitude for the feedback

rokhayakebe 12y ago

Xoopit. It does not exist anymore, but this was by far the best plugin I ever used. In fact it was one of the best software products I ever used, period. It would go through your email, and organize every photo, pdf, document you ever received and let you search through them. Xoopit search was better than gmail search. Significantly. Xoopit created a "personal media," [1] not social media, out of my inbox. This felt better than Facebook to me; when I had FB that is. [1] I heard the term personal media from Tyler Crowley, which helped to change how I thought about this space.

andmarios 12y ago

Best DAM software is digiKam imo. From online services I like (and fear) Google+ which let you search your photos via context without any prior tagging (e.g “show my photos of cats”).

bane 12y ago

I'm a travel photographer in my spare time. I don't really need a photo organizing app, what I need is a photo metadata app. I already have a great way to organize my photos via the file system, but I don't have a good system to put metadata on each photo (where it was shot, what it is, etc.), personal rating (so I can grab the top shots and public them), etc. The old flickr was perfect for me, I could group things by continent/country/city give a title, drop it on a map to geolocate it, etc. But now they've flattened out the structure a bit and it's not as good for my purposes.

privong 12y ago
> I don't really need a photo organizing app, what I need is a photo metadata app. I completely agree. I also liked flickr's system, but I left a year or two ago, after deciding I would rather not put my photos on someone else's server. I would love a good desktop metadata system that felt like it would be long-lived and widely useable. gthumb and darktable both have tagging capabilities, for example, but I have not gotten the sense that either of their systems are worth going back and tagging the past 10+ years of photos I have taken. A great metadata system would have me doing that.
clarkm 12y ago
Is there something like ID3 tags for pictures?
- th0ma5 12y ago
  Yes, EXIF metadata.
  - clarkm 12y ago
    I totally forgot about that. Though I thought EXIF just had technical info like resolution, camera mode, date, and location. Is it really as flexible as ID3? I know next to nothing about photography, so maybe there tons of tools out there to manage your photo library EXIF tags that I have never noticed.

jscheel 12y ago

i consider myself a fairly smart and technical human being, but a good photo storage solution is something I still haven't figured out. I want all my photos on an external drive that is also backed up to backblaze. But I also want that external drive backed up to dropbox so that I can access my photos from my phone. Between dropbox wanting to auto-sync my phone pics, itunes backing up my phone, lightroom's photo library management, my external drive issue, etc, I'm at a loss how to organize everything.

rakoo 12y ago
Camlistore (http://camlistore.org/ http://camlistore.org/) is kind of an answer to that: just stuff all your data into it, and get back to it by searching. You shouldn't have to care about where to put what: what you have is Photos, Music, PDFs, and all are accessible through a search box. The content can also be synced between your computers, and there's some work started to sync with the phone (as far as I know, there's a photo uploader for Android at the moment). The project is still in its infancy (as in "not widespread yet") but it's advancing at a good pace. For the moment the focus is put on how to run it in the cloud, so that people can install a simple instance somewhere for them, for their family or even for business (so you can run a public instance). But if you want to see it for yourself, you'll see that a good amount of work has been put on images (the golang's stdlib for image was improved from camlistore work) as you can see in the videos.

uvee 12y ago

If you store your images on a bunch of online storage locations, you could use http://mazira.me http://mazira.me to see them all at one place (even from inside your email).

monksy 12y ago

What I'm looking for is a way to have multiple contributers to a photo album. I've got photos from a lot of difference sources, so I need the ability to merge those into one album.

surreal 12y ago
We're doing exactly that at FOMO - we were fed up of missing out on great memories just because someone else happened to press the shutter. www.fomo.fm Get in touch if you need anything and/or have feedback :) shai@fomo.fm

bobosha 12y ago

are there any visual search i.e. search-by-example tools? or tools that automatically cluster images?

GreatCrane 12y ago

Check out Mylio http://mylio.com/ http://mylio.com/ It has automated cataloguing, organization, and offline backup of large number of photos all synchronized across multiple devices. Disclaimer - I work for the company, but I really feel that the product can help people manage their photos.

ajcarpy2005 12y ago

Photoshop Elements has really great tagging functionality for people, places, events, time, etc.

espinchi 12y ago

We tried at Photofeed, but decided to close it earlier this year. It's not easy to make ends meet in this market: the percentage of users that are willing to pay a monthly/yearly subscription fee is too low to make up for the cost of storing the photos. The big players provide online photo storage for free, so the user's position is understandable. But it doesn't make it any easier for a small business that wants to, well, make business.

icefox 12y ago
Where you able to find anything users were willing to pay for related to photos? Maybe more on the physical side with prints, photo books, posters, postcards, etc?
- espinchi 12y ago
  That's a good idea. We did some research on that and, still, the net revenue we would generate out of those wouldn't make up for the costs either. We started pushing some cool features like auto-magic clustering of photos into moments. Now Google and a few others do it too, so I know it doesn't sound all that impressive now.
  - icefox 12y ago
    Reading over all of the comments it sounds like trying to have a company that is simply providing a place to store photos is a losing proposition. The revenue would have to come somewhere else. * By default the photos can be re-sold and the user gets part of the profit. * Services such as photo restoration * Selling physical goods such as mugs, tshirts, postcards, posters, puzzles, Christmas cards, photo books, etc * Ads on top of a chat system based around photos ;) * A social network that uses the photos to get your friends to join the network * Now that you are backing up your photos for $ we could back up all your data * Daily advertising games such as 1 random users that uploads a photo today featuring Taco Bell gets $1000 (aka advertisers pay for everything). In fact any company that derives revenue secondary from having photos, but not from the users storing the photos is incentivized to let the users store the photos for as cheap as possible if not free (when possible). This is probably the number one problem with any company that is trying to sell storage for photos and will no doubt force them to pivot or close down eventually. Alternatively the other option is to only cater to users that are willing to pay and have no free option at all. You would want to interview those users and make sure the problem they have is being solved.

veidr 12y ago

I've tried them all too, including the ones that cost $100+ (Lightroom, Aperture), the free ones (iPhoto and friends), and the doomed web apps (Everpix, Picturelife, etc.), and I fully agree that there is not one workable solution in this space -- which is crazy since there are more than a billion people who need this. This problem cannot be reasonably solved with a web app. Or even a native app running off a mechanical hard disk. With 20MB photos common these days, you need the data coming off a blazing fast local SSD. Otherwise, you can't flip through your photos in a reasonable way. It takes too long to move from one to the next, and every web app does that thing where they load this horrid blurry version first while waiting for the full-resolution version to load. Unacceptable (to anybody who's ever experienced instantly flipping through a hundred pics off a fast SSD, anyway). So a web app can't do it, but you do need a web app component, and cloud storage strategy, to solve this problem. People's local SSDs are typically too small to store all their photos. Plus, you want your photos everywhere, on all your devices. So not only do you do need to architect a web/cloud component, but you either need to create a native app for all devices, or at least create an integration with the local photo management facilities on each platform, so that the subset of photos people want are in fast local storage. It's a hard problem. Meanwhile, my own 500GB of photos (I used to have only maybe 20GB, but then my kids were born) are just sitting in a big folder, with no organization at all, waiting for somebody so solve it.

Veratyr 12y ago
Picturelife + Lightroom works pretty well for me. Lightroom lets me do all the adjustments and metadata correction locally (something that only has to be done once anyway) and Picturelife gives me the cloud storage and browsing/sharing capabilities I need. It's not one application but it is a workable solution. As for webapps being 'doomed', there's a pretty large spectrum between 'horrid blurry version' and 'full-resolution version'. Considering that my photos are generally ~4K in resolution and I don't own a monitor that can display them in full resolution, a 1080p scaled version is fine and loads entirely fast enough, even on my terrible ~8Mbps ADSL connection. Sure it's not as great as flipping through an SSD locally but I think it's definitely acceptable and 'a reasonable way'. I think you're just setting your standards too high. Most of the world doesn't even own an SSD, let alone demand that speed in every application they use. Most users are entirely happy just flipping through albums on Facebook.