8 ms·

The Best Way to Organize a Lifetime of Photos

83 points by scosman 12y ago

hcurtiss 12y ago
Crazy that they don't mention Carousel. I've been really happy with it. Easy to send family links. Not tied to a social platform -- my wife and I share the same account with all iPhone photos uploaded/downloaded to family computer. Onedrive offers much of this, but its slow -- photos load relatively slowly on iPhone app, and videos constantly buffer. Carousel/Dropbox is instant. For me, the only missing feature is rotate/crop, but I can always do that on a desktop/laptop linked to Dropbox account, and all devices update.
- hsshah 12y ago
  +1 After few iterations, currently I too have landed with Carousel/Dropbox. It just works. Although, there are several features that it lacks related to editing. If Apple Cloud Photo service proves reliable, I might switch over (My family has all apple devices so makes it easy)
  - hcurtiss 12y ago
    I admit Apple Photos and family sharing looks pretty slick. Unfortunately, while we use iPhones, iPads, an Apple TV, and several Airport Expresses (home audio), the home computer is still a Windows machine, and I use a Surface Pro 3 daily for work. I'm also wary of doubling down on Apple. Our next family machine may very well be an iMac, but I guess there's something attractive to me about keeping our data separate. I want to be able to pay Dropbox for a premium service that "just works" on every machine, no matter the OS. That way I can fluidly move to the next big thing without all the hooks (I struggled with a messy Google+ exit a year ago). Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but I'm one of those guys who think the Dropbox team is on to something. They need to work quick though. Google's move to decouple photos (and provide for auto desktop download) threatens to shake things up -- at least in our little household. My wife will love another transition . . .
mattsmith321 12y ago
I'm actually liking http://thislife.com http://thislife.com which is an extended service of Shutterfly. It can pull photos from your local machines as well as online accounts. You can pay to also have video access.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
What I look for the most in a backup solution for something as precious as my personal / family photos is the stability of the company. Will it be there in 5/10/20 years? Regardless of the solution, redundant backup is an absolute must for me. I will never depend on 1 solution for any of this no matter what the price. My current solution is this: * all photos go to Dropbox about once a month or if there is a large batch (birthdays etc) * redundant backup to a RAID server in my house (3 TB drives) right now about 50% full * I also compress really important photos and send them to an FTP server on a VPS with limited web access (no httpd)
- foobarian 12y ago
  I ended up rolling my own too. Videos were a big problem, online solutions cost a lot for the videos my family takes. I ended up throwing them on a server with pared disks synced using rsync (not raid because raid doesn't protect from file deletion). For presentation I have a bunch of scripts to import and index in bulk from idevice backups (which catches things received thru MMS from the nanny or family) and convert to webm format or create thumbnails. Once all the metadata is in a db, a simple rails app shows them with paging, date ranges etc. Would be really nice to have more features like curation, galleries, rotate, and so on like online apps have. But as long as I have full control upstream I'm happy.
- knodi123 12y ago
  is there much benefit to compressing your photos?
  - DavidAdams 12y ago
    I would think that if they're jpegs, they're already about as compressed as they're going to get. Like putting a brick into a stuff sack.
  - BorisMelnik 12y ago
    its more organizational for me than anything. the fact that they are "inside" a gzip/tar or zip file kind of keeps them categorically together. It does usually end up saving some space, not a ton.
jwr 12y ago
Alas, I think there is no "best way" right now. All solutions fall short. And the problem is not just with library management (although that's bad, too), but even with sharing photos with your family. For a couple of years I've been paying SmugMug to host my galleries, but recently finally got annoyed: they are great for pro photographers (who sell photos), but their goals are not aligned with mine. What I need is fairly simple: * online site, available at a specific (ONE) URL, that my entire family can bookmark (ONCE), * login/password required to enter, and I want multiple login/passwords, * HTTPS (duh), * no borg-minds harvesting my photos for advertising data, or doing face recognition, * good image quality, fast and responsive, both on mobile and desktop, * single gallery index, automatically ordered by date, * gallery date ranges extracted automatically from photos, * easy adding of new galleries, preferably just by uploading a directory with a bunch of images exported from Aperture/Lightroom/Photos/Whatever, * simple text-based search that finds galleries. Google Picasa, Flickr, SmugMug, whatever you pick — they all fail at this simple task (for various reasons). And some people even use Facebook to share images with family (sigh). I got so annoyed that I finally wrote my own solution. Which works. Costs me 6EUR/month for a Hetzner.de virtual server, but I can finally have all of the above "features" without any extra annoyance. Plus I get significantly better image quality than any other solution I've seen (mozjpeg kicks ass). And I don't depend on anyone, in particular on any company's whims or "strategic cutbacks", nor am I "the product being sold". I find it amazing that it's 2015 and I'm writing software that manages private online photo galleries. I think it doesn't speak well of the current business/tech landscape. (Incidentally, software to manage your photo collection is a whole another story. After Apple screwed me over with Aperture I am thinking hard about what to do about my photo archives.)
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I use Pixieset for that (mostly to share shoots with clients), and it does most of what you describe, but yes, even that isn't perfect.
- walterbell 12y ago
  For organization of a local collection of photos or other digital assets, http://www.cdwinder.de http://www.cdwinder.de looks promising. I wish there was an open-architecture alternative that could be scripted.
tommyd 12y ago
Tangentially related, I have to give a shout out to Chris Marquardt's "1000 Pics 1 Hour" Lightroom workflow: https://shop.chrismarquardt.com/bookshop/product/1-hour-1000-pics-supercharge-your-lightroom-workflow/ https://shop.chrismarquardt.com/bookshop/product/1-hour-1000.... Simple but effective way of dealing with the massive volume of images we capture with digital cameras, and reducing your photos to the real keepers. It's worth paying for the e-book as he goes into some interesting points, but in a nutshell the core concept is going through your imported photos in three passes: first, quickly pick all the ones that might have some potential merit (e.g. they are in focus and of something somewhat interesting), then go back through the picked ones and quickly rate them from 1-3 stars (1 being "has documentary value", 3 being "potentially a great photo), then take the 3 star ones and spend a bit of time retouching them if needed and giving them 4 or 5 stars if they are really special. The end result is that you can quickly get down to keeping maybe one in ten photos from a shoot - it makes the whole process feel a lot more manageable and opening Lightroom less scary! Plus, it reduces the amount of photos we store so you need to worry less about the capacity of your cloud solution ;)
- StavrosK 12y ago
  > The end result is that you can quickly get down to keeping maybe one in ten photos from a shoot Are you a photographer? I'd love to be having that much success, if I end up with three good photos out of 500, I call it a good day.
  - Litost 12y ago
    1 in 10, or 3 out of 500? The problem with comparisons like this is it's horribly a) Judgemental - what you might class as a success can differ wildly from what someone else does. b) Situational - the success rate you get from differing events, shot under different conditions with different equipment, technique, time constraints and expertise etc. etc. can vary hugely, even when judged impartially. About the only time i ever feel like i can objectively judge a day a good one, is either 1) When i've been to the same event as any of my peers, using comparable gear and felt like i've held my own. 2) Achieved whatever it was i set out to, be that a great picture worthy of putting in a portfolio or sticking on the wall, a satisfied client, a new technique or lesson learnt, a memory captured or just enjoying whatever i did on the back of the excuse i was out with my camera. I wouldn't worry about the numbers, worring about the numbers would be when you got roped in at the last minute to be the main photographer at best friends wedding and all you had was a kodak brownie with half a roll of film left in it anything nowadays would be a cakewalk in comparison. Yes, don't stop pushing yourself, but at the end of the day, for me anyway, it's the experiences that count, the pictures are generally just reminders of things i've forgotten, can no longer experience or because the people in them are no longer with us.
mattbeckman 12y ago
Excited about Apple Photos. Every solution I've attempted to instigate with my wife has been met with resistance for minor technical or minor inconvenience reasons. Previously, it was an external drive with iPhoto that used what eventually was a merged iPhoto Library on an external drive. The external drive would be plugged in to the RAID 1 NAS periodically to preserve it. Finally, every week or so the NAS would backup to S3. However, all of that proved too inconvenient or too aggravating. Apple Photos is working great so far for us (albeit with a tight coupling).
outericky 12y ago
Just started using Amazon's cloud offering. Don't mind it... it's not perfect, but it's simple. Coupled with prime it's affordable. Easily back up multiple devices, videos, etc.
- ValentineC 12y ago
  How many photos do you usually upload? I was signed up for the trial, but stopped using it when the web client decided that it couldn't upload an entire camera's worth of photos (~70GB) at once.
  - outericky 12y ago
    I don't use the web client. On my mac, I installed the desktop client, and that seemed to work fine for the 30 or so gb I did per batch. On the phones I backed up 2 phones, each with about 10gb of photo/video.
bane 12y ago
Since I started taking photos in earnest during travels in late 2004, I've collected around 120k photos. I don't really shoot very often, but when I do shoot, I take tons of photos. For example, on a 10 day trip to London, I took around 9,000 photos. I'm not a great photographer, but somewhere in that pile will be some great photos I'm pleased with. I don't want to be stuck with one software's way of doing things, so here's how I organize them: - Each trip is organized in a folder with a sortable date down to the month and general placename: "2014-05 London" - Inside that folder, at the end of every day of shooting, I dump all the photos into a folder with the name of the day of the trip: Day1, Day2, etc. Sometimes I'll use the date for the day instead. It doesn't really matter much. - Since during the course of a day, I might shoot at several locations, inside each "Day" folder, I organize the photos by location of the shoot or a short description of the event I was shooting, "Walking Around the Shard", "Tate Modern", "East Dulwich" etc. - I also use a couple different cameras, so inside each of those, I have a folder for each camera: Nikon, Lumix, etc. - Inside each of those I separate out pictures I took of my family or of me with pictures of sites. I usually upload the "personal" pictures to Google or Facebook so I can access them anywhere. - So if I want pictures of us from Picadilly circus on the 3rd day of our trip to London (and not the 6th day when we went there again), I go to 2014-05 London/Day 3/Picadilly Circus/Nikon/Us - If I want Pictures of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa from the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, I go to 2011-04 Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria della Vittoria/Canon - In each of these, I make a folder called "top" where I copy the photos I think are the best. As I process the photos I make a final selection and put the results in a folder called "done". - So the best, finished and processed, shots from my last example are 2011-04 Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria della Vittoria/Canon/top/done out of maybe 200 photos total at that church, only 2 or 3 might make it to "done". Even if I can't remember exactly which day I took a shot, the descriptive names are searchable in the file structure and I can usually find a specific photo in a few seconds. It's also self documenting so when I need to update my CV or remember when I took a trip somewhere, just navigating the file system provides all that information. There's often 1 more step, an agency also buys some of my photos, and their acceptance process is even more stringent than mine, so out of 20 or 30 "done" photos, I might only get 6-10 accepted for professional publication. I put those in a "published" photo under "done". I've started a new system as well. On January 1st, I take the previous year's photos and put them in a folder with that year. Only the current year's photos stay in my root photography folder. This makes things much tidier even if a little harder to find. So all of the above examples would have one more folder with just the 4 digit year before it. I make a global backup of my entire collection after every trip or shoot onto a couple other disks, one of which stays disconnected most of the time and in a drawer.
hammock 12y ago
How is there not a free service that does this? Or were free services just not reviewed in this article.
- kijin 12y ago
  Free services tend to come with a fairly small amount of disk space, nowhere near enough to store a lifetime of photos.
matdrewin 12y ago
Apple Photos would be great if they had more powerful family sharing. My dream is to have the family photo collection on all devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook) that we can both curate. Adobe Creative Cloud seems to support 1 collection with 2 people accessing it. Apple Photos is less expensive though, comes out to $5 a month for both of us (20GB + 200GB) vs the 10$ a month for the Lightroom.
copsarebastards 12y ago
The fact that this is a problem widely felt enough to be reported in the WSJ is a side effect of consumerism run rampant. Advertising campaigns that conflate high resolution with high quality combined with a "you can do anything" attitude have persuaded millions of people that they're great photographers when in fact they're just taking photos and videos which even they will likely never watch. Don't get me wrong, the technology is great and it's enabling some really talented people to do really awesome things. But those people spend literally years learning to compose shots, and hours after each photo session poring over thousands of duds to find the few gems. The average person isn't doing that. Let's face it, if you want the sunset in Puerto Rico captured in a photo you're better off letting the professionals do it. There are other definitions of quality. I have a lifetime of photos too, but my lifetime of photos amounts to about 300 photos taken over 30 years. They're not well-composed. A lot of them were shot on crappy hardware and it shows. A lot of them are pictures I didn't take. But every single one of them takes me back to something I care about and makes me smile. My vacation photos are of me and of people I care about, with things we liked. I don't need cloud storage to sync those 300 photos between my devices. They don't require organization; they're stored by date and time and that's it--I know where every photo was taken and who is in it by looking at it. The photos are stored on my laptop hard drive, a backup drive, and on my personal server. I sync them with rsync but if that didn't exist there are a dozen other ways that would work as well. If you're not a professional or trying to be one, then the solution isn't waiting to be invented. The solution is to stop taking so many pointless photos. Is sifting through hundreds of photos really improving your life? Do you really care about all of those photos, or could you figure out before you even take the photo which ones you're going to care about? And taking all those photos has other downsides too that have nothing to do with poor storage solutions. Trying to capture everything for the future prevents people from living in the present. I see people at concerts all the time watching the entire concert through their phones. Are you really going to rewatch that poorly lit video with its shitty sound later? You're damaging a present experience that could be awesome in exchange for a mediocre future experience that might not happen. Not to mention how this affects other people's experience: if you're tall it's not your fault, but if you're holding a phone between me and the artist I paid to see you're being an asshole. TL;DR: The best way to organize a lifetime of photos is to stop taking ones that don't matter.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I played with Photos and it is nice. The problem is if you also use Android and Windows devices. I have a simple setup that works well for me: I set my Android phone to not upload photos to my OneDrive Camera Roll unless I am on a wifi connection, and I turn off wifi on my phone when I am hiking, at family dinners - anytime I am taking a bunch of pictures. When I am home, I delete unwanted pictures before turning wifi back on and the pictures sync to OneDrive. All my picture file names are time stamped and I add descriptions to the some of the file names after the time stamp. Occasional descriptions help find stuff in a time stream. Every several months I rename my Camera Roll directory to Camera_year_month_day and create a new empty Camera Roll directory in OneDrive. It is easy to find any of my pictures, select groups of pictures and generate share links, etc. This same scheme used to work fine when I used Dropbox, and converting from Dropbox to OneDrive was easy and maintained this setup. edit: I use selective sync to device to not have all of my pictures on my devices, relying on the web OneDrive interface to show people pictures without taking up local disk space.
cdown 12y ago
If you really want to store a "lifetime of photos", you should probably consider having a better long-term backup strategy than just putting it in locations that are managed by a single piece of software. :-) Sure, some of these applications store a copy both online and on disk, but if your application chooses to run amok and delete everything, that's not really going to matter in many cases. I've seen horrifying things happen when iPhoto tries to sync with the cloud before. :-(

83 points by scosman 12y ago

Crazy that they don't mention Carousel. I've been really happy with it. Easy to send family links. Not tied to a social platform -- my wife and I share the same account with all iPhone photos uploaded/downloaded to family computer. Onedrive offers much of this, but its slow -- photos load relatively slowly on iPhone app, and videos constantly buffer. Carousel/Dropbox is instant. For me, the only missing feature is rotate/crop, but I can always do that on a desktop/laptop linked to Dropbox account, and all devices update.

hsshah 12y ago
+1 After few iterations, currently I too have landed with Carousel/Dropbox. It just works. Although, there are several features that it lacks related to editing. If Apple Cloud Photo service proves reliable, I might switch over (My family has all apple devices so makes it easy)
- hcurtiss 12y ago
  I admit Apple Photos and family sharing looks pretty slick. Unfortunately, while we use iPhones, iPads, an Apple TV, and several Airport Expresses (home audio), the home computer is still a Windows machine, and I use a Surface Pro 3 daily for work. I'm also wary of doubling down on Apple. Our next family machine may very well be an iMac, but I guess there's something attractive to me about keeping our data separate. I want to be able to pay Dropbox for a premium service that "just works" on every machine, no matter the OS. That way I can fluidly move to the next big thing without all the hooks (I struggled with a messy Google+ exit a year ago). Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but I'm one of those guys who think the Dropbox team is on to something. They need to work quick though. Google's move to decouple photos (and provide for auto desktop download) threatens to shake things up -- at least in our little household. My wife will love another transition . . .

mattsmith321 12y ago

I'm actually liking http://thislife.com http://thislife.com which is an extended service of Shutterfly. It can pull photos from your local machines as well as online accounts. You can pay to also have video access.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

What I look for the most in a backup solution for something as precious as my personal / family photos is the stability of the company. Will it be there in 5/10/20 years? Regardless of the solution, redundant backup is an absolute must for me. I will never depend on 1 solution for any of this no matter what the price. My current solution is this: * all photos go to Dropbox about once a month or if there is a large batch (birthdays etc) * redundant backup to a RAID server in my house (3 TB drives) right now about 50% full * I also compress really important photos and send them to an FTP server on a VPS with limited web access (no httpd)

foobarian 12y ago
I ended up rolling my own too. Videos were a big problem, online solutions cost a lot for the videos my family takes. I ended up throwing them on a server with pared disks synced using rsync (not raid because raid doesn't protect from file deletion). For presentation I have a bunch of scripts to import and index in bulk from idevice backups (which catches things received thru MMS from the nanny or family) and convert to webm format or create thumbnails. Once all the metadata is in a db, a simple rails app shows them with paging, date ranges etc. Would be really nice to have more features like curation, galleries, rotate, and so on like online apps have. But as long as I have full control upstream I'm happy.
knodi123 12y ago
is there much benefit to compressing your photos?
- DavidAdams 12y ago
  I would think that if they're jpegs, they're already about as compressed as they're going to get. Like putting a brick into a stuff sack.
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  its more organizational for me than anything. the fact that they are "inside" a gzip/tar or zip file kind of keeps them categorically together. It does usually end up saving some space, not a ton.

jwr 12y ago

Alas, I think there is no "best way" right now. All solutions fall short. And the problem is not just with library management (although that's bad, too), but even with sharing photos with your family. For a couple of years I've been paying SmugMug to host my galleries, but recently finally got annoyed: they are great for pro photographers (who sell photos), but their goals are not aligned with mine. What I need is fairly simple: * online site, available at a specific (ONE) URL, that my entire family can bookmark (ONCE), * login/password required to enter, and I want multiple login/passwords, * HTTPS (duh), * no borg-minds harvesting my photos for advertising data, or doing face recognition, * good image quality, fast and responsive, both on mobile and desktop, * single gallery index, automatically ordered by date, * gallery date ranges extracted automatically from photos, * easy adding of new galleries, preferably just by uploading a directory with a bunch of images exported from Aperture/Lightroom/Photos/Whatever, * simple text-based search that finds galleries. Google Picasa, Flickr, SmugMug, whatever you pick — they all fail at this simple task (for various reasons). And some people even use Facebook to share images with family (sigh). I got so annoyed that I finally wrote my own solution. Which works. Costs me 6EUR/month for a Hetzner.de virtual server, but I can finally have all of the above "features" without any extra annoyance. Plus I get significantly better image quality than any other solution I've seen (mozjpeg kicks ass). And I don't depend on anyone, in particular on any company's whims or "strategic cutbacks", nor am I "the product being sold". I find it amazing that it's 2015 and I'm writing software that manages private online photo galleries. I think it doesn't speak well of the current business/tech landscape. (Incidentally, software to manage your photo collection is a whole another story. After Apple screwed me over with Aperture I am thinking hard about what to do about my photo archives.)

StavrosK 12y ago
I use Pixieset for that (mostly to share shoots with clients), and it does most of what you describe, but yes, even that isn't perfect.
walterbell 12y ago
For organization of a local collection of photos or other digital assets, http://www.cdwinder.de http://www.cdwinder.de looks promising. I wish there was an open-architecture alternative that could be scripted.

tommyd 12y ago

Tangentially related, I have to give a shout out to Chris Marquardt's "1000 Pics 1 Hour" Lightroom workflow: https://shop.chrismarquardt.com/bookshop/product/1-hour-1000-pics-supercharge-your-lightroom-workflow/ https://shop.chrismarquardt.com/bookshop/product/1-hour-1000.... Simple but effective way of dealing with the massive volume of images we capture with digital cameras, and reducing your photos to the real keepers. It's worth paying for the e-book as he goes into some interesting points, but in a nutshell the core concept is going through your imported photos in three passes: first, quickly pick all the ones that might have some potential merit (e.g. they are in focus and of something somewhat interesting), then go back through the picked ones and quickly rate them from 1-3 stars (1 being "has documentary value", 3 being "potentially a great photo), then take the 3 star ones and spend a bit of time retouching them if needed and giving them 4 or 5 stars if they are really special. The end result is that you can quickly get down to keeping maybe one in ten photos from a shoot - it makes the whole process feel a lot more manageable and opening Lightroom less scary! Plus, it reduces the amount of photos we store so you need to worry less about the capacity of your cloud solution ;)

StavrosK 12y ago
> The end result is that you can quickly get down to keeping maybe one in ten photos from a shoot Are you a photographer? I'd love to be having that much success, if I end up with three good photos out of 500, I call it a good day.
- Litost 12y ago
  1 in 10, or 3 out of 500? The problem with comparisons like this is it's horribly a) Judgemental - what you might class as a success can differ wildly from what someone else does. b) Situational - the success rate you get from differing events, shot under different conditions with different equipment, technique, time constraints and expertise etc. etc. can vary hugely, even when judged impartially. About the only time i ever feel like i can objectively judge a day a good one, is either 1) When i've been to the same event as any of my peers, using comparable gear and felt like i've held my own. 2) Achieved whatever it was i set out to, be that a great picture worthy of putting in a portfolio or sticking on the wall, a satisfied client, a new technique or lesson learnt, a memory captured or just enjoying whatever i did on the back of the excuse i was out with my camera. I wouldn't worry about the numbers, worring about the numbers would be when you got roped in at the last minute to be the main photographer at best friends wedding and all you had was a kodak brownie with half a roll of film left in it anything nowadays would be a cakewalk in comparison. Yes, don't stop pushing yourself, but at the end of the day, for me anyway, it's the experiences that count, the pictures are generally just reminders of things i've forgotten, can no longer experience or because the people in them are no longer with us.

mattbeckman 12y ago

Excited about Apple Photos. Every solution I've attempted to instigate with my wife has been met with resistance for minor technical or minor inconvenience reasons. Previously, it was an external drive with iPhoto that used what eventually was a merged iPhoto Library on an external drive. The external drive would be plugged in to the RAID 1 NAS periodically to preserve it. Finally, every week or so the NAS would backup to S3. However, all of that proved too inconvenient or too aggravating. Apple Photos is working great so far for us (albeit with a tight coupling).

outericky 12y ago

Just started using Amazon's cloud offering. Don't mind it... it's not perfect, but it's simple. Coupled with prime it's affordable. Easily back up multiple devices, videos, etc.

ValentineC 12y ago
How many photos do you usually upload? I was signed up for the trial, but stopped using it when the web client decided that it couldn't upload an entire camera's worth of photos (~70GB) at once.
- outericky 12y ago
  I don't use the web client. On my mac, I installed the desktop client, and that seemed to work fine for the 30 or so gb I did per batch. On the phones I backed up 2 phones, each with about 10gb of photo/video.

bane 12y ago

Since I started taking photos in earnest during travels in late 2004, I've collected around 120k photos. I don't really shoot very often, but when I do shoot, I take tons of photos. For example, on a 10 day trip to London, I took around 9,000 photos. I'm not a great photographer, but somewhere in that pile will be some great photos I'm pleased with. I don't want to be stuck with one software's way of doing things, so here's how I organize them: - Each trip is organized in a folder with a sortable date down to the month and general placename: "2014-05 London" - Inside that folder, at the end of every day of shooting, I dump all the photos into a folder with the name of the day of the trip: Day1, Day2, etc. Sometimes I'll use the date for the day instead. It doesn't really matter much. - Since during the course of a day, I might shoot at several locations, inside each "Day" folder, I organize the photos by location of the shoot or a short description of the event I was shooting, "Walking Around the Shard", "Tate Modern", "East Dulwich" etc. - I also use a couple different cameras, so inside each of those, I have a folder for each camera: Nikon, Lumix, etc. - Inside each of those I separate out pictures I took of my family or of me with pictures of sites. I usually upload the "personal" pictures to Google or Facebook so I can access them anywhere. - So if I want pictures of us from Picadilly circus on the 3rd day of our trip to London (and not the 6th day when we went there again), I go to 2014-05 London/Day 3/Picadilly Circus/Nikon/Us - If I want Pictures of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa from the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, I go to 2011-04 Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria della Vittoria/Canon - In each of these, I make a folder called "top" where I copy the photos I think are the best. As I process the photos I make a final selection and put the results in a folder called "done". - So the best, finished and processed, shots from my last example are 2011-04 Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria della Vittoria/Canon/top/done out of maybe 200 photos total at that church, only 2 or 3 might make it to "done". Even if I can't remember exactly which day I took a shot, the descriptive names are searchable in the file structure and I can usually find a specific photo in a few seconds. It's also self documenting so when I need to update my CV or remember when I took a trip somewhere, just navigating the file system provides all that information. There's often 1 more step, an agency also buys some of my photos, and their acceptance process is even more stringent than mine, so out of 20 or 30 "done" photos, I might only get 6-10 accepted for professional publication. I put those in a "published" photo under "done". I've started a new system as well. On January 1st, I take the previous year's photos and put them in a folder with that year. Only the current year's photos stay in my root photography folder. This makes things much tidier even if a little harder to find. So all of the above examples would have one more folder with just the 4 digit year before it. I make a global backup of my entire collection after every trip or shoot onto a couple other disks, one of which stays disconnected most of the time and in a drawer.

hammock 12y ago

How is there not a free service that does this? Or were free services just not reviewed in this article.

kijin 12y ago
Free services tend to come with a fairly small amount of disk space, nowhere near enough to store a lifetime of photos.

matdrewin 12y ago

Apple Photos would be great if they had more powerful family sharing. My dream is to have the family photo collection on all devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook) that we can both curate. Adobe Creative Cloud seems to support 1 collection with 2 people accessing it. Apple Photos is less expensive though, comes out to $5 a month for both of us (20GB + 200GB) vs the 10$ a month for the Lightroom.

copsarebastards 12y ago

The fact that this is a problem widely felt enough to be reported in the WSJ is a side effect of consumerism run rampant. Advertising campaigns that conflate high resolution with high quality combined with a "you can do anything" attitude have persuaded millions of people that they're great photographers when in fact they're just taking photos and videos which even they will likely never watch. Don't get me wrong, the technology is great and it's enabling some really talented people to do really awesome things. But those people spend literally years learning to compose shots, and hours after each photo session poring over thousands of duds to find the few gems. The average person isn't doing that. Let's face it, if you want the sunset in Puerto Rico captured in a photo you're better off letting the professionals do it. There are other definitions of quality. I have a lifetime of photos too, but my lifetime of photos amounts to about 300 photos taken over 30 years. They're not well-composed. A lot of them were shot on crappy hardware and it shows. A lot of them are pictures I didn't take. But every single one of them takes me back to something I care about and makes me smile. My vacation photos are of me and of people I care about, with things we liked. I don't need cloud storage to sync those 300 photos between my devices. They don't require organization; they're stored by date and time and that's it--I know where every photo was taken and who is in it by looking at it. The photos are stored on my laptop hard drive, a backup drive, and on my personal server. I sync them with rsync but if that didn't exist there are a dozen other ways that would work as well. If you're not a professional or trying to be one, then the solution isn't waiting to be invented. The solution is to stop taking so many pointless photos. Is sifting through hundreds of photos really improving your life? Do you really care about all of those photos, or could you figure out before you even take the photo which ones you're going to care about? And taking all those photos has other downsides too that have nothing to do with poor storage solutions. Trying to capture everything for the future prevents people from living in the present. I see people at concerts all the time watching the entire concert through their phones. Are you really going to rewatch that poorly lit video with its shitty sound later? You're damaging a present experience that could be awesome in exchange for a mediocre future experience that might not happen. Not to mention how this affects other people's experience: if you're tall it's not your fault, but if you're holding a phone between me and the artist I paid to see you're being an asshole. TL;DR: The best way to organize a lifetime of photos is to stop taking ones that don't matter.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I played with Photos and it is nice. The problem is if you also use Android and Windows devices. I have a simple setup that works well for me: I set my Android phone to not upload photos to my OneDrive Camera Roll unless I am on a wifi connection, and I turn off wifi on my phone when I am hiking, at family dinners - anytime I am taking a bunch of pictures. When I am home, I delete unwanted pictures before turning wifi back on and the pictures sync to OneDrive. All my picture file names are time stamped and I add descriptions to the some of the file names after the time stamp. Occasional descriptions help find stuff in a time stream. Every several months I rename my Camera Roll directory to Camera_year_month_day and create a new empty Camera Roll directory in OneDrive. It is easy to find any of my pictures, select groups of pictures and generate share links, etc. This same scheme used to work fine when I used Dropbox, and converting from Dropbox to OneDrive was easy and maintained this setup. edit: I use selective sync to device to not have all of my pictures on my devices, relying on the web OneDrive interface to show people pictures without taking up local disk space.

cdown 12y ago

If you really want to store a "lifetime of photos", you should probably consider having a better long-term backup strategy than just putting it in locations that are managed by a single piece of software. :-) Sure, some of these applications store a copy both online and on disk, but if your application chooses to run amok and delete everything, that's not really going to matter in many cases. I've seen horrifying things happen when iPhoto tries to sync with the cloud before. :-(