{NA} Storing and organizing photos among many sources

[RussR]

Okay, like most people I have pictures a lot of places - on a hard drive, a backup hard drive, my 3 family members' Google Photos account.

The ones on the hard drives are nicely sorted by year/date/event (through brute force naming of folders). The ones on the Google Photos accounts are not really sorted (just by the date), although the 3 of us do sometimes share them to a shared album if we're on vacation or something. I'd like to get them onto the hard drive easilier. Because our Google Photos account size keeps growing and I really don't want to step up to the next level of subscription.

And then of course with the Google Photos on each of our phones, there are tons of pictures in there that aren't related to a vacation or anything else worth keeping, just the random photos that fill up your account.

It's a mess and I'm beginning to despise the work involved in getting them all into one easy-to-access place with some semblance of organization.

For example, I can download all the photos in a Google Photos album, but it puts it in a ZIP file for download (not a problem) but then it sets the "date modified" on each individual photo file to today's date/time, not the date/time the photo was taken. Making further sorting work-intensive. And the ones taken on the iPhone in the family save as an HEIC file, which I'd then need to convert...

I'm sure that there are tools/apps/methods/AI now to help with this, the more automated the better. Anybody have any good suggestions versus just brute force (which means it just gets worse because I don't want to deal with it)?

 

[SixPapaCharlie]

I got the same problem and I almost have the mindset of just deleting them all.

That sounds terrible. But the next generation isn't like our generation. They're not going to want them especially at the incredible volume that we have.

I have a 16 terabyte storage appliance full of probably hundred thousand photos and videos. I told the the kids you can just toss it when I die if that's easier.

Attention spans are shrinking and future generations are only going to care about things for about a day.

I don't know, I think they'll just categorize all of our social media accounts into some sort of ancestry type website where everybody can go see what passed generations we're doing and mostly eating.

 

[KeepWatch]

It takes a mindset change. It's easy to feel like if you delete it, it's gone forever. I'd argue that the opposite is true. If you end up with tens of thousands of files, the storage isn't really the issue. The real issue is that it's not consumable to you or anyone else in the future generations.

I haven't yet put my money where my mouth is, but I my aim to to set a personal goal of <20 photos for every event no matter what. Videos....... if you're not willing to edit them into a summary reel, the enjoyment versus storage requirement ratio is super low.

Pick your few favorites from each event, delete the rest. Edit videos into shorts, delete the original video files.

 

[SixPapaCharlie]

Also my wife kinda does what @KeepWatch mentioned and takes the top x best photos from any memorable event and makes them into photo books.



I think those have more value for the kids than piles of digital images.

 

[Brad W]

A few years ago I was trying to port my photos from one google account to another. Was very disappointed that I couldn't find a way to port them, complete with all of their metadata. I used to occasionally use the feature that allowed search by location. That made it super easy to find the pictures when we'd be somewhere and ask ourselves, "Remember that time when we were here before a bunch of years ago?"
I had used google's takeout but I couldn't find a way to import that data into anything that I had at the time.
It was a bummer but over the years I only miss it very occasionally.

The other thing I did at that time was what @JjCc Jay suggested...I did a quick pass clean-out, trying to get rid of all blurry shots, poorly exposed shots, etc...and the duplicates when I'd take several shots of the same thing knowing that someone is going to have their eyes closed or something. (funny discovery was that very often I'd have a handful of shots of a group of people, I'm sure I had been thinking that at least one of them has to be good.... and i'd find that all of them were garbage.)
It really wasn't much of a "quick" pass thing... I had/have a lot of pictures and it took me a lot of sessions sitting down while watching TV or whatever and clicking through a date range.... Honestly I think I still have a year or so's worth of shots that I haven't gotten through, but I've lost track of the dates that I hadn't culled yet.
Regardless, I still have way too many pictures and I probably should make another pass through cleaning more of them out.

Two good things came from that project. First was that now I'm much better about taking fewer pictures, trying to capture only a sampling of what counts. I don't have a particular number in mind as @KeepWatch suggested, but I do try to keep it in check. The second was that when I'm on a trip or at an even where I take some pictures, I'm much better about each evening or ASAP afterwords, I'll go back and delete the garbage shots...and I'm much more brutally honest about which ones are garbage.

 

[finnleyross21]

Okay, like most people I have pictures a lot of places - on a hard drive, a backup hard drive, my 3 family members' Google Photos account.

The ones on the hard drives are nicely sorted by year/date/event (through brute force naming of folders). The ones on the Google Photos accounts are not really sorted (just by the date), although the 3 of us do sometimes share them to a shared album if we're on vacation or something. I'd like to get them onto the hard drive easilier. Because our Google Photos account size keeps growing and I really don't want to step up to the next level of subscription.

And then of course with the Google Photos on each of our phones, there are tons of pictures in there that aren't related to a vacation or anything else worth keeping, just the random photos that fill up your account.

It's a mess and I'm beginning to despise the work involved in getting them all into one easy-to-access place with some semblance of organization.

For example, I can download all the photos in a Google Photos album, but it puts it in a ZIP file for download (not a problem) but then it sets the "date modified" on each individual photo file to today's date/time, not the date/time the photo was taken. Making further sorting work-intensive. And the ones taken on the iPhone in the family save as an HEIC file, which I'd then need to convert...

For automatically sorting photos into YEAR/MONTH folders on your hard drive, free utilities like DigiKam or PhotoMove are excellent choices; they read EXIF data and organize everything for you in minutes. As for HEIC files from iPhones, DigiKam or a simple converter like CopyTrans can easily batch-convert them to standard JPEG format. Bringing order to that pile of files and freeing up cloud storage feels like a real win, and for some relaxing downtime after the sorting is done, you can check out the AussCasinosAnalyzer $100 bonus page for some great leisure offers. Give PhotoMove a try it really saves hours of manual work.
I'm sure that there are tools/apps/methods/AI now to help with this, the more automated the better. Anybody have any good suggestions versus just brute force (which means it just gets worse because I don't want to deal with it)?

How many gigabytes of photos have accumulated so far?

 

[flyingron]

While the interface isn't my absolute favorite, it works for me. I've been using FLICKR for nearly 20 years now.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

I take a LOT of pictures for very random reasons sometimes. I'll be at Costco and see a product I'm interested in, I'll shoot the price and maybe do some comparison shopping online later.

I also have Live Photos turned on all the time. I have small children, and often there's only about a 20th of second where they were both cooperating and smiling nicely. And even with adults, there's the whole blinking thing. I've found that with pictures of people, Live Photos are the way to go - I can almost always make an OK shot into a good shot just by changing the key frame. In fact, that's probably my most common photo edit these days. And Live Photos are occasionally good for other reasons too.

Well, put the two together - I really don't need Live photos of price tags, but I know if I turn Live off that I'm going to miss really good stuff later. However, they do take up more room, and now my 512GB phone is pretty much full.

I also am a "quality via quantity" photographer, so I will do things like take a dozen shots of my kid on the first day of school just to be sure I get a good one. I don't really need or use them all, but when I'm going back I like seeing all the "bad" ones as they do show the kid's personality on that day pretty well.

What I really want is a tool that can go through all of my photos, recognize the Live photos of things like price tags, and tag them and present them to me for review and easy flattening down to a single frame and quite possibly a lower resolution. It'd also be great to combine a bunch of very similar shots into some sort of multi-frame format, as that could do a lot more compression than single-shot compression due to all the similar data between the different shots.