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Ask HN: Photo cataloging programs

4 points by rt2016 ↗ HN
I'm looking for a program to catalog my midsize photo collection (about 25K photos spanning the last decade). I'm at the point where I have so many photos that I'm starting to lose track of the context each photo was taken in, this is quite important to me so I'm looking for some software help.

These are the kind of features I'm looking for:

1) ability to maintain an index of photos searchable on tags like location, year, and custom ones like "landscapes", "to print", etc.

2) ability to batch add new photos to the index, all with the same tags/description.

3) ability to add a small description to an individual photo (ex. sunset view from Haleakala volcano, Maui) and have the photo be accessible by searching for "sunset" or "Maui"

4) catalog is transferrable between computers. I have my entire collection on Dropbox so it's synced on my laptop, desktop and my parent's desktop. I want the catalog to be available on all of these computers at best, and at the minimum I want there to be a way to easily transfer the index if I upgrade one of my computers.

What are some programs with these features? If there isn't one that meets all desired criteria, are there some that come close and what are they missing? I don't mind paying a small amount (ideally a one-time purchase rather than subscription) but obviously free is better.

One of the obvious choices is Adobe Lightroom, but I haven't found a detailed enough walkthrough of the cataloging/tagging/search/indexing features to commit to paying ~$100/year. I'm also not really interested in the batch editing capabilities of Lightroom at the moment because I have a standalone copy of Photoshop Elements that I use for <1% of the pictures. Is Lightroom still the best option?

Thanks for the advice.

6 comments

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kaishiro
Being remarkably lazy, the idea of manually tagging so many images gives me hives. It'd be fun to try piping your collection through an image processing API, a la https://cloud.google.com/vision/, and seeing what comes out the other end. Could save you a bunch of time re: the tagging of items like "landscapes".
rt2016
I would absolutely prefer to not have to individually tag photos with high-level tags, but my limited search of desktop programs didn't surface any that were capable of machine vision to do it for me. I should have considered cloud solutions too, thanks for the suggestion!
kaishiro
Cool! Would love to hear how it turns out. I haven't done much more than just play with it on one off photos. Good luck!
kejaed
Have upu considered Google Photos? It meets pretty much all of your criteria with machine vision help there to help search and tag too. I'm invested in the Apple ecosystem and have all my pictures in iCloud, but have recently set Google Photos to sync all my 37K photos for free (if you allow compression) and am very happy with its features.

I did this because our home laptop died and we are now tablet and phone only in the house other than work computers. So my Mac/time Capsule/Backblaze backup strategy was thwarted. I didn't trust iCloud to be the only canonical copy of my photos, so now I'm using Google Photos as a cloud backup for the cloud.

rt2016
I'll check that out, thanks! I have an entry level DSLR (18MP) so I was hesitant to Google Photos due to the compression, but the features look great. I didn't realize the machine vision for search and tagging was all included in the price/free for compressed pictures It's probably cheaper to pay for Google Drive space than pay for Lightroom, so it's probably worth it.

One followup question, since the browser is cloud-based, have you experienced significant latency viewing your photos? For example, when I use the Dropbox webapp it takes a couple to load thumbnail previews for a folder of 200ish photos while Finder on my Mac does it basically instantaneously.

kejaed
I've found no lag when using Google photos, however it is mostly on the iDevices. When I do log in from a laptop I have never noticed any lag. This is in contrast to logging into iCloud photos from a browser which often has significant lag.

As my photos have been syncing with Google it has been automatically creating slide shows and collages. Each day I'm getting something new as it goes back in time. Pretty neat.