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Ask HN: What Photo Solution do you have?

9 points by pettycashstash2 ↗ HN
Over time, I've gathered a collection of photos spread across different devices, such as aging computers and obsolete smartphones. What are the common approaches that individuals use to effectively manage photos originating from various family smartphones, dated computers, and similar origins, all while guaranteeing the security of offsite backups for this diverse assortment of pictures? Additionally, what techniques can be employed to track down photos residing on antiquated Windows systems, outdated network drives, and similar locations? How about backing up to the cloud? Where and How? (AWS? RSYNC?)

8 comments

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aborsy
Synology Photos. The NAS also backs up to various clouds.
pettycashstash2
Thank you. Any suggestions for locating pictures on various os's and devices ( iphone, android, linux, old windows boxes)?
randomluck040
My naive solution was to gather everything at one place before sorting everything and backing it up on a NAS. It was a lot of work but I didn’t find anything that could’ve helped me to accelerate the process so I did it manually. After having everything at a single place it was pretty straight forward though. I’m using directories to sort my stuff because at the end it’s independent of software and tags that might deprecate at some point. I’ve backed everything up using rsync.
pettycashstash2
Thanks for this. I feel somewhat overwhelmed myself. I am on device 1 of x. X because I actually don't want to know how many more i have to go though. I am manually copying things into 1 location. I also fear once done I will have to deal with deduplication, etc. I started with windows machine and found microsoft's robocopy. Supposedly its an improved version of xcopy. Still copying.........
randomluck040
That‘s what I use on Windows machines as well. I have to admit that I don’t care too much about duplicates as long as it’s not Gigabytes of dupes. There is software that might help with getting rid of duplicates (see Excire), the question is how much time it would take and how many TB of storage I could buy with the time lost. Outside of that: if images are meaningful to you, think about printing them out. It’s a different way of remembering the images and a printed out version feels different than digital. You don’t even have to hang them but touch them and go through them once in a while (I tend to not look through digital images ever after „archiving“ them). Good luck and don’t give up. It’s ugly for the first time but if you control the influx of new images in a meaningful way it‘ll get easier.
ketanmaheshwari
I select pictures from my albums periodically and get them printed. I found it simple and effective.
sys32768
On Windows I would use these tools:

SearchMyFiles [1] = You could use this to search, but mainly it's a good free duplicate file finder.

Everything [2] = This tool is VERY fast for doing a rapid initial searches so you can identify the locations of images (again, you need to specify the extensions). You can also limit the size so you don't end up hitting thousands of tiny GIFs. Unsure what versions of Windows this supports, but SearchMyFiles probably supports more older systems.

Bulk Rename Utility [3] = Fantastic renaming utility which you can use to add prefixes or whatever to file sets en masse, which will help you or anyone else later search the resulting files you find, not to mention keep things organized and avoiding duplicate file names. It also will extract the "Taken" date from an image (if it is embedded) so you can use that in the file name automatically.

IrfanView [4] = This free tool has a rapid thumbnail viewer and batch converter that is very handy, but remember to check the option to retain the original file date stamp if you're converting anything for any reason. Date stamps on images are very important.

Don't forget movie files often stored with images (.MOV, .MPG, .QT, etc). These can eat a lot of space. I used HandBrake to convert a lot of large uncompressed .MOV files to MP4. Of course with storage so inexpensive these days, I would keep the uncompressed movies for the sake of preservation.

In your project I would likely have top-level folders for each person's collected photos or device, then sort the images/movies within by year folders.

[1] https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html

[2] https://www.voidtools.com/

[3] https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/

pettycashstash2
Wow. Thank you. My 1st cpu finished after 20 hrs. I am trying to find time to set up next oldie and connect it. Finding or resetting passwords is becoming another challenge. Very much appreciate the tools suggestions.