Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

Both Apple and Google have good photo organizers in their cloud suite. I use both. I assume offline tools exist as well. Did you Google “photo organizer?”

This isn’t really a philosophical problem. It’s the outcome of too many photos, easy to take and store, versus personal preference. I don’t pay much attention and rely on the cloud tools for organizing and searching. I know some people carefully curate their photos.

I do delete near-identical ones, otherwise... I do pretty much what you do. I have lots of photos I took to mostly to show someone in one email somewhere, etc.

I use SyncThing for a lot of stuff, if I have a small file of any kind that I really want to keep, it goes in a sync folder.

Until recently, device storage just kept growing, so I never needed to think about getting rid of anything, the folder just followed me on every device.

Now phones are unfortunately ditching microSD, which I hate, so available storage is actually smaller than before.

If you have an iPhone (and iCloud), you can save a ton of storage space by enabling Optimize iPhone Storage. Your original photos will be moved to the cloud, but you'll get low-res proxies on your phone (good enough for the phone display).

Alternate, low-tech solution: my sister goes through her photos (print and digital), curates a decent selection and turns them into print-on-demand photo books. Much more compact than a physical album, yet more accessible than a digital frame (and giftable too). Does require quite a bit of time investment though.

I’m also now past the 128gb mark. I rarely go back through my old photos, and the more time that passes the less connection I feel scrolling through my library.

Occasionally I post to Instagram (with an accompanying caption), and I like going through that more because each post is highly curated and annotated with my feelings at the time. Not too dissimilar to a physical photo album. So even if you did that privately, it’s worth a go.

Other than that, I figure that one day I may want to look at them, eg when I no longer have any mobility. The cost is so low that it doesn’t make sense for me to delete photos.

I copy everything, cameras, phone, scans, to disk, organized by device. Some stuff gets organized, such as scans of old family photos, documents, faceplates, devices and so on. I have organized some in relation to the home and property should I sell.

Mainly, as I transfer from sd cards, photos get ranked (not tagged or renamed) and the best make it to a "gallery" folder, or an "illustration" folder for posting on the other aggregator site I use. Only two for me.

The phone photos are transferred in giant blobs, so they never get sorted. I won't host my photos outside the home because of the great internet copy machine and hacking plague. And so I have yet to find any desktop tech that will categorize photos even in the simplest way. iOS image search is insanely dumb and useless. It finds people, but the few other categories are not helpful to me and often hilariously wrong in identification.

I don't use Apple's photos app because in the past, it failed to do anything but create a giant album with phony virtual folders, and the underlying files were organized by date in a tree that made access to the actual files a fright. And with cryptic names.

So I organize, to the extent I do, in the simplest ways. A few categories, but otherwise, some big bags, and a "best" folder that I copy to the iPad Pro for showing off. No third party involved. Benefits not worth the perceived risk.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a photographer so take with a grain of salt. A combination of iCloud and self hosted PhotoPrism [1] is perfect for me. My phone automatically backs up everything to both locations so I’m not worried about loosing anything and both do a good job of organizing by date/location/event. I can happily take photos without worrying that I’ll need to sift through them all at a later date. When I happen to use a camera that isn’t my phone (Mavic Mini being the most frequent), I can add the photos to both locations from my laptop. Apple does a great job of packaging and presenting ‘memories’ at a later date.

[1] https://www.photoprism.app/

Google Photos works well for me. There is unlimited storage (with compressed, but perfectly usable format).

I archive the originals to backups and can happily delete them from my phone. I have scanned all my old pictures, given them backdated exif dates (a bit fiddly), and, again, archived them and uploaded to Google Photos. I can scroll all the way back into the 1970s!

iPhone can automatically classify your pictures to different group. google can mark your pictures with date and GPS, sometimes this is enough

Me and my wife wanted something to better categorise memories, so we actually yearly go through the lady 12 months of photos and out together an album with 80-120 pages that we order.

We he done this since our first year dating and now have multiple "Year X" albums that we sometimes pick up and go through.

We do also have a Google Home Max that is connected to a shared album we add photos to, which we keep in the kitchen and see latest photos pop up there, which we love seeing. But the physical albums are great because we hand picked those photos while going through the events of the year.

So in my opinion, there's no reason not to also have physical albums

I think it definitely feels like clutter in some ways. I use Google Photos, and I practically back-up every picture I take, including screenshots. Indirectly, I find screenshots to be just as important to memory-making as pictures I capture.

Clutters up pretty quickly so I star pictures I like. If there is a special event/vacation, I tend to save all pictures in a folder and later upload that to cloud.

Definitely looking forward to using Apple's new Journal app on iOS 17 to journal special events and memories.

I've been taking digital photos since 1997. I've got everything stored in a set of folders stored exclusively by date, like \photos\source\2023\20230927 for today, with all of the folders created by the camera stored in those folders. The best photos move "up" into the folder.

I use DigiKam to do face tagging. A photo of people without names is effectively useless to anyone else. Recently, I've recently started discussions about what photos my family want to keep after I'm gone. I don't want to leave them with a ton of things they won't care about, and don't want to make them feel guilty when deleting them.

I used to keep everything, but I've started clearing out the lesser quality images.

I take photos with an SLR & phone so have built up quite a large collection of photos and quick early sorting & review is the key for good future usability of your photos.

My workflow is to import all photos onto the computer into an Import folder, sorted by day for the SLR and month for the phone (using the SLR creates higher volume but only for some days). I use Photosync to move from phone to PC as it only moves new photos and sorts into folders. Apple cloud wants to put everything in one folder, which is awful.

After that personal photos & memories go into one parent folder divided by year/month/ or year/occasion and all the random photos, photos of notes, similar photos where somebody blinked, etc... are removed at this stage. This leaves me with a lower number of meaningful photos to be able to look back on (or be surfaced by the On This Day feature of OneDrive).

Non-personal photos, e.g. nature, graffiti, whatever go into a different folder with theme based sub-folders. This can mean that if I go on holiday somewhere I have photos of the family in a different place to photos of cool things that I saw but that's what I'm after. Non-personal photos are the one most likely to have future editing & posting on photo sites or used as a background.

I started using Google photos first but then stopped using it after I found out that they completely lock you in and you can't really export all your photos seamlessly while still having the time stamps. Now I have all of my photos on onedrive but will migrate to immich in a few months. Open source and selfhosted btw. https://github.com/immich-app/immich

  exiv2 -T rename image.jpg  

I copy photos from several smartphones, SLR, etc onto a single massive HDD. Use Shotwell under Debian to organize and tag.

Previously used iPhoto on a MBP, but even on the latest hardware it seems far slower than Shotwell. So I no longer bother.

Everything i snap gets transferred onto my server running photoprism.

I typically take photos and videos on my phone. I periodically manually copy all of those to my computer: camera pictures, screenshots, downloads, WhatsApp or other app media and so on.

I then tag those with date/event and compress the folders with 7-Zip. Those archives are then duplicated across 2 different local drives and 1 remote drive. I don't really tag the contents or store other metadata apart from the event name, if one exists.

For videos about software development or YouTube/Twitch streams, I render them with Kdenlive and put them on my PeerTube instance as acceptable quality backups. I actually needed those once because the OBS audio setup was messed up and YouTube only included my voice in some videos, not the computer/other audio track.

In short, do the simplest thing that meets your needs, but ideally also have backups. Drives occasionally fail, data loss is unpleasant.

Synology Nas with Photos, I have an app on smartphone or upload by webUI https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos

We make one print-on-demand photobook for each year of holiday trips. It's very nice, no worry at all about data getting lost or whatever (of course you can keep your files too) and the process of making a book is also a nice way to curate and go over all the memories again. Making a new book is always a good occasion to have a look at the earlier ones too. You can show it to people without instigating a looking-at-phones party. If you're into photography at all it's also just nice to see them in physical format.

I put eveything in a folder named YYYY-MM-DD_XXXX where XXXX is an general identifier of the pictures, usually a place, sometime an event or a person. When there are several days that belong together I use YYYY-MM-DDstart_YYYY-MM-DDend_XXXXXXXX/YYYY-MM-DD

It's more difficult since I have a cellphone that take good pictures, since I can have a lot of day with one or two pictures instead of sevral in few days like before, but it's also an opportunity to get rid of unwanted pictures

For photo scanning, I'm just using a batch number that I also add to the physical media

My plan is to make some albums for memory in the future

I stopped making photos after I realized that I never watch none of 100GB photos I have. In case I make them, I don't care about doing anything to them, most of photos I do I use immediately. And I even do not care about deleting some photos I have already used. Just push all of them to the HDD in case I need to clean some memory. After I have losed one of HDD because of dropping, I have a cool tech solution to store HDDs as close to floor as possible.

I star/favourite some photos after taking them. If I lost everything except the starred ones I would be ok. Backup on dropbox, and dropbox in n computers.

Once in a blue moon I collect some starred pictures and print a physical album, several if it involves family (one album for them). If I am browsing photos on my phone and I see a bad one, I will delete it (will then sync the delete automatically), but only when I casually run into them.

Just repeating my comment from a recent DSLR/film thread [1]:

I don't shoot film anymore since about 15 years, it's totally not worth the hassle. However, I did stick to this mindset of first trying to figure out whether it's worth it overall and only then taking a picture (except when shooting plants/insects for later determination etc, then different metrics come into play). It has a lot of advantages for me, mainly because I really despise what the OP also does (shooting pretty much everything, taking x rounds of the same scene then figuring out the best one). Instead I end up with a sort of pre-curated list and then go through it once to delete what wasn't a good shot or turned out to not evoke any emotion whatsoever when seeing it again. Sure, I might miss something somewhere, but that still hurts a lot less then the mind-numbing and time-wasting alternatives.

tldr; I can get a strong feeling of attachment, but it takes a really good picture or a certain subject, preferrably the combination, before that feeling kicks in. And then I do get back to look at them, because it's worth it.

I did in the past try to not do that and just keep a lot more pictures, but it just feels boring to look at them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37369490

I have not found any solution that even approaches Google Photos. That is: a reverse chronological feed with shared and private albums around events or interesting sets.

Google also identifies people and pets which is useful but not terribly reliable. Search works reasonably well which gives a forth avenue for accessing memories.

I do love the automatic retrospections which solves the problem of photos being stored and never looked at. That's the fifth avenue.

Finally, integration with maps gives you the ability to find photos from a given area. Even though it relies on simple meta data from the photo, this does not seem to be replicated well anywhere else.

Overall, I am very worried that Google removed the option to buy additional storage for legacy Workspace and don't know what to do when I inevitably fill up my current subscription.

At one point right after college I went berserk on my digital clutter (yup those identical photos and useless photos and mostly useless videos). 90GB (iirc) to 3.x GB (this I am sure). This was around a decade ago.

I never looked back.

Now I rarely take photos, videos are even rarer. I actually realised it doesn’t matter if I have too many of them. And even among those few captured media, I do regular cleanups. Those are so few now that cleanups take no time.

The trick is to do the clean up once and make sure you never have to do that kind of cleanup ever again. There’s no other way. Literally none.

No, I lied - there’s another way. You forget about it. Just keep clicking, keep hoarding, keep paying for storage. I mean this is fine as well on the lines of whatever floats one’s boats.

Hint: If I am looking at a great scenery, or a building, or a spectacle I look at it right then and there with just my eyes and nothing in front of it. What I mean is I do not let my phone look at it and then go back home and look at what my phone saw or not.

I know you didn’t ask for it. But you did mention philosophy ;-)

> cool tech solutions

tl;dr. There’s no hack to cure this. It’s all about discipline or preference and being okay with it, either way.

Own your digital clutter/garbage. Don’t let it own you.

> How do you go about managing your photos?

1. Saved all Photos in PC directories as follows: $HOME/Pictures/<YYYYMMDD - Event>

2. Ensured '$HOME/Pictures' is regularly backed up to at-least one more disk.

3. Just use the File Manager (with Thumbnails) & Image Viewer to view the Photos.

> Does it feel like digital clutter?

No, not one bit.

> How do you approach memory making through photos?

Capture as many as possible, delete duplicates/similar. Retain good ones.