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Ask HN: How do you handle your personal photo library?

7 points by baens ↗ HN
I've finally accumulated enough photos in iPhoto that I believe it is time to move/expand to something else. I have the library sufficiently backed up, but more wondering workflows/software/services for managing large collections of personal photos.

So I propose the question to you, how do you handle your photo library? What services do you use (be it cloud/local nas/etc...)? Best software for viewing/managing the collection? Any kind of workflow tips/tricks (i.e. how to combine photos from all the different devices into one collection)?

8 comments

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dalerus
My wife is way better at cataloging our images than I am, but we use Dropbox for everything.

All images get put into a folder by event and year. We have IFTTT save all Facebook images and Instargram images into Dropbox as well.

For viewing, we use iPhoto mostly.

jpetersonmn
Badly, have photos all over on different drives. It's always something I want to organize, but never get around to it.
kzisme
For me, i use Dropbox for small backups from my phone, and every so often I backup my phone onto my desktop. I have each of my phone backups in a folder. This folder is then copied onto two other drives for safe keeping.

For other pictures and such I just have them broken down of where they originated ie: skype, facebook,downloads from specific websites, etc. Then I follow the same process as above.

therealmocker
I use Picturelife (https://picturelife.com/home) for photo backups. They have a "Here's what you were doing one year ago today" email feature that is fun. Mainly just used to get photos off-device and off-site.
baens
This is the first time I've seen this service and it looks fantastic!
midnitewarrior
I use a 2TB Synology NAS that's backed up to Amazon's extremely cheap Glacier backup service.
ajinkyakale
google photos is pretty neat and space expansion is not expensive either
vlad_didenko
About 23K photos, negligible personal video. Software: OSX, Adobe Lightroom. Local storage: MacBook Pro with PCI flash, catalog (Lightroom folder, 35GB of previews and catalog backups), local working set for travel (10GB folder). Local storage backed up by OSX Time Machine. Central storage: ~900GB (as of today, probably 10-15GB worth of dups) on Synology DS713+ useful RAID1, access over 1Gbps Ethernet, 9K MTU. Backed up to a RAID6 on a DIY Ubuntu system over rsync. Plan to start backing up to Amazon Glacier.

Lightroom is a nice workflow manager. I got it when accumulated about 3K photos all over the local storage. It allowed to start the catalog with photos in their current locations and then gradually drag them to central locations, while maintaining a directory structure of my liking. Thoughtful backups and redundant storage are not less important anyhow.