When I got a new phone, I bought 128GB thinking it would be more than enough. But it's not.
I find that I just snap photos of things I want to remember. Some photos are nearly identical, but I don't delete them. I feel a sense of attachment. Though I never go back and look at them. Periodically, I offload a bunch to an HDD and then I definitely don't look at them.
I don't have social media to post photos. I have a digital frame I upload pics to, but that also just fills up over time.
How do you go about managing your photos? Does it feel like digital clutter? How do you approach memory making through photos?
Finally, any cool tech solutions are welcome.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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 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.
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.
Previously used iPhoto on a MBP, but even on the latest hardware it seems far slower than Shotwell. So I no longer bother.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Also, all current photo library solutions are deficient and built mostly for a single flashy keynote presentation, not for managing actual photo libraries. Sharing with your family has only recently started arriving at Apple, for example. There is no good and reliable way to manage and keep metadata with your photos (like extended descriptions), and it seems everybody at Apple believes that the EXIF date in an image is the actual date that the photo was taken (apparently nobody at Apple used older digital cameras, or scanned anything from paper/film).
I was severely bitten by this approach, because I entrusted my archives to Aperture, which Apple later discontinued. I am not left with a large library which I can't migrate anywhere: first, because there is nowhere to migrate it TO, and second, because I know of no other programs that can manage photo stacks: groupings of several related images (like the front and back of a scanned paper photo, or several versions of a scan). I still don't know what to do about this library. I'm thinking about writing my own exporter that will read the Aperture sqlite database and export the pictures with all the metadata.
I thought about writing my own long-term photo archival and sharing software and making it open-source, but when I realized which particular group of lowlives this will be very useful for, it gave me pause and I'm reconsidering. Perhaps I'll write something for my own use.
1. Saved all Photos in PC directories as follows:
$HOME/Pictures/ 2. Ensured '$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.
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.
For photos of our kids, we have an iCloud shared album that is shared with family (grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends, etc) so that becomes the curation of all the photos of the kids. Not ideal since it's in lower resolution.
Every year for the kids birthdays I make a collage of the highlights of the past year and print it in A2 as birthday banner.
For memorable trips after the trip I go through and create an album and put it in an album. I like looking back at these when I'm feeling nostalgic or anxious about my place in life.
For stuff I like to refer to like hobby projects, stuff around the apartment (device setup/model numbers/wiring etc) etc I create albums and sort them in folders.
When I need to find a photo, if it's not in an album 90% of the time I find it through the geotagged world map feature. "that campsite that weekend was over here somewhere, oh there's that photo of the nice stream we bathed in"
I do not take the time to remove duplicates etc, it would take weeks. I can do that when I'm retired...
All I need is a mini-press operation
Social media and sharing isn't very positive either, I think. There's a tendency to try and represent a more idealized existence, and when other people do it too, you can end up with envy for a fiction. Not an original insight.
Brief, occasional reminders of past times can be nice. Google Photos' alerts about X years ago isn't bad, and can sometimes generate a smile, without risking getting stuck into a 30+ minute nostalgia session.
1. Upload all your photos to personal cloud such as google/apple/dropbox 2. Self host a similar cloud service such as photoprism (https://www.photoprism.app/)
Both have pros and cons and depending on your technical skills you can opt for option 2 of self hosting.
Option 1 will cost but privacy and getting locked out of account by company is big problem.
I personally use option 2 and feature wise its similar to big companies. let me know if you need more details about option 2.
The more manual the camera is, the more you have to think about what you want to shoot because it takes more skill, but it's also more rewarding when you take a great photo.
You end up with fewer pictures, but you value them more because you worked for them and they're not as disposable.
For the photos I took with my camera, I use Digikam with an external hard drive, since they're relatively big images. I put them to folders named YYYY-MM-DD-$EVENT_NAME, merging multi-day events into a single folder, using the date of last day.
Digikam has tons of features, and allows me to organize and browse photos the way I want. For RAW processing, I use Darktable, which is fantastic.
I don't know how it is backed up. It feels great, not knowing.
If I see a picture I don't like I delete it immediately. The main problem is that we keep to many pictures. From time to time I go through some months of pictures and delete as much as I can, add some stars to good pictures and postprocess some.
Also from time to time we order prints of all of the "filtered" pictures and then we put them into a physical photo album. We certainly looked at these photos as a family but we never look at the digital ones.
The big problem with all kinds of digital collections is that you don't find anything at some point.
The photos on my NAS replicate what I capture with my phone. I actively delete photos of the mundane such as a random snap of food I cooked. I let the iOS photos app automatically create albums of people and places and display those as a widget on my home screen. I go through it every now and then to clean it up from bad photos that accidentally got uploaded. This collection has survived a transfer from Android to iOS since it is platform agnostic.
My gallery on my website is for hosting things I want to be shared and has a higher standard for what I select. I also don’t have social media, so when people ask where they can view photos of my trip, I point them to my website. Right now it has photos from vacation trips that were mostly shot on film. It’s more artistic in nature and features landscapes rather than humans. The idea is to capture the essence of the photo albums of the past that my older family members have. I can always go to my website and view photos from a trip. Shooting those photos on film makes the shots more deliberate and more limited in nature. I could always get them printed physically to place into a photo album, but I’m happy with storing them digitally for now to reduce clutter. The gallery feature itself is something I really enjoyed building.
I like the balance of viewing subjectively more interesting photos in my gallery but also being able to see the behind the scenes photos with my family in my digital collection. I’m waiting for a way in the future to more conveniently display my photos locally on a digital photo album such as a docked iPad.
I don't. I used to manage my photos very carefully, doing all sorts of the things you can think of. Until I stopped doing that, because I realize all that effort gives me no real-life benefit and is a waste of time. Nowadays I just auto upload photos to Google Photos and call it a day. Occasionally I delete photos that are duplicates or are not meaningful, but that's it.
I don't manage my photos, which I take a fair deal of as i've been living more or less nomadically for 6 years now. I just organize them by year, as the filenames are datestamped.
If a particular photo is something I know will trigger a negative memory, for better or worse I put those in a folder called "lockbox" with no sorting - the idea being I know what i'm getting into when I look in there.
I very rarely review my photos, sometimes once a year when i'm coming up with my plans for the year.
This also matches my journaling - which I treat the same way. I've been journaling almost daily for 20+ years. It's a huge treat to go back to points in time and see what I was thinking and what was going on. I'm regularly surprised on how bad our memory is of what happened vs what we remember happening. I'll often visit it when i'm in a low spot / trapped in a rut.
I have it setup to automatically backup from my phone to a NAS. Then the NAS backs up routinely to Backblaze. It's all automated, I don't even think about it. And it gives me great piece of mind, so it doesn't feel like clutter or a burden.
I routinely cleanup the photos from my phone, but even then, some photos I really like and I keep them on my phone. I try to keep at least a couple of photos from each 'memorable' moment I've captured, to look when I feel like it.
Keeping some photos on my phone helps when impromptu, in a conversation, you want to show something, e.g. Chatting with a barber recently, he asked about my summer and told him about a vacation I took, he was intrigued by some places I described, so he asked if I had some pics, I showed him the few I had on my phone from that.
Many photos I take, I won't keep on my phone because they go to the NAS and I clear them from my phone, but every once in a while, I open the folder in my NAS and it's cool to see and remember all those moments. That 'feel good' increases with time, so I expect the older I get, these will be more valuable. I don't do photos only, I also sometimes record a conversation with a loved one, just because I know one day they won't be there and I'd like to capture their voice.
Recently an aunt was telling me about a prank/revenge thing she did to an ex of her when she was a teenager, I was in tears laughing, and recorded that secretly. In a few years, when she's no longer with us, I'll be damn glad to have captured that and revisit that memory.
But my wife takes a gazillion photos of everything. I organize them in a directory hierarchy by date, on my NAS. I also run a private wiki at home, and have pages of "special collections" of certain photos by subject matter/event/ whatever that link into the hierarchical directory collection.
It takes effort to choose photos and make the book, but it is pleasant to see ourselves quickly over the years
The world is full of phones, which are full of photos, that nobody will ever look at.
Look more intently, see more, evaluate and remember, photograph less.
We have thousands of photos of our children who were born when smartphones were prevalent. Opposed to my own childhood (early 70s) were only a dozen or so photos of me exist. Then I am beginning to calculate the time it takes for someone to watch the 10.000 or so photos that will be made of our kids until the are grown up. Are they supposed to go all through this mess of duplicates? And no one will ever have the time to go through all photos and bring order to it.
So yes, it feels like digital clutter but on the other hand it really does revive a lot of (mostly positive) emotions to go through a huge collection of family photos.
[0]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism [1]: https://github.com/marklr/labelizer
We ll be able to AI-generate photos of ourselves in the past, in any location.
1. syncthing uploads photos from my phone to my NAS (receive only)
2. scheduled systemd service (hourly) on my NAS reads newly received photos, renames them by date, moves it to my photos catalog
3. photoprism starts a scan of the photo library (triggered by systemd when 2. finishes)
4. weekly systemd service syncs the library to backblaze