I’ve got a bajillion pictures stretching back years. All unorganized. I’d like something that lets me bothorganize them easily and browse them. I miss the days were pulling out photo albums was a thing.
I do half-assed used shotwell, a program on linux but it’s work to keep it going. And I don’t keep all the pics on my phone, because that’s too much space.
I just went and printed out like 150 pics from the last 5-10 years or so plus a photo album. But it seems like I should be embarrased with this flashback 1980’s technique. Gotta be a better way?
I have too many photos, and should prune them. I’m also interested in suggestions.
But the short answer is that from time to time i take some photos i like and make a folder on my phone, which is basically my photo album. And i guess anything that doesn’t make the cut to be on my phone (organized into a named folder) is a less valuable photo.
I think think ours are on Google Photos. They get out there straight from the phone, and you can upload more if you want. Not sure the capacity but I think it’s like $2/month.
Plus a 2T hard drive that gets backed up every so often.
Folders by year and I think quarter. I have a bunch of printed photos in albums. Those are from when my kids are small. Honestly I’m kinda done with cataloging every moment.
I do have a creative daughter who goes through the printed photos that are not in albums and changes out what’s hanging on the wall from time to time. So that’s fun.
Digital camera/phone pictures/videos since mid-2008 get automagically filed by date (I have a bunch of folders named in yyyymmdd format), initially via a Linux script, and more recently with a Powershell script.
Digitial camera/phone pictures taken before then were manually placed in descriptively named folders (e.g. “Cruise 2007”).
I’ve had “digitize the family photo albums” that I grabbed when emptying my parents’ house (and again when I recovered the stuff from my father’s nursing home room) on my to-do list for a very long time. The magnitude of the task and not having a good way to preserve the captions attached to some of the photos have been good excuses to keep pushing that project off.
Since I’m the last of my family, and am extremely unlikely to have kids…well, that also provides a certain disincentive from tackling the task.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t on the verge of AI-based photo organizing/naming…or perhaps a utility exists already.
Im looking at piwigo, a program that organizes by albums, has geolocation, etc. Just installed it today. It not polished, but may be better than nothing. Im curious to see how the facial recognition tech is.
Pretty sure I included subfolders with titles that related to events. But honestly, getting them organized in one way or another is a pretty big step. I feel like if someone wanted to do more with them they could.
For all of my analog photos, it’s a mess. I’ve got boxes full of albums and loose pics, ugh. It’s somewhere on my list to tackle that but where to start? Should I try to winnow them down to a manageable number and digitize them? I’ve inherited pics from my mom and dad so it’s not just my pics, but lots of old family photos.
For digital photos, I do keep albums for vacations, and I’m pretty mindful that when we go to an event and I take 40 photos, I’ll go through them quickly to delete the bad pics. Between being able to look at albums for the bigger events, and being able to sort by location, I’m generally able to navigate photos. I could probably do better.
I’m also really careful to print photos once we return from vacation. Not many, if we do two weeks in Europe I’ll find like four pics I really like, print them, and find a frame.
