How I organise my pictures
UPDATE: How I organise my media
My workflow
- Take photos with iPhone
- Upload with Dropbox App on the Iphone
- On my VPS "~/Dropbox/Camera Uploads", I have a script
dropper.shwhich moves photos to http://static.natalian.org/ (saving space on Dropbox) - From http://static.natalian.org/ I have another script
flickr.shto upload the images to Flickr - I tag/title images upon Flickr, which takes a lot of effort with Flick's dated http://www.flickr.com/photos/organize tool
Pros
- I have a back up my photos upon http://static.natalian.org/ which is hosted by Dreamhost
Cons
When I backup from Flickr, the images and their metadata is separate. :/ I need to write a script to keep the metadata in the image. I want to back up from Flickr as the years of Metadata I've uploaded is worth a LOT to me.
Don't have a good way of handling videos yet. I do mean to convert them to HTML5 video for http://video.natalian.org/ upon http://static.natalian.org/, but I keep running into rotation problems https://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/ticket/515
I don't think Flickr should handle videos.
I generally try to upload videos to Youtube as its fairly easy from the Iphone and it gets maximum exposure. Again I don't have a way of downloading the metadata I add to the videos there.
I have a LOT of duplicates on Flickr and elsewhere which puts me off uploading really old stuff which I think isn't on Flickr. I can't really tell, especially since Flickr has no de-duplication feature.
Of course I don't own the Flickr and Youtube URIs, and I can't make them redirect.
My parents photo flow
They are in Apple land with a Macbook and with the introduction of a Macbook Air, it's truly fucked up.
A lot of the "Apple photo management" problems are raised upon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5673628. To add:
- Hosting an iPhoto library on the Time capsule even on a good network is pretty much unusable
- iPhoto wants to upgrade the iPhoto library? Or you have two different versions of iPhoto accessing the same library? You're basically screwed.
- The iPhoto library is just insane-ware. It's really really hard to export photos with its metadata embedded in it.
If you do the right thing by trying to take it out of iPhoto, it makes viewing your collection of Photos on Apple TV / iPad almost impossible. :(
Right now my parents are not taking pictures because I'm trying to sanitise their existing huge iPhoto collection, which is taking me forever. :/
Moving forward
I'm re-purposing my linux rig to an Archlinux powered NAS to store backup of all the photos on a mirrored 1TB soft raid setup.
I'm keeping all of the photos in a git repository, sorted by year.
I'm endeavouring to keep metadata in the image. E.g.
exiv2 -M"add Iptc.Application2.Keywords String $tag" $image
I plan to backup in the mornings over months the photos to one of my VPSes, probably Hetzner. Then I sync to Dreamhost slowly. Need to come up with something a bit more robust here.
(200 GB) / (0.7 * (Mbit / sec)) = 27.0899471 days
The canonical copy of the photos will be the NAS, in git.
I mount the NAS share in NFSv4 and do my scripting and editing. Then I commit the changes. It's a lot of effort on my part since I'm the only one who can use my sxiv image viewer and metadata scripts. I've sunk countless hours into it and I don't think any member of my family appreciates the herculean effort that's required. :(
Exporting Photos out of iPhoto to the NAS is so painful. I can't have NFS and AFP services running simultaneously for example. Apple does not support Samba/NFS IIUC. So I have ton of work running around trying to ensure iPhoto is putting photos in the "family memories NAS".