Photo Management

I have been tying to find a way to manage our ever increasing collection of photos and videos. When I was the primary photographer, I had a pretty streamlined process that involved copying photos to my laptop, sorting them with Picasa and Polyview. These photos were moved into folders in my web server and instantly available on the web thanks to php-pix.

But as technology advanced, things got complicated. Picasa was deprecated. Pho-pix was abandoned and no longer compatible with the latest PHP. And as more and more photos were being taken with my phone, stuff accumulated, I sorted, in my “camera roll”. My recent move from Android to iPhone has made things worse.

I have everything backed up from my phone to iCloud, Google and OneDrive, but just camera rolls and no sorting. Thanks to Google eerily good phot search, this has been ok, but not ideal. I still want to sort.

I thought tagging would be my salvation, but that seems to be surprisingly difficult. There are very few mainstream apps that support embedded tagging, other than faces. (I’ll have a entirely separate post on the use of face tagging for genealogical work.)

All I want is a way to move photos into folders, but that seems to be a crime these days. Google and Apple want everything in albums but they don’t provide any hierarchy. My albums become unmanageable. I will want to put some photos in albums, but not everything. I need somewhere for “everything”.

I found an app on the iPhone called Photo Manager Pro ($2.99). It seemed to have promise, but I was concerned that to use its sorting capabilities you need to move data into the app. As with most iPhone apps, it does not support external file systems.

I found that the latest OneDrive app would let you “move” photos from the camera roll but after moving them, they show up in the overall photo section so there was no way to remember which photos had already been moved. I wanted a sort of “inbox zero” capability. I would know I was done when the directory was empty.

Then I found out I could move photos from the Camera Roll directory. Now they would still show up in the “Photos” view, but as I moved them out of the camera roll directory, they would be gone!

I just started this part of the process today. I will update if I find any problems, but this seems promising!

My next step will be syncing my OneDrive with my photo server (likely with the help of this article: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-rclone/)