Help Managing Photos

[hongman]

Hi guys/gals

Like most people I have a myriad of photos from over the years. Some on my S4, a backup folder on my SkyDrive, plus random ones on my PC, Laptop.

It's all becoming a bit much to manage if I'm honest. After a couple of incidents wherew I have broken a device, lost a phone of whatever, sometimes I'm not even sure if or what I have lost.

I want a way to manage these all centrally, and backed up to the cloud, accessible easily. I reckon about 20GB in total at the moment.

If I just download all photos into one place, there will be a load of dupes as they may have been renamed etc.

What do you guys suggest? I dont mind paying a bit for cloud storage.

After this, I want to make slowly start organising these into albums.

Look forward to suggestions!

 

[Rukbat]

Are you familiar with using databases? Even something like Access? Put a photo into an album (or just a subfolder or subfolder of a subfolder) in a cloud account and enter the subject, date, place, any other category you want to be able to search by and location (folder, subfolder, etc.) into the database. Then just do a search for subject = 'Niagara Falls' and date between 'January 1997' and 'December 1999' and subject = 'Mary' and you'll get a list of pictures (locations in the cloud account) that match those criteria.

If you search file sites (like CNet) you'll probably find programs that do it even easier.

This is the sort of thing where there are about 10,000 ways to skin that particular cat, and 9,000 of them have already been written. (I spent about half of my working life writing front ends to databases like that.)

 

[hongman]

You lost me at database haha!

 

[El Presidente]

I'm in a similar position myself, I've tonnes of pics across various cloud storage sites and devices.

I was looking to centralise and ended up deciding on flickr, it's free, you can set your albums to private, organise them in to sets and you get 1 Terabyte storage.

It's been a pain uploading everything, but I'm almost done.

The only downside I've found so far is that there's no way to autoupload pictures taken with your devices camera, that has to be done manually.

 

[hongman]

Mmm, in looking for auto backup as it's saved my ass a few times and I'm terrible at remembering to do stuff like that. I'll carry on looking in my spare time, I'm reply if I find anything.

I think the first few steps are to get all my photos into one location.

Remove all duplicates but not based on filename... This will unfortunately be a manual process

Choose a central location which supports auto backup... At this point probably skydrive

Decide on a filing system, if at all. Date, event, tag people maybe... But long ass process!

 

[Eugene]

I'm using a tool to do auto upload from my phone to my home every time I take a pic (OwnCloud). That way loss/breakage/theft of the phone I don't loose the data.

For filing, pictures have EXIF fields, they are similar to the ID3 tags in mps's/music. You've probably seen how the music player knows the artist, song title, album, etc of the song your playing right? Pictures are the same way. Assuming you haven't used any older Microsoft tools to copy/edit them then the data will be there. You'll have the date and time, camera model, gps coordinates, etc. There are other fields as well.

What I do is have a script which renames the pictures based on the date taken that way no matter what camera they came from they are all named the same. Then you can download and use any number of photo apps that can read the exif data and allow you to tag the comments and such. KphotoAlbum, Google's picassa, are examples.