Photos and J.D. System

10-19 Concepts 11 Core Concepts
1

I’ve been working on setting up a final for real final :roll_eyes: photo organization system. I found some nice Hazel rules using exiftool scripts, etc. So the workflow is taking shape. But then there is the existing backlog to process. So…

I think I have finally resolved that any folder structure should minimize layers (ala J.D.) and also be date-based. I think I’ve come up with a date system that mimics J.D. It assumes that I probably won’t have any significant number of photos older than the 1920’s, so 10-11 decades worth. It also uses hyphens instead of decimals and looks kinda like this:

1950-1959
- 1950
- 1951
    - 1951-01-03-George-birthday
        - 1951-01-03-George-birthday-001.jpg
        - 1951-01-03-George-birthday-002.jpg
    - 1951-01-05-MX-san-cristobal-birding
        - 1951-01-05-MX-san-cristobal-birding-001.jpg
        - etc.

So 11 > 10 will still work - the last layer could get messy. The first number will expand slowly going forward (I mean, how many decades do I have left? Not as many as I’d like) the second layer will remain constant (10 years per decade) and the third number - well, there are 12 months with up to 31 days per month, so if I have photos on more than ten days per month…

I guess theoretically you could insert just one more layer there for months, but I was trying to keep it at three…

Maybe this could be the Johnny Decadal system? :smiley:

2

I guess I should clarify a few things that seem confusing when I re-read the OP…

When I say “will still work” I am referring to the three layers of JD. His system is limited to 10 > 10 > 99 (Areas > Categories > ID) - my photo setup will be something more like 11 > 10 > ??? (Decade > Year > Event) I thought about adding one extra layer in there, the month, which would make the system more like 11 > 10 > 12 > ??? - the 12 being months. For everything since 2007 there would probably be content in each month. Prior to that, not necessarily. 2007 being when I got a new digital DSLR and just before the wife and I got smartphones and turned into photo-generating bots.

So while it mimics JD it deviates a bit. Still trying to keep the principles in mind.

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3

This is dedication … my photos are just a mess in the Photos app!

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4

I have slowly come to realize a couple of things about myself.

  1. I hate getting burned by app/vendor lock-in. I have been trying to extricate myself from this as much as possible. Plain text/bare metal philosophy.
  2. This includes Apple. Their software and services work well enough for non-techies. I have just enough knowledge and desire for power features that I quickly trip over their software limits or design flaws. Especially true for services (iCloud, iDrive, etc.) and big bundling apps (Photos). Aperture’s demise was a warning flag.

So this leaves me with plain text and 3rd party apps where necessary. And things like J.D.

I still have a strong urge to just dump all the photos/videos into Photos. It would ‘solve’ everything in one move. But I’ve lost data before with Photos, iCloud and even Google Drive. They have just enough un-intuitiveness to allow a relatively smart user to click something that they think is going to do one thing but, in fact, does the opposite.

There are other constraints. A big one is data bandwidth. We live in our RV, so 85% of the time our internet relies on cellular data. Currently paying over $200USD/mo. for data plans. That gets me 100GB on my main router and 20GB of tethering over smartphones. Best I can tell my photo/video folder is clocking in at 310GB. Online backup, after my reorganization, will take four months to avoid going over data limits, leaving precious little data for normal things. But with Photos, you get a lot of round-trip data, syncing back and forth, on top of the initial backup. Same with Mylio and other sync services. We can offset this using park wifi, but it’s mostly crap that can barely sustain a Netflix streaming session.

I still need to solve this problem for my initial backup (after reorganizing) but will need to limit the future backups to one device, not syncing everything everywhere all the time. That was a lot of words. Wow.

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5

Makes a lot of sense, and I guess you value your photos more than I do mine … but then my best friend is a good photo-organiser so I know that when I’m older I’ll just go round his place rather than relying on my shonky collection. :upside_down_face:

Do you know where you’ll be, geographically, in the future? Could you post yourself ahead a hard drive full of backup, meet it there, update it, post it, and so on? Super old-school, sounds kinda fun. Either that or set up RVBackupNet, switch drives with similar people as you bump in to them?

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6

Here’s what I’m aiming to do. There are a number of decent apps that allow organizing photos better than the stock photos app. I may try them.

However the most important thing than organizing all photos is to create notable memory logs. So in the photos app, I organize all my photos according to category into albums (family photos, friend photos, nature photos, funny memes, inspiring memes, etc).

For the actual photos, I then go through the albums — for the family photos, I quickly create a slideshow for each month that includes the best photos of that month. I use one of those slideshow apps that create an automatic slideshow. It takes 5 minutes. If I feel like spending more time I can but I don’t want to overwhelm myself to the point where I give up the system.

I set a weekly repeating todo item to organize all photos I’ve collected that week into albums. By doing it on a short interval like this, it usually only takes 15 mins max.

Photos stock app already organizes great by year month and day so if I want to look at all photos from a particular timeframe, I can do that.

But for the most part, when we want to reminisce about a certain timeframe, we can view the slideshow. And then at the end of each year, I also create a slideshow with the best of the best. While also creating a yearly photo book which are relatively cheap to create and buy nowadays.

One could do a bit more than this but I believe this is sufficient :slight_smile:

7

Update on our situation - we’re now back in Mexico and our apartments have all had TotalPlay, which is fiber-to-the-home at speeds of around 90mbps down (although I need to call the landlords because it’s currently only 20mbps :frowning: ) So my bandwidth is steady and reliable and backups and syncing are not a problem.

That’s it. That’s the update.

8

Finally, someone with worse internet than me: scarcely hundreds of metres from the centre of the capital of Australia in 2024.

Rumour has it we’ll get fibre this year. Though inexplicably they limit the upstream to 50Mb/s. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯