As a post semi professional photographer, I want to go on a divergent path here for a moment.
As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now.
Second, never ever ever use any cloud based back up unless you are just using it for a back up of your multiple hard drive backups. In essence, if she only be a back up of your back ups. And never a back up of your daily workflow.
In my opinion, we are heading for a time of fiscal turmoil that will either make these cloud backups too expensive or obsolete.
> go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now.
This is how you lose historical records, because the critical eye of the day is going to be very different in 50 years.
have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM , which is a video of the British Library's archive. They collect published material, no matter how mundane it might seem to be, because only someone from the future looking back can tell whether it was worth preserving.
Digital data is trivial to preserve compared to physical materials! Don't delete the digital photos!
I had a minor fascination with "life in the 70s" in Ireland. I wanted to know what sort of life I could have if I was sitting catipulted back in time 50 years. What would I eat? How often would I wash? What job would I do? What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet). If I went to my local grocery, what could I get?
You'd think that this should be easy to answer but it really isn't. For example, you might think that you could just search for music created prior to 1975 and that's the list of music I'd listen to. But it isn't. I can remember how insanely hard it was to get a copy of something, even in the 90s. I wanted a track by Nirvana called D7. At the time I was searching for it, it hasn't been released. I heard it on an obscure pirate radio station. I eventually found it while visiting London, inside a huge HMV store, in the ridiculously expensive imports section. The single was more expensive than two regular albums. So the actual list of music that you might reasonably hear, or hear of, and then to be able to get... It's pretty tiny.
Similarly, you might be able to get your hands on mangos, chilis and spices, but not in my old town. You'd be lucky to find peppers.
I found a jigsaw puzzle, "brands from the 70s", which has all the most popular supermarket brands you'd find in the UK & Ireland. My mother spent 10 minutes looking at the photo on the box, stabbing the various items with her finger, saying "Oooh, I remember when the packaging looked like that! And those sweets! You can't get them any more!" and off she goes, remembering some story from her childhood in the 60s... some old man who used to call into their house for a chat on his way up the road, and would have a bar of Fry's Chocolate Creme to split between 5 kids...
> What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet)
Don't forget car exhaust! The air here is so clean now I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car while driving. It's hard to imagine everything smelling like that all the time.
> I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car
It's worth noting that most classic cars are tuned running too rich fuel mixture - because they are driven so rarely, it's more important that the engine runs at all than that the engine is running efficiently.
Those cars smelled different - once the choke was off - wen they where new.
Around the 3:30 mark, while discussing Notre Dame Cathedral, consider how useful all those photos (and however many taken since) would be in its post-fire reconstruction.
Would anyone present at that demo in 2007 think there were too many photos, especially if they knew it would burn down?
I think GP is right. If you look at most people's photo albums, there will be a picture and then five blurry versions of it taken seconds apart from each other. Being a bit selective often means you will be more likely to browse the album again.
I have two shared albums on Google Photos. One is an archive that holds (essentially) every picture of our kids. The other is a curated album of pictures from the first. But I started these albums when our twins were born, and now we've got 3 kids, so there's... ~12,000 in the everything album and ~700 in the curated album. I try to get a couple of pictures in there every week or two, since we don't do social media but want to share pictures with family and friends.
On the other hand with digital cameras and phones we tend to take several photos of the same scene. In that case it would help taking the few seconds to decide on which one is the best and delete the others. We rarely do that.
I’m curious because in the mid 90s, I burned all my black-and-white film negatives in a rage of creativity. I felt like all my old work was dead and I was just relying on that and not creating anything new. I look back at that moment with both her and liberation so it’s hard to say whether it was good or bad.
I find this incredibly hard to do. Mainly because what I have found interesting in my parents collection of media probably would have been thrown out. I found one of the more interesting videos to be of my grandfather just recording a random dinner with my parents mid week. He was an avid tech fan and always needed the newest equipment. To test this one out he setup a tripod and just recorded.
They chatted about the weather, family, news and they made several jokes, told stories about family, and it was just this fly on the wall moment for me watching a taste of what that relationship was like. This little slice of life moment really stuck with me and I made it a point to take similar recordings on my own.
Weddings are great, but they are a performance. It is an abstraction from who people are. I enjoy a more candid style which I feel like gets tossed a lot more these days in pursuit of what we consider perfection. Storage is cheap so I keep almost everything.
What your parents kept in the past was related to how difficulty it was to take in store the media. The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory.
Surely not every moment in your life can be as significant as that moment that your family was around the table talking about the news and the weather.
The best photo presentations I did for clients was when there were fewer photographs presented, not more.
Photo curation is a quite different thing from photo archival.
Treating the two as the same problem makes things much harder, at least for me: If I know that every decision to not pick a given photo means that it’ll be permanently deleted, I end up with much larger albums than is probably reasonable for sharing with friends and family.
Storage is cheap, time spent worrying is expensive. I like being able to revisit my presentation/curation choices at a later point in time, e.g. when my audience, medium (portrait vs. landscape!), or aesthetic criteria have changed.
> The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory.
I don't think this is true. Otherwise we wouldn't treasure photos of our great grandparents, or even of ourselves when we were babies.
the relationship between you and the photo will change if you took it, a friend/family member took it but you were there, or an ancestor took it. I disagree with the parent that there's one purpose for photos, but I agree with them that less can be more. Curating your photos improves signal-to-noise and makes them more likely to have an emotional impact on you, family, or someone discovering them after you've passed.
I'm selfhosting Immich (Google photos clone) on my NAS which has a 70TB's+ of storage. Every night a backup to Glacier runs (which is pennies to store, expensive to retrieve). Every so often I hook up an external hdd and just copy the backup over.
I've had some pretty severe data loss a few years back where I had photos on a cloud service that shut down and I was too careless to properly back them up. Once I got kids I stepped it up a notch and vowed to never let that happen again (the Glacier backup is for when my house burns down or something). Still need to write some proper instructions for my family to retrieve the data if I am unable but they're basically files on a hdd.
As for curating them, I'll leave that to the next person. I think I'd have loved to comb through pics my parents took of us. I do select pictures that are super great and add them to an album. Throwing away isn't worth the effort imo.
I've been meaning to set this up. which NAS do you use, and do you like it? how do you sync it with local copies for editing? I shoot 10k raw photos a year and editing with remote storage is too slow, but it gets unwieldy locally.
Not OP but I use an NVME enclosure with a 4 TB drive in it for my main staging area (I have about 100,000 photos from 4 years on it right now.) This offers fast storage for editing. I highly recommend against the Samsung T7 as it would get hot and throttle way too easily.
I try to rsync the drive to my homebuilt NAS any time I add photos. At this point I feel comfortable formatting SD cards.
The NAS is set to backup to Backblaze using restic every night at 3am.
I'd like to add one more backup into the mix, but cloud storage is expensive.
Do you use encryption and/or compression on the hard drives or cloud? That’s my main concern with disaster recovery - feels so much easier if it’s literally just raw files backed up everywhere instead of needing software.
Thanks, that's helpful. I've had a number of NVME enclosures and have thermal issues with most of them. As a one-off hack, it can be helpful to lightly spray with rubbing alcohol if you need to cool one off during a large transfer.
FWIW, the T7 is not an NVME enclosure per se, but rather a "portable hard drive." Its issues are well documented in forums.[0][1][2] I've known a couple friends in real life who've owned it as well, and they ran into the same issues I did.
I'm now using an OWC Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with a 4 TB WD Black SN850X and have no issues whatsoever. Very happy with this solution!
I went all out and got a Synology DS1621+ with 5 14TB drives. I don't really do photo and/or video editing so I'm not sure what the requirements for that are. I access it through Immich but I've also got a few shares mounted through NFS which is very fast imo.
> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos.
Photography is a hobby for many people. I don’t think you get to prescribe people how to spend their time (curation takes a lot of it!) and/or money on their own enjoyment as long as it doesn’t harm others.
I have two close friends, both of them quite into amateur photography. One takes about 10 times as many photos as the other and never deletes any of them, the other is quite selective in what they shoot and even more selective in what they keep; their camera roll is their curated gallery.
They sometimes have a very hard time empathizing with the other’s approach, but both seem pretty happy with their choices :)
I deleted so much stuff from my old PCs due to disk space constraints at the time, and I wish so badly I had just bought another disk. It would be so great to still have some of that stuff, of not purely for historical record. You don't know what you'll miss 10 years from now.
I'm a similarly semi professional photographer, and I have to agree. Most photos are stored for decades just to never be looked at again. Sure it might be interesting to retrieve a picture of that random piece of furniture or that car one future day, but seriously how many photos of their dog will people retrieve from storage?
I'm taking pictures everywhere. At the supermarket, on the road, in the kitchen, it's more than words. All these photos are super ephemeral, they will literally expire within 30 minutes. I think it is actually correct to store low resolution copies only, as they are just enough to trigger my own memory. I would gain nothing from a RAW copy of that photo. I would lose nothing from deleting them from the archive, but it's a hassle.
My non-professional photo library is at around 50 GByte, excluding astrophotography projects and photogrammetry runs. It's a really handy size for backups, and it indexes quickly with whatever service. I'm using Google Photos as a dumping ground, but PhotoPrism also indexes quickly.
I'll also note that geotags and a correct clock matter much more for archiving than high dynamic range and raw file formats. "Real cameras" suck for easy archiving. I want to zoom into a map of places I've been, and GPS is way too flimsy to be reliable on my Canon gear.
Several people, for example, have 5 to 20 photos of their son or family at the same outing. It’s those redundant photograph I’m talking about mostly.
I would say, keep the photos with the most context, look in the backgrounds of photos for items, and things that are interesting, not just the main subject. A photo of a person standing in a field would be much different than a person in a photo sitting inside of a house That they own.
And you are right, I think the rarity of the photos is what makes them more beautiful, more valuable.
> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now.
Basically it's just going through your old photos every now and then and deleting everything you deem not worthy ("doesn't spark joy").
The one innovation is that your definition of "worthy" will change as time progresses, some photo might be essential to you now, but in a few years you'll go "meh" and delete it.
> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now.
This is so true. It doesn't even need to be with a super critical eye. People take multiple shots of the same subject then keep all of them. IMO if you are keeping all of them then none of them are special so delete them all. If you insist it is special but can't pick then just pick one at random and be done with it.
People are such hoarders when it comes to pictures and it means they never, ever look through them because there are far too many.
For the first part I can't do this at the time, but I find that going back over my old photos a few months or even a year later I can easily delete the similar photos and find the most pleasing version.
As for the second, I've become lazy - going to investigate syncthing.
I have too many pictures to sort through now. I've tried multiple times; I don't have enough time to go through them all. The only way I can find anything is by Google Photos' AI labeling and search, or timestamps.
As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now.
Second, never ever ever use any cloud based back up unless you are just using it for a back up of your multiple hard drive backups. In essence, if she only be a back up of your back ups. And never a back up of your daily workflow.
In my opinion, we are heading for a time of fiscal turmoil that will either make these cloud backups too expensive or obsolete.