Tuesday, 21st June, 2022

I remembered about Amazon Photos last night - and how they offer free unlimited photo back up if you have prime. Might as well install it again and get it setup. The website/app is okay for looking at photos. It had people, memories, on this day and ability to create albums. These help me go back and appreciate older photos that I’d probably not look at.

I’m not satisfied that it’s the final answer but will be something. I looked at photoprism again and remembered the huge docker compose file to go through to install it. I’ve installed it in the past and did get it working, although then on an update it stopped and I just removed it. I should try it again.

I’ve installed Adobe Lightroom again. I’ve yet to open it. It’s a great program but I don’t want to edit all my photos and it feels like it’s more edit vs. Library. Although it has a very comprehensive set of library functionalities. Really the problem I’m trying to solve is to make it easier for us (and mostly my wife) to make a photo album at the end of the year. I’m thinking hit 3 ⭐️ or equivalent then just look through those and pick. The past method has been to go through all the folders and copy good photos to another folder then upload them all. Not terrible but it’s slow. I could be more ruthless when trimming photos so that later on there’s a smaller set. I do usually pick the best ones for my photos website (which is another folder on the computer), although historically I’ve not been good at keeping that up to date. I got better but now I think there’s a few months gap again.

Unfortunately I think the setup I had with Apple Photos was actually pretty good for what I wanted. Editing wasn’t the greatest but you could still do enough tweaks when necessary. Just a shame that the Mac mini ground to a halt once it had loaded all the photos into the library.

I’m not buying a Mac just for this…

Although I have thought that if we do remodel the kitchen, that an iMac would look nice in it as a family computer. If I want to avoid external devices (which I do) then I’d have to buy one with a custom SSD and that would be extortionate to be able to fit all the photos. There is always the option of adding from a network share but it would be slower. I could do a rotation system and move out old photos but then you lose the functionality of it. Or I pay for 2 TB of iCloud again and offload to the internet. Or I just find a small and neat looking external SSD and maybe one of those rear shelf things as plug it in.

This is all hypothetical and another part of me only wants to kids to know Linux so that they can enjoy their freedom. 👁‍🗨

Maybe I should watch some videos on library functions with Lightroom and just set it up.

It was fun looking at old photos and videos on Amazon last night. I did probably spend two hours doing so. “They grow up so quick!” 🥹