How do you organize & store your photos and videos?

[maisymouser]

Title says it all. I'm looking for alternatives to my current method of photo and video organization that don't involve a subscription.

Current method: Google Photos until storage nearly maxed out, then download in Takeout. Delete all photos from the cloud and begin filling my allotted storage up again. This method is killing me because:

-I haven't figured out organization in Takeout, I get really confused about how to unzip then organize photos in Explorer in a reasonable way (I am not super tech savvy). It takes me FOREVER to pull from Takeout files and I am currently manually organizing them so that I have photos/videos in month/year folders. This is super dumb of me and I am tired of doing it.
-I don't have instant access to my old photos & videos. Want to look at a cute Halloween picture from 2017 while on my lunch break? Can't do it.

I could suck it up and pay ~$30-$100/year to upgrade my storage and just keep all of my photos & videos on Google (while periodically downloading a Takeout package, of course). But I suspect there are better options than Google for photo & video cloud storage.

What do you use and how do you amass your collections?

[maisymouser]

I should probably mention that not having instant cloud access is not a show stopper for me. Would be nice but not needed.

My main issue is the process of downloading & organizing photos/vids.

[jfer_rose]

I'm mostly posting to follow as I am interested in the responses.

For now I tend to mostly store photos and videos on my computer hard drive. I'm not much help on the organizing part of the question-- and why I'm interested to see what the responses are to this question.

But I do like my solution for downloading. I don't know what Takeout is, but I found it really annoying to download photos from Google Photos and so I tend to use Dropbox Camera Uploads to get my photos from my phone to my hard drive. Photos upload from my phone to Dropbox automatically. Then, I have Dropbox set up to show up as a folder on my computer, so the download to my hard drive is seamless.

[lutorm]

I use Lightroom. From my DSLR I download the photos directly, from the phone Dropbox syncs the pictures to my desktop and I then import them from there. My organization in Lightroom isn't awesome but I tag most things and with that and the date-based storage I can usually find what I want. (I have all my photos going back 30 years on there, including old films that were scanned using a negative/slide scanner. In total almost 30,000 pictures and half a terabyte.) The Lightroom storage is on a redundant NAS which is periodically snapshotted and backed up to another machine offsite.

Imho, the single biggest issue with photos is having a secure back up. These days, this is how your life is documented and being on bits it can easily just disappear if you're not careful. Because I have access to a large amount of off-site storage on my wife's work machines, I don't have to deal with any cloud providers. My solution probably isn't workable unless you're savvy enough with Linux to set up ZFS, file servers, etc, though.

[maisymouser]

I use Lightroom. From my DSLR I download the photos directly, from the phone Dropbox syncs the pictures to my desktop and I then import them from there. My organization in Lightroom isn't awesome but I tag most things and with that and the date-based storage I can usually find what I want. (I have all my photos going back 30 years on there, including old films that were scanned using a negative/slide scanner. In total almost 30,000 pictures and half a terabyte.) The Lightroom storage is on a redundant NAS which is periodically snapshotted and backed up to another machine offsite.

Imho, the single biggest issue with photos is having a secure back up. These days, this is how your life is documented and being on bits it can easily just disappear if you're not careful. Because I have access to a large amount of off-site storage on my wife's work machines, I don't have to deal with any cloud providers. My solution probably isn't workable unless you're savvy enough with Linux to set up ZFS, file servers, etc, though.

Yes- I've heard really really great things about Lightroom but it is unfortunately not in the budget for me. I also have a hard time finding time to tag thousands of photos in a meaningful way, but I'm sure that will be an RE task eventually- that will probably something I do with that time. My understanding is that Lightroom also has some really great AI & facial recognition attached, which will be fun to play with someday.

And yeah, I am way too non-tech-savvy to do much of any of the latter part you talked about. I could probably figure it out if I had a solid week or two to myself, but I'm in the stage of life where I'm too busy with raising my kiddo to take it on as a really serious project, unfortunately. I would love to learn all of that eventually.

Over the last 30 minutes of my own research, I think I've found a slightly better solution for right now- organizing Google Photos by albums then downloading the albums (I'm doing 1 album per month). That way, the photos & videos keep their metadata instead of being separated out into json files the way they do in a Takeout folder- one of the things I didn't mention but hate about my current (prior) system. This should work for the next few years, I'm hoping, and I can certainly take the 30 minutes to do it once a year.

Yet another reason to work hard toward FIRE, I guess- to take the time to actually keep track of all the fun stuff I've gotten to enjoy in life.

[2sk22]

I am all-in on Apple so I pay for iCloud every month and keep all of my photos and videos (over 31000) there. It's accessible on all of my Apple devices and this has been very valuable for me. In addition to keeping copies on my devices, I also pay for Backblaze on my main home machine so that serves as an independent backup as well.

[Anon-E-Mouze]

I'm a semi-pro photographer and I use Lightroom. For me, the $9.99/month price for Lightroom and Photoshop combined is well worth the price. It's important to note that Lightroom isn't just an organizer, but it's also non-destructive photo editing software, so that protects your images as well.

That said, if you don't want to pay a monthly subscription, here is a 2021 article reviewing Lightroom and alternatives.
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-photo-organizing-software

Aside from which software you use, there's also the question of how you protect and organize your photo collection. Here are a few recommendations.

1) When you upload photos to your computer, make a copy to a separate, external hard drive and don't edit or delete images from that hard drive. That's your back-up.

2) My primary photo file structure is date-based, with each day's photos also have a descriptive name. Then, each photo gets a file name that includes the date, something descriptive, the original photo file number, and something relating to the status of that photo in terms of whether and how it's been processed. For example:

I recently did a photo shoot of rescued momma dog and her puppies. I uploaded those photos to a file folder like this:

2021 (the year's photos)
- Folder: 2021-11-05 Sunny and puppies
- Sample file names: Mouse-211105-3648-O and Mouse-211105-3750-O (i.e. Mouse the puppy, photographed on Nov 5th 2021, the image files out of the camera were numbered 3648 and 3650, and "O" stands for original (the original RAW format file I uploaded). If I edit File 3750, then I will have variations like 3750-L (edited file, full size), 3750-W (web-ready file that is smaller size and easy to upload and with a copyright notice), 3750-IN (formatted for Instagram) and 3750-P (print-ready: means I have processed this file to optimize it for printing and have actually printed it and am satisfied with the print quality), 3750-P-1x1 (this means it's a print-ready file that has been cropped to a 1x1 aspect ratio).

3) Because I use Lightroom, I can create virtual collections of images based on tags etc so I don't need to create multiple folders to hold the same images. I can also attach stars to my images, so I know which photos are the best in a series, and then I can search based on those stars and other tags.

4) I have 3 main back-up hard drive collections:

a) The original photos I took, straight out of the camera, organized by date - not touched.
b) Year-to-year collections (e.g. 2020, 2021)
c) Greatest hits collection. Every 6 months or so, I search for the best photos taken in the prior period, and upload to a separate hard drive the Original (unedited) image, the "L" file (Large, edited image), and the "P" file (Large, print-ready image).  These photos are organized in subject matter folders (e.g. Farm Sanctuary).

[LD_TAndK]

This may be obvious but I was butting up against google's 15 gig free limit until I went on a deletion spree.

I deleted all emails over 4 years old, scanned through the remaining emails over 1 MB and deleted almost all of them.

Then sorted my drive files by size and deleted all the large ones I didn't need.

Last I did the hard part and combed through all the photos deleting duplicates and ones I just don't care about anymore (like of something I cooked 3 years ago, or an insignificant place. who cares!) I think we put undue emotional attachment on photos and videos and their permanence. Maybe I'm crazy but I'd only need a few photos of even my wedding, and I don't mind if someone was blinking, or the framing wasn't good, it'll still bring back the memories.

The 100 gigs for $20 a year google drive plan seems like a reasonable plan, that'd allow me about 25,000 photos I think. If I lived for 100 years I could upload a photo every one and a half days!

[lutorm]

I'm a semi-pro photographer and I use Lightroom. For me, the $9.99/month price for Lightroom and Photoshop combined is well worth the price. It's important to note that Lightroom isn't just an organizer, but it's also non-destructive photo editing software, so that protects your images as well.

Yeah, I guess I should have pointed out that I'm still using my copy of Lightroom 3, which is pre Adobe going all subscription. I would not pay ten bucks a month for it. Once I'm forced to update from LR3 I'm going to be going to some of the free alternatives.

[Michael in ABQ]

I create a folder in my Pictures folder on my hard drive by month. 2021-09, 2021-10, etc. I have a backup hard drive somewhere but honestly haven't backed up anything in far too long. We also have a Microsoft OneDrive that I just checked and realized it's syncing with my wife's computer and has basically nothing I've added recently. So I'm currently uploading several hundred pictures to that.

My last two digital cameras broke so lately any photos I take are with my phone. I think Verizon is also backing those up in their cloud as I get random reminders of pictures I took 1 or 2 years ago.

[JoePublic3.14]

Vastly decrease the number of pics and videos. That is my technique. I have three folders on google drive. One is for crap I got rid of that I might, maybe, perhaps, get a kick out of looking at in a decade. Probably 25 pics total. The second is current project stuff that I share with a buddy. Probably a total of 30 pics. And the final one is for the interesting things like our cats, vacations, and so on. Probably 200 pics from the last 15 years.

Delete delete delete. Then get serious about deleting. You won’t miss anything.

[AngryOcean]

I just went through this and decided to set up a NAS ( Network attached storage) basically your own cloud system that runs off of your home network. I went with a NAS from Synology, I chose them because it is basically a plug in and go type of system.

[thesis]

I always try to remember that 95% of my photos are basically worthless, and my life would be no worse off without them.

That being said, I tend to organize photos in folders named after the specific event, sometimes with the year. I don't do this to all photos, only the sets of photos that relevant to specific events. I back these up on an external hard drive. I place some photos in Google drive when they aren't already backed up in the Photos app.

It's okay to be sentimental, to want sometimes to remember good times. But I'm having to fight the desire to hoard photos. Sometimes you have to let go of the past. It's okay to keep a few photos from various events, but I almost certainly do not need all of them. Life is too short for that, and nobody is going to cherish my albums when I pass away. That might seem a morbid thought, but it's true, and helps me keep things in perspective. Life goes forward, not back. Sentimental memories are luxuries to be visited sparingly, IMHO.

Now I really should go back through the Photos app and delete the things I don't particularly care for :)

[tarheeldan]

I have Office 365, that's 1TB of storage plus Office of course lol

[WSUCoug1994]

Storage - I have set up a Private Cloud in my family with Synology Discstations.  This is more than most people need but each of us (3 houses) have a Synology and they all back up to a fourth location (vacation home).  We are an Apple family and we use the Synology apps to automatically upload our photos/videos once we have entered the house - nice to have it automated.  Computers back up using Time Machine to the Synology multiple times throughout the day.  Each Synology backs up to the "vacation home" Synology each week.  My DSLR offloads to a Mac which gets backed up by Time Machine.

Organizing - No clue - have tried 1000 different strategies - they all have failed.  We take a lot of pictures.