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Good way to store a lot of photos - hobby photography (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by Loganthehatless@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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Hey Guys, My mum is doing semi professional photography and I am at my wits end. It’s a human and technological problem. I did a quick object count she has like 70k photos roughly 4tb. This happens because she takes every picture in raw and JPEG and a lot of series captures. The begin of the story is that she had at first a ssd, then a second, then a third and so on. I already bought a synology nas. And threw everything at it. But everything is messy and unsorted and she is not happy because she doesn’t get her chaos together and adobe Lightroom performs bad with network drives, and I don’t get why … but this seems to be a known problem… Anyways she uses Lightroom for her editing which is nice, but she is using more like a library and not to perform the actual changes, that’s the reason that the catalogue which is a db of the changes is a 17 gb.

She is not happy at the current state. Do you have suggestions, for a strategy to clear this chaos ? Or a cool tool for getting a folder structure? Maybe any tips and tricks for synology and network stuff ?

I Already tried to move files and get a structure but Lightroom hates this and loses track of the file. So a powershell script which sorts the items into year folders was a good idea but I am scared of bricking the db

The nas and the mac are all wired up on 1 gbit and I am sure it should be ok because the big raws are only like 70mb per file

Regards :)

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[–] Plane_Resolution7133@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Unless LR have changed, there’s built in tools to move and manage the db <-> file relationship.

There used to also be tools to prune/trim the db.

The root of the problem might her workflow. Especially when shooting series, when she’s back/at the computer, immediately go through the photos and delete whatever’s out of focus/uninteresting/etc.

Maybe she’s good at the workflow? I know how tedious it is to sit down and sort out a huge archive like that.

I used LR for a long time, but got tired of backing up and managing the files. I moved to iCloud and I’m happy with that.

The Apple Photos program is extremely basic, but it’s a decent way of rough organising photos.

Using tags/project/etc. is important.

As for folder structure, I used (year) - (month) (day). That with at least some basic tags made it manageable.

[–] Loganthehatless@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah she used year month day at first but a such a load she said I need to organize it like in categories. I can’t say anymore in which year I was in Greece or at the Lofoten and so on … and this is now messy af. I already consolidated everything on a 4tb hdd and give her the homework to sort it and later we will have it on the nas, and use this drive as a backup, but it’s challenging 🥲 and I try to find something smooth to make it less demanding

[–] ManSpeaksInMic@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Tags, tags, tags.

My photos are stored by date ("yyyy/mm/dd - Main description", e.g. "2018/04/19 - Lofoten holiday"), but that is by far not enough to find anything meaningful at any time.

Meticulous tagging with a well-structured taxonomy is the only real choice here, in my book. AI tools, like are integrated into immich and other tools, help building that library. But for what I do with photos, how I think about photo gategories, AI can only go so far.

Tagging appropriate subject matter (family, friends, still lives, architecture), surroundings (location, as in "Lofoten", but also location, as in "at the beach"; indoor/outdoor; nature; event; ...), theme (light painting, black-and-white, nighttime, high fashion, random funny snapshot, ...) and even species (I photograph a lot in zoos) is necessary.

With that kind of thing you then can find "that funny photo of Uncle Roger at the beach, when he slipped on the stray dog toy!" in the 4TiB of photos.

And that's, unfortunately, work.

(Also, I am harsh in culling my RAW files. Ofc precious memories stay even if the photo isn't perfect, but if I go out on photo walks, anything that is blurry/unsharp or badly exposed has the original RAW deleted as well. Or selecting the best candidate from chimping, I don't need the other ones anymore. But that, too, is a workflow problem.)