Digital photos and videos

[explanade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scuba DH & I have always enjoyed taking photos/videos of our travels. In the old days when we used to have snapshots developed, I'd either make photo albums or store the photos in boxes ordered chronologically. Now with digital technology, we have tens of thousands of photos and videos and we rarely if ever look at them. The process of weeding through them, let alone editing the images or videos, just seems overwhelming. Anyone else feel this way? If one doesn't enjoy photo editing, any suggestions on how to quickly organize and streamline digital images and videos so we can enjoy them?

One reason people don't look at photos could be that few people bother to print them out and make physical albums like they used to.

When I was younger, I still looked from time to time at the family albums, which had photos until I was maybe 5-7.

I haven't had any interest in scanning those photos in but I do take a ton of photos now, though I haven't printed any of them.

It is a lot of work to edit photos, especially DSLR raw files which can take up a lot of time. But in the editing process, I throw out a few, typically maybe 10 out of the 600-1500 photos I may take during a trip.

Of course the photo importing software lets you organize by export so I will put in keywords for the trip photos. Then out of that, maybe I will give 4-star or greater ratings for 100-250 of them.

It's this subset of 100-250 that I will create as an iCloud Photo Stream and upload them to iCloud. From there, I can send sharing invitations by email so others can view. But I also just send them to my other iCloud accessible devices -- a Windows laptop and my MacBook Pro -- where they will cycle through as screen savers.

So I do see these photos, some of which are several years old, cycle through on my devices every day. I can also send them to things like iPads as well as Apple TV.

I also geotag photos but there's no easy way to present the map showing their locations during photo slide shows.

Sometimes, I return to a place I've visited before and I'll look through the photos from my previous trip and that will give me ideas on what to see again.

[explanade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bw5972 Have you considered Google photos app? Description from Wikipedia page is: "Google Photos gives users free, unlimited storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution. The service automatically analyzes photos, identifying various visual features and subjects. Users can search for anything in photos, with the service returning results from three major categories: People, Places, and Things. Google Photos recognizes faces, grouping similar ones together; geographic landmarks (such as the Eiffel Tower); and subject matter, including birthdays, buildings, animals, food, and more. Google implements different forms of machine learning into the Photos service, particularly its recognition of photo contents, as well as enabling features that can automatically generate albums, animate similar photos into quick videos, surface past memories at significant times, and improve the quality of photos and videos. In May 2017, Google announced several updates to Google Photos, including reminders for and suggested sharing of photos, shared photo libraries between two users, and physical albums, with Photos automatically suggesting collections based on face, location, trip, or other distinction."

I haven't tried to upload too many of my photos but all Photo software will give you some kind of automated organization capabilities.

Typically the basic level is organize by time and place, using metadata which is already in the photo files. If you take a lot of photos and videos with smart phones, all that data is recorded.

That's how Google Photos is doing it and the same for other software like Photos app. on iPhones and iPads will automatically group "collections" by time and place.

Now the other thing that photo software is doing is using machine learning (ML) and other AI techniques to recognize the types of things in images.

Face recognition requires the users to identify the names of people in a few photos and then once it has that data, it will process all your photos for all other instance of those people previously identified and automatically tag photos in which they appear.

The latest thing is object recognition, so it will detect mountains in photos and tag the photos as such.

But there are different approaches which has implications for privacy. Google will use the computing power of their servers in the cloud, so your photos are being analyzed by computers outside of your control.

Apple promises that image recognition is processed on your device so your photo isn't uploaded and processed, unless you set it to be uploaded.

I invest in storage because I have little interest in uploading my photos, especially my DSLR photos which are 25 MB each.

You also have to be wary of some sharing sites, which have terms that let them use your photos for their purposes without permission or compensation.