Digital photos and videos

[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?

 

[Nemo2]

DW digitized about 15 carousels of old slides that I had amassed, and that I/we looked at every other eon or so......we subsequently sold the slide projector and the carousels online.

Great!

 

[mountainsoft]

I name our photos with chronological names and descriptions. This allows easy sorting within Windows file explorer or other programs. For example:

2017-06-05 120502 - Our trip to the zoo.jpg

That's a simple format of YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS - description.

I use a simple program I wrote many years ago to rename the files automatically from the EXIF data. But most cameras let you choose a date based file name within the camera settings.

Then I organize the photo files within year based folders, such as:

C:\Photos\2016\
C:\Photos\2017\

It's also important to delete photos you aren't interested in. When we used traditional film, we usually had 24 or 36 photos per outing. With digital we can easily take hundreds of photos in a day. Weed out any photos you are not interested in, and you'll enjoy the important ones more.

Finally... BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP! Someday you will be hit by a virus, your hard drive will fail, or you'll have a major loss from fire or theft. A backup is your only protection.

Good luck!

 

[bw5972]

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?

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."

 

[donheff]

I organize my photos into albums, primarily organized by trips but also other events or concepts. I also recommend that you skim through them soon after taking them and delete most.

As bw5972 mentioned, Google photos is an excellent storage vehicle. It is free and unlimited if you use their standard compression algorithm which is good enough for the vast majority of people. You will know who you are if you need original resolution.

DW and I have a 23 inch all-in-one desktop on a desk in our kitchen where we often hang out. I set the screen saver to randomly cycle through my favorite photos so we see them as background frequently.

I upload my crappy videos to youtube where I can easily access them if I want to show them to someone. The grand-kids like to watch some of the goofy stuff we have of them and occasions come up where people want to see my daughter ski diving or me bungee jumping. Easy to just bring them up on a phone or PC if they are on youtube.

 

[jollystomper]

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

We are in a similar situation, but I have just decided to do it a little at a time. I spend around a hour or 2 a week digitizing our old pictures. Sometimes more if I multitask (easy to scan while, for example, watching TV). That does make the task more manageable. Nothing fancy, I use the printers scanning capability with Irfanview for photos, which also allows me to do mass format conversion/renaming fairly easily. For videos I hook up the camera to the PC and let them play while I do so other activity, the capture software handles the rest. In a year I've done around 12,000 photos and videos.

As was mentioned, backup is critical. I have copies on systems in my house, on a portable drive in the safe deposit, and on Google Drive.

 

[savory]

DW digitized about 15 carousels of old slides that I had amassed, and that I/we looked at every other eon or so......we subsequently sold the slide projector and the carousels online.

Great!

This is what I did as well with slides and photos. At first I used a regular scanner. What a mistake that was. I put 4 pics or so on the scanner and then had to crop them, so they would not appear as 1 pic. I purchased a photo scanner that scans many pics/slides and recognize they are individual pics.

Given many family members living around the country, I shared with my relatives/friends on Google. I also I look at them from time to time which is much more frequent then when they were in albums/slides. It turned out to be a lot of work but a good decision.

 

[folivier]

I sometimes like to put them on a thumb drive or usb drive and connect to the tv so I can run a slide show. It's nice to walk by and see a picture that brings back nice memories.

 

[Ronstar]

I scanned the old photos and put them on my external drive that is backed up to another drive. Newer photos/videos are on the external drive also. I play slideshows and movies through AppleTv on my Tv.

 

[marko]

I sometimes like to put them on a thumb drive or usb drive and connect to the tv so I can run a slide show. It's nice to walk by and see a picture that brings back nice memories.

+1
If you use Google Photos and have a ChromeCast you can do that automatically. Google Photos also will create albums and "Do you remember this date?" slide shows automatically.

 

[Cobra9777]

On the PC, we have photos organized into yearly folders. Within each yearly folder, we typically have 7-10 additional folders with big events or travel photos. The rest are just in the yearly folder. These are backed up to a secondary hard drive at the house and two online services, Google Photos and Amazon Prime Photos. Google Photos is free but compresses the photos slightly. Amazon is free for Prime customers and uses full resolution. We also pay $12/year for 1TB of storage at Amazon for videos and other files.

We usually view photos using either Google Photos or Prime Photos, rarely the PC. Both TVs have Chromecast and Fire TV so either online service works seamlessly on the TV. But we prefer Prime Photos, which is on the main menu of Fire TV. It also accumulates photos from both of our smartphones to the same Amazon account so we have real-time access to all the latest photos from both devices. Google Photos OTOH sends them to two different Google accounts based on our gmail.

Both services make it incredibly easy to find what you're looking for and to organize and share. Just one recent example, DW wanted to frame some prints of her parents with each of their grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren as a Mother's Day gift for DMIL. We just went to Prime Photos, specified the people, and the facial recognition program generated a fairly long list of photos that contained only those people. We've also searched by place and event, and we often generate small online albums to share with family and friends after traveling or some other event.

 

[MoreTimetoRide]

After our longer trips, DW has created books (from places like Shutterfly). It doesn't help the task of editing and sorting the photos, but they are in a "shareable" form.

We also have a digital picture frame. It is pretty easy to every so often upload a bunch of photos to the frame via Wi-Fi. It has the added advantage of random photos appearing and can also be a good conversation starter when guests are visiting.
--
Wayne.

 

[dadu007]

Well, I'm a bit obsessive about this and my method is not for everyone, but...

• I've used https://www.scancafe.com/ to scan all old negatives, slides, and paper photos
• I then back up (burn) those scans to high-quality DVD discs (2 copies, stored separately)
• The photos are also backed up to the cloud using https://www.backblaze.com/ (all documents/files from my PC are backed up there)
• All digitized photos (and digital photos) are catalogued using IMatch, which is an excellent, excellent, highly customizable photo database https://www.photools.com/
• IMatch has a feature where I can query the database from any mobile device or PC in the household to find a particular photo or type of photo; I can create slideshows from the query
• I'm considered the family's "photo archivist" and am approaching 30,000 photos in the database.
• I have also organized select printed photos for my nuclear family in about 15 binders (starting from my wedding)...Those are fun to browse with the kids now and then...
• I also make photo books from time to time.

I'm a bit of an organizer, so the process itself is satisfying to me. It has come in handy many times when a family member (nuclear or extended) is looking for a photo of a particular event or photo. I also on occasion will post a very old photo on FB for family/friends, which is fun...


It's sad to me how few photos are now printed these days. I have an Epson semi-pro photo printer and I enjoy the process of printing photos as well (with correct color management, archival inks, etc..)


Like I said, it's not for everyone, but there will be a lost generation photo-wise, since nothing is (mostly) ever printed these days.

 

[Scuba]

Thanks for all these ideas - very helpful! I am going to share with DH as he is the "techie" in the family. We do have everything backed up on external hard drives, and they are roughly organized by year and major trip, but we have way too many and there are also a number of duplicates so it's quite tedious to organize. However it sounds like some of these recommended tools would help a lot. Thanks again!

 

[RunningBum]

I'm way behind on this, but I like to pick out some favorites from a trip or set or every day photos, and copy them into a favorites folder. I can return to that folder to view my favorite photos, perhaps print them locally or send away to be printed, or put them on a memory stick to put on my TV, or on my screen saver for my laptop.


I am pretty good at downloading photos to a folder by year and/or trip/event. I try to get rid of the blurry or totally redundant photos as I go through them too.

 

[clobber]

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."

This has made life so much easier. There are many reasons I think Google Photos is probably the best app of them all. Especially for people who think their cell phone camera is good enough for most scenarios. I take photos and videos when I am out and about. When I get home it automatically uploads everything into the cloud. Everything is searchable and all that good stuff. One of the features I really like is "rediscover this day." Some times it will give me a notification to rediscover a particular day and show me photos from the past. The actually makes me look at old photos and relive those moments. No more pulling out the photo album every 2 years.

 

[redshift]

+1 Google Photos.

 

[Blue Collar Guy]

I dislike looking at old photos, videos are much worse. I cant look at our wedding photo book, most of my loved ones in the pictures are now dead. I saw a video a while ago, it was of my dad's 47th birthday, i heard his voice, something i have not heard in 33 years. Saying i was heartbroken all over again was an understatement.

 

[Nemo2]

I dislike looking at old photos, videos are much worse. I cant look at our wedding photo book, most of my loved ones in the pictures are now dead. I saw a video a while ago, it was of my dad's 47th birthday, i heard his voice, something i have not heard in 33 years. Saying i was heartbroken all over again was an understatement.

When I look at (now digitized) pics of my late wife/friends I think only of happy times, (which is likely when most pics are taken), and how lucky I was to have experienced them.

 

[dadu007]

I dislike looking at old photos, videos are much worse. I cant look at our wedding photo book, most of my loved ones in the pictures are now dead. I saw a video a while ago, it was of my dad's 47th birthday, i heard his voice, something i have not heard in 33 years. Saying i was heartbroken all over again was an understatement.

Yes, photos and videos have different effects on different people.
I used to study and pore over old family photos constantly as a child and teen. I think I did that in order to piece together my (very screwed up) family story. Kind of like a detective...so they are important to me as almost physical archeological artifacts. There is some heartache there.

I do confess sometimes I wish I didn't care. Would have saved me a ton of money for sure.

 

[explanade]

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]

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.