How do you organise 18,500 images on a hard drive?
Hello đź‘‹
I'm feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work I created for my-self, my files are a mess.
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Are they your files? Just dump them by major event (like "trip to", "X's wedding") or period if nothing special happened (/2023/"08 Home Summer" - I always put numerical month before so they get sorted). Then use some kind of software to organize them further (automatically, by place/date/face/object recognition, etc.) https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/17l7230/bleedingedge_selfhosted_photo_software_in_2023_im/
The problem I have with all the softwares listed on the link, is that they need to run on a server. I want it on my hard drive
My problem: what if there is a selfie of my sister at her marriage with my grandma. I want to easily find this picture by searching "My sister Marriage" and by searching "Grandma"
How would you go about doing that? or I'm asking for too much?
My problem: what if there is a selfie of my sister at her marriage with my grandma. I want to easily find this picture by searching "My sister Marriage" and by searching "Grandma"
If you remember the year then you can quickly go to that folder just using Windows Explorer, then find the "Marriage" subfolder.
But I can find a centralised place to see all the pictures of my grandma
You're not asking too much, but you will need a server (or some way to run the software) to actually create some sort of organization, image/object/face recognition processing, etc. that is indexed and can be searched. Depending on what tasks are being run will depend on how much system resources you'll need or what specific hardware is required to process the files.
Now, does the technology exist there to do what you are looking for without needing to get a server yourself? Yes, it absolutely does. However a lot of it can be found within Media Asset Management systems (not free) that connect to services that do the actual processing (costs extra and really not free). Like, if you wanted to search through your images and find every image with a red coffee cup in it, you could.
This also goes without saying, but if you have a single HDD with all your photos on it, the last thing you should be doing is running high I/O tasks on that HDD if that is your only copy. You should ingest those files into whatever solution you want and process it there, leaving the original intact. Ideally, duplicate that HDD and work off the duplicated data.
Here is the thing: I don't trust cloud services to still exist in 40 years
Even open source ones, they are very complex and if the people maintaining it stop working on it, I'm doomed.
Is why I don't want a server to run.
I have seen people using Adobe Lightroom to do sort of what I'm looking for. But too expensive.
As a DataHorder, by using those servers you are talking about, are you sure you will still have access to them in the future?
Might i suggest DigiKam ? Its free and open source, you can create albums and assign tags to pictures(like you said wedding 2006 or grandma), there is a tool for facial recognition but i dont have any experience with that. It creates few databases for the albums and i have no idea of it will handle that large amount of pictures but you can give it a try