hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3620.txt

Episode: 3620
Title: HPR3620: Photo storage, backups, and workflow
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3620/hpr3620.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:15:15

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,624 Friday, 17 June 2022.
Tid's show is entitled, Photostarge Back Cups, and Workflow and is part of the series Gimpid
is hosted by Ouka and is about 20 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is how to keep your photos safe.
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Hello, this is Ouka, welcoming you to another exciting episode in our ongoing Gimp series.
And what I want to do today is talk about what you're going to do with all of those photos
to protect them.
The next thing that you need to think about when you contemplate a lifetime of photos that
you might want to edit, fix or improve is how you're going to set up your workflow.
Now, since storage is relatively cheap on computers these days, for instance, I consider
a three terabyte hard drive the smallest I will bother to install now.
You know, it kind of makes sense to establish a careful workflow that uses this storage.
Now, the way I do it is to have two separate directory trees, one for original photos and
one for edited versions.
Within each directory tree, I have sub-directories for each year, and then within each year sub-directories
for specific events, if I have multiple photos.
For instance, in 1979, we took a trip to San Francisco early in the year, and it was on
that trip that we officially became engaged.
So that's one folder.
Then we had a joint bachelor party that's another folder.
Cheryl's bridal shower was a third folder, the wedding was a fourth, the honeymoon was a fifth.
Now, this was a busy year with a lot of photos and a lot of events.
Some years, all I might have are some miscellaneous photos in the directory for that year.
So anyway, I first put all of my originals into the right folders.
Then I set up a duplicate structure for my edited versions.
Now, if a photo doesn't need editing, or I've not gotten around to it yet,
a copy still goes in the duplicate tree for what I call my final copies.
The idea is that one tree is my archive, and the other is my in-use group.
Then I copy all of this to my NAS drive, which in my case is a DROBO5N,
and that of course has an essentially read type of redundancy built into it.
That gives me some added backup, which is important.
After all, there are only two kinds of hard drive in the world.
Those that have failed, and those that are going to fail eventually.
Now, I then copy the final entire tree of the final versions, or updates as it goes on,
onto an SD card, which is inserted into an electronic photo frame,
which sits beside my monitor and runs continuously, changing the photo every 15 minutes.
Now, mine is a 10.1-inch frame from a company called Sungale.
Amazon has it listed for $79 as I write this. I put a link in the show notes.
And you can spend more than this, or less than this.
I'm just saying this is what I have. I'm satisfied with it.
The point is, I don't just want photos stored away.
I want to enjoy them and relive those memories.
So, for instance, I get to revisit the trip we took to Ireland with my brother and his wife,
or the Ryan River cruise we did for our 40th wedding anniversary.
This stuff worth reliving.
Now, this is good, but it isn't enough to be safe.
If my house clocked fire as an example, I expect I would lose my computer, my NAS drive,
and my photo frame.
And then there is the famous example of the director, Francis Ford Coppola.
And I always keep this in mind.
Francis, and I'm quoting now from a story in the Guardian link on the show notes,
Francis Ford Coppola,
five-time Oscar-winning director of the Godfather Trilogy and other films knows how that feels.
Yesterday, he lamented the fact that he had lost computer data, including his writings
and family photographs, going back 15 years in a robbery on his Argentine studios.
He had backed up all the material, but the robbers also stole the small reserve memory that was
lying on the floor of the studio. If someone could bring me back my backup, I'd be very happy,
Mr. Coppola said. Speaking to the Argentine news agency, Toto Notesias, he said,
the lost material held all of the photographs of my life, all of my writing.
The return of the backup, which he described as just a little thing, would save me years.
You know, and that's a good object lesson. Unfortunately, it's the hardest way to learn that lesson.
So, you know, having a backup on site is better than not having a backup on site.
You know, one is saying that you shouldn't do that, but it is not sufficient if it's anything you
really want to hang on to. Now, it's a matter of record, I would say, that every day someone loses
a lifetime's worth of photos when a computer crashes and dies. And people who have, you know,
technology advice columns are constantly getting letters. What can I do to get my photos back?
In most cases, nothing or you can spend a small fortune to have a data recovery firm do it.
I don't think that's the best way to do it. I think you just need to have off-site backups.
And I've done this with a kind of triple redundancy. Now, this is just how I'm doing it.
I offer it for your consideration. And the thing you need to keep in mind is that the off-site
backup is not free. You do need to spend something. Now, it could be as simple as a spare hard drive
that you leave with a friend, but then you have to be sure your friend will be as careful with it
as you would like. And let's face it, your photos don't mean as much to your friend as they do to you.
Now, I've chose to go with cloud backup in three different ways.
Now, first is Facebook. There's no monetary cost to putting your photos on Facebook.
You pay in other ways, of course, such as giving them information, seeing, advertising,
stuff like that. Now, I wouldn't join Facebook for the sole purpose of storing photos,
but I have an account there because everyone else in my family is there, and that's how we keep in touch.
And there are the people I would be most interested in sharing my photos with.
And perhaps the only people who really would be interested in seeing them.
Now, of course, one wrinkle with this is you can't just store the photos you have to post them,
at least I've not found a way to store them without posting them, but since I have no compromising
nude photos, that isn't a big deal for me.
Now, the next one, Google Photos.
This used to be a better deal when Google gave you unlimited storage. Those days are gone.
As of June 1st, 2021, any new photos you upload will count towards your Google storage limit,
which is 15 gigabytes if you have a free Google account.
And that has to cover everything. Now, they did grandfather in, for now, any photos previously
uploaded so they will not count towards the limit. Now, if you need more storage, you have to purchase
it from Google. Now, I said it covers everything. It's not just photos. Google Docs, Google Drive,
Gmail, all of those things count. Of course, Gmail, they're always encouraging you to
keep all of your mail forever. So that will mount up if you do that.
It's not a bad deal. I pay $30 a year and I have at the moment 204 gigabytes of storage. Now,
I checked and the deal right now is $30 a year gets you 200 gigabytes. So the four gigabytes
must be old stuff that got grandfathered in or something. I don't know.
So I have a capacity of 204 gigabytes there, of which I have used 86.11 gigabytes.
And the breakdown on that, and you can see this if you go into your Google storage,
Google Drive is 25.9 gigabytes. Now, I've got, you know, PDF files and stuff in there,
and Google Drive is how I share things with my wife that we may need to both have access to.
And Gmail, relatively small, 0.58 gigabytes, I am pretty good about not hanging on to stuff that I
don't need. So I tend to delete most of my emails. And then finally, Google photos 59.62 gigabytes.
So, you know, it's $30 a year doesn't bother me. Then Flickr, I have a Flickr Pro account that
costs about $50 a year and it gets me unlimited storage. I have to say the future of Flickr is a
little uncertain right now. It was acquired by Smugmug, which is good because, you know,
remember originally it was part of Yahoo and it kind of languished with Yahoo. But Smugmug has
reported that Flickr is still losing money and there may be a limit to how long they can afford
to keep doing that. So, Smugmug itself is not a bad deal either. Okay, has a basic plan offering
unlimited storage for $55 a year. So anyway, Facebook, Google and Flickr are the three that I have right now.
I've had them for a few years. Now, there's other alternatives like Shutterfly. And I've also
posted a link in the show notes to an article from Bebom that has a list of alternatives.
Now, the general rule here is that there is no free lunch. You have to pay for storage.
If a site offers free unlimited storage, well, you know they have to make money somehow. And you
might not like how they do it. So, I actually just prefer a straight commercial transaction.
But that's me. You know, you can make up your own mind about that. In all three of these services,
you do things pretty much the same way. You upload photos. You collect them in groups that are
called albums. And then you can share them. You can add descriptions for each photo.
And for each album, you can create a accompanying text. For instance, on our Ryan River cruise,
I brought my Chromebook along. In each day, I wrote down a diary using a Google doc of what we
did. The things we saw, the people we met. When I got home, I collected each day's photos into
an album and then pasted in my diary entry for that day as the album text. Now, in Facebook,
that becomes the text of the post. So, I've got a good record of what we did.
Note also that all three of these will store videos as well as still photos.
I often will record short videos using my phone or my waterproof action camera, which I've
posted shows about previously. And these are generally about three minutes and length. So,
I haven't attempted to, you know, put up an hour's worth of video or anything.
I mean, if I had that much video to put up, I would put it on YouTube. I have an account there too.
So, here's what my workflow looks like as a result of this. Number one, I take some photos.
Number two, record some information. Now, it might be the daily diary, like I did on
our Rhine River Cruise. Or, you know, if I'm at a music festival, it might be a program where I
just write down and number in order the people I took photos of.
Then when I get home, I move the photos from my phone or my camera onto my computer
in the originals directory tree. And I use the information I recorded to name the photos
appropriately. Then make any edits that are needed, like cropping, color correction, etc.,
and discard any duds because, you know, I take more photos than I end up keeping. Some of them
just don't come out very well. And then store the result in the edited or final directory tree.
Then, copy the updates for both trees to the DROBO NAS device. Now, this step could easily
be automated using backup software, but as part of my standard workflow, it really doesn't take long
to do it manually. Then, go to Flickr. Upload the edited photos, caption them with information I
recorded, collect them in an album, add the explanatory text to the album, which could be anything
from a few sentences to a page. Then, go to Google. Upload and do the similar. Go to Facebook,
upload, do the similar, and post it. And enjoy the comments from family and friends on Facebook.
And finally, copy to the SD card on my electronic picture frame. Now, frankly, I do that about once a year.
Now, software backup. This is another thing to think about, and has often overlooked.
In GIMP, we've looked at the idea that there are plugins available, and that you can download and
add things like fonts, brushes, patterns, and so on. If you get used to having them available,
you might want to back them up as well. If you already have an offsite or cloud backup solution,
you could easily add a few directories. In GIMP, go to the edit menu, select preferences,
and go all the way down to folders. Click the plus sign to expand it. And you should have a
window that is going to list all of your folders. Be brushes, dynamics, patterns, palettes,
gradients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I have a picture of this on my web page.
And this is from my Kabuntu 20.04 box running GIMP 2.10.24. I say that because, depending on your
system, things may look slightly different. For many of these, you're going to see two different
directories. One is marked as writable, and the other is not. Now, the thing you have to understand
is that GIMP sets up its own folders on installation, and they're not intended to be user writable.
And so that stores all of the stuff that GIMP automatically comes with as part of the installation.
Now, the folders that are marked writable, in my case, they're the ones in my home directory,
whereas GIMP's built-in stuff is in the slash USR directory.
Anyway, the folders marked writable are where you're supposed to store all of these things.
And we've talked about it before. Anything you put in that folder will automatically appear
the next time you open GIMP. It knows to look in that folder, and load anything it sees there.
Now, you may not be running the same kind of system I am. I put a link in the show notes
to a page on the GIMP site that talks about how to do this for Windows or OS10, if you're
into any of those things. Now, if I'm backing up my entire home directory, which I would say is
probably best practice, it's kind of covered, but again, think about what happens if the backup is
only local. If you're not backing up to the cloud somewhere, that backup could disappear, again,
flood, fire, any of these things. So copying that directory is probably a good idea.
Anyway, if you go to the folders, you can see where things are located on your system,
and I would say copying this stuff to a cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever.
If you have an offsite next cloud hosted somewhere, that could be cool.
So to summarize, before I retired, I was a project manager for about 15 years.
And one of the things I had to do on my projects was risk management.
The idea was to look at different scenarios, see what the outcomes would be, and how the project
would recover from a bad outcome. That doesn't mean you protect against everything at all costs,
but it does mean you consider everything that might happen, how likely it is, and what it would
cost to protect against it and so on. Then you would make a deliberate decision. It might be to
mitigate the risk, to ensure against it, or just accept it. I suggest you approach this in
a similar spirit. Some risks you may decide to simply accept. There isn't a whole lot I can do to
protect my assets in the event of a nuclear war, but a tornado could wreck my house because I live
in a place where they happen with some regularity, which is the middle of the United States.
And if I live through the event, which is likely, if there is a warning, and there usually is,
what I'd like to get my photos back, can I do it at an acceptable cost? If the answer to those
two questions is yes, then I need to take some steps. So look at the scenarios that might cause
you to lose your photos and think about how much they are worth to you, and then act on that.
And so with that, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and as always,
encouraging you to support free software. Bye-bye!
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