Where do all the photos go!?
A visual memory of 15 years of personal snapshots.
How to actually enjoy all those snapshots on a daily basis.
We generate a whole lot of photos during a year. I always end up with a digital pile of around 35000 photos. Luckily I don’t have to sort them out at the end of the year. As a disciplined pro-photographer I do my homework immediately when I come home from a shoot. Import them into Capture One Pro. Filter, tag, edit, color grade and export the photos that need to go to the client or for retouching. I also run backups like a boss: “Two local and one in the cloud”. My photo backup (on dropbox) is about 14 terabytes. But having an online full back up of your photo database is worth the money and effort. But most of them sit there to be never used again.
That is something that I don’t want to happen to my personal photos. Just sitting there waiting impatiently to be never seen again. And in fact that is something what people ask me very often: «what do you do with all those personal photos?»
Of the 35000 photos I make a year, about 5000 are personal: Travel, snapshots, kids, family, friends, trips, portraits, … and a selection of those I want to have always close to me. On my phone, laying around in the house in small photo book and rotating on our TV’s at home. We hardly watch television at home here but we often spent an hour just watching photos and the according memories on the TV. Catching up memories from the first day I met my girlfriend, the birth of our daughters, our wildcamp adventures and more random memories like mornings at breakfast ora play-full sunny afternoon, just random life. I find that very important reliving those memories, it keeps me focussed on the future. It inspires me to keep up exploring and creating great memories for myself and our family.
To get all your personal photos somewhat organised and in a logical process flow you first need to step back and look where your photos are coming from and where you want them to go. And the black box in between the input and output is what you need to figure out and automate as much as possible. Because we are all lazy beings and don’t want to spent an entire day organising your memories. Except for me, I like doing that because the results satisfies everyone in the family.
Google Photos is my main archive, every photo that I want to keep ends up there. I’ll get more in detail why and how it works and especially why it’s just plain genius. So input comes from both me and my girlfriend smartphone, every photo that we take goes to Google Photos. That is easy to keep space on your phone and you have immediately an online backup. And it adds photos from people in specific folder, keeps grouped folder per person, it even recognises your pets, … but more on that later, first the flow.
For the photos taken with any of my favorite cameras (Sony A7Riii, Sony A7iii, RX100iii, Ricoh GRiii, …) I treat them the same way as I do with my professional photos. I download them to my computer and process a selection of the images and export those to a specific folder on my Mac. That folder is automatically synced to Google photos. No need for extra actions or anything. Everything I export from Lightroom (What is use to process my personal photos) goes in that folder. And with the Mac/PC Google Photos App you can select specific folder to auto upload to Google Photos. Very convenient!
All the photos taken with any of those cameras are also backed up local and the cloud. You can’t have enough backups ;-)
Google Photos doesn’t keep the original format but a smaller version. But i’m ok with that. The size is big enough for small prints and for the files coming from my camera, I still have the High Res files in my local archive and in the cloud.
The same folder that I use for my export to Google Photos is also the source folder for screensaver on my apple TV. In Apple TV you can select via HomeSharing in iTunes what the source folder Is for the Apple TV Screensaver. So once you set that in iTunes and Apple TV it updates the screensaver with newly added photos. Sometimes it takes a day or two before it renews but in my experience it even updates the same day.
So when I export photos to that folder both Apple TV and Google Photos get updated automatically. The smartphone photos that are good enough are also downloaded from Google Photos to that folder. And that same source folder is used to print from to those 10x15 photo booklets on our living room table.
I used to print them myself, but now I use on online print service. That is much cheaper.
And that’s about it for my workflow for personal photos. It takes me 30 minutes to process photos from a day out: including selecting, processing, export and back up. But if you’re not home in processing photos, you can also just download your photos from your camera, copy them into your source folder and maybe delete the bad photos that you don’t like. That will take you about 10 minutes a week I guess.
Now that we got a streamlined workflow that makes keeping memories easy, it’s time to dive a little deeper in the magic of Google Photos.
Google Photos has a lot of powerful AI behind the minimalist interface.
It reads the metadata of your photos and makes it searchable. So when you are looking for a memory you just type in place where you were and it will give you the photos related to that location. GPS data is only available if you have that option on your camera but the trick is adding to each folder of a holiday a smartphone photo. They always have location info in their metadata. So when you search for the place where you went on Holiday, it wil return a GPS tagged photo of that location and the folder that it is listed in, so you can immediately find your treasured vacation photos back.
It also recognises people and automatically groups those in folders. Not all accounts have this feature yet but there’s a work around to activate that. It takes a while to get all the faces labeled with their name but once the big work is done, it’s a fully automated thing. The cool thing is that I now just click on a photo of my daughter and I get a list of photos containing every photo of her from her birth up till yesterday when she spilled the milk all over the breakfast table. (On the condition that you consequently keep your Google Photo archive up-to-date with the earlier mentioned workflow.) Sometimes Google asks me to confirm if two faces match to improve its recognition skill.
But it goes even further, my good friend Pieter B., who I learned this from has his facial recognition folder of me shared with me. Whenever we are together and het takes photos of me they are added to our shared folder. Genius.
We can even go one step further. I create folder for each grouped activity. Holiday, Weekends, trips, events, … That is a manual action each time I auto upload files. But I also created a folder called “friends” and “work”. For each folder I selected the faces that belong to that group. And whenever a photo is uploaded to Google Photos its AI will run and put the recognised face in the assigned groups. Of course all these photos are not public unless you decide to take an individual photo or folder and share it with an individual or make it generally public.
I even use Google photos as a memory for the kind of medication that I take, take track of works in the house. Proof of being correctly parked or even where i’m parked…
Google Photos is also great for sharing, making albums, getting past memory/event reminders, quick edit photos, … And the best thing of all, it’s free.
In fact, Google photos is my visual memory!
It seems like a lot to do, but it isn’t and after the initial setup is done it takes about 15 minutes a week to keep things organised.
The initial setup will take you a couple of hours depending on your IT skills.
After that it will take you between 15 and 30 minutes a week to keep everything organised and up to date. On a lazy Sunday afternoon when I hang with my kids in the cough, I browse on my phone trough my Google photos: deleting bad ones, assigning photos to folders, editing a bit, … 20 minutes of discipline a week to have maximum satisfaction of your photographic memory.
You can also do this on Chrome TV or other smart TV’s, ….
This article is part of a series I wrote about how I handle my digital life:
My Perfect Travel kit
A decade of paperless office
How I roll in the cloud
Where do all the photos go
Being a Professional Photographer: The Never Ending back up Story
