[HN Gopher] Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challen...
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Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challenge is finding
the good ones
Author : ciprian_craciun
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-04-01 06:33 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| jdrc wrote:
| the better the camera of my phone the less I use it. there are so
| many good photos of everything, it's just, what's the point ?
| hulitu wrote:
| > Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challenge is
| finding the good ones
|
| Google already did this for you.
| MisterTea wrote:
| There was a time when cameras had a roll of film in them, usually
| 35mm limited to 36 shots per roll. You had to put thought into
| shooting because there was no preview, undo or delete. Once the
| films was exposed, it was done. Mistakes costed money.
|
| Now you can shoot until your 1TB+ SD card is full, preview,
| delete, edit, etc, right on the camera as it is now a general
| purpose computer with a digital camera hooked to it. So
| photography is a now a cheap afterthought for many. Point, click,
| forget.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| It helps to consider the smartphone as an "input device" rather
| than as storage and presentation device. You know you've got a
| real winner of a photo if right away you want to share it with
| someone. A backlit cluster of leaves on a beautiful fall day -
| off to my sister who is a master of such shots. A really great
| photo of the kids - off to a particular Whatsapp group (Facebook
| has long ago faded for this sort of thing - yes, I know, Whatsapp
| is still Facebook). And so on.
|
| But at the end of the day, or the week anyway, download all the
| new stuff to my old-school computer and cull ruthlessly. Only the
| parts that survive that go into the real collection. Which is
| still a lot, but cross-referenced by date taken _and_ subject
| matter, the fulfill the "digital diary" role, not the "art
| gallery" role.
|
| Immediate culling is important. Once the photos are a month or
| two old, for one thing they seem too important to cull any more;
| for another so many have accumulated that you'll never catch up
| anyway.
|
| My ultimate storage system - homemade and not publishable quality
| - has a web accessible, rudimentary full screen, swipeable
| presentation layer, so I can still show off the photos from it in
| a similar way to showing off photos actually stored on the phone.
| But it has the culled collection that is merged together from two
| phones, several old school digital cameras, and even motion
| capture surveillance cameras watching the front and back yards.
| pkulak wrote:
| Am I ever the opposite. Every photo or video anyone in my
| family takes goes to the local NAS and that's the end of it. I
| think of that media more like a diary. It's all sorted by date,
| and that's it; but it's also enough.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Backups? One advantage of the culled collection (with the pix
| also downscaled from the original resolution to 2500px on the
| longer edge) is that I can afford to keep it in
| quadruplicate. On the main machine, on the server that
| exposes it to the web (password protected), and on two
| portable hard disks, one of which is always kept offsite in
| alternation.
| pkulak wrote:
| I've got about 13 years of photos and videos and it's still
| under a single terabyte. That's pretty easy to keep one
| copy of in Raid 1 and one remote. If I had 10x... I'd
| probably just spring for more hard drives and move to
| Glacier for backup.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| I wish that Apple had pulled just a few of the organisation
| features from Aperture into Photos before they canned it.
|
| For example, the concept of "stacks" -- letting us condense a
| group of highly similar shots and choose a "winner" to represent
| them all, but not actually have to delete the others.
| thunderbong wrote:
| Are there any open source programs (on the desktop) which can do
| as others have suggested that Apple and Google do?
|
| Essentially, filtering the good photos from the gazillions
| collected?
| pwenzel wrote:
| I must be an old person. I still upload my favorite stuff to
| Flickr and periodically delete everything else. Even in 2022
| Flickr is still an excellent shoebox for photos and videos.
|
| This has been my workflow for over 15 years and I am close to
| accruing 20,000 items that I believe to be reasonably searchable.
| voisin wrote:
| Every year or so I go through my photos since the last time and
| cull whatever photos I've taken in a manner similar to what he
| describes at the end of this article. While I agree the process
| largely needs to be done by hand, there are components that could
| be automated and technology could aid in the process.
|
| For example, rather than showing me all my photos in
| chronological order, it would be amazing if there was a way to
| group photos first by event - say someone's birthday party. As a
| parent of young children, I don't want to have no photos of a
| certain visit with grandma, but I also don't want or need 50
| photos of that visit. If my photos were first grouped by event, I
| could aim to keep 1 or 2 photos and be a lot quicker and more
| ruthless and culling photos from that event.
|
| Once shown as events, technology could certainly highlight or
| group the photos that were all taken in quick succession. Often I
| take a lot of photos while trying to hit the exact moment my
| children are all looking.
|
| Then, technology could likely intelligently highlight photos that
| are blurry or maybe even all the shots that I accidentally hit
| while putting the phone back in my pocket and so show only the
| floor or something. Seeing these highlighted would make it much
| quicker to delete photos.
|
| I am sure there are more simple processes that could be included
| that would allow people to cull photos down from 1000s to 10s in
| a short period.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > For example, rather than showing me all my photos in
| chronological order, it would be amazing if there was a way to
| group photos first by event - say someone's birthday party.
|
| Shotwell[0] automatically orders your photos by date, which is
| quite useful.
|
| [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell
| shotta wrote:
| I use the App Flic to sift through my photos. It lets you pick
| a month (or I think day) and then you go through your photos
| right swiping (keep) and left (trash bin to review once again
| before emptying.)
|
| Another app, Gemini, can help you find photos of nothing (floor
| shots, sky shots, pocket shots) and blurry shots and
| duplicates.
| gadders wrote:
| I used to like the android app Slidebox that walked you
| through your gallery and swipe left or right to keep photos.
| Unfortunately it seems like abandonware since 2016 and
| doesn't support SD storage.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I remember an early discussion with an engineer from either
| Smugmug or Dropbox, circa 2011-2012. Something like 99% of photos
| backed up online were pretty much never retrieved. I'd guess it's
| almost the same today.
| gadders wrote:
| More cynically, I wonder if that is why they don't give us the
| tools on our phone to easily prune our photo collections? Too
| much money being made in cloud storage.
| coldpie wrote:
| I wonder how many petabytes of Google's storage is filled with
| blurry pictures of fish in aquariums that will never be viewed.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Or sunset photos with a camera flash washing everything
| out...
| auto wrote:
| Honestly the challenge for me, as an iPhone user but not a
| complete Apple cloud ecosystem user, is getting the damn things
| off my phone. Is there anyway to do this that isn't trash yet? So
| many of the processes I've run through either fail randomly, or
| Apple has broken. At one point I remember being able to just plug
| into a linux box, do some mounting magic, and transfer the files
| over just like any USB device, but I feel like that didn't work
| the last time I tried.
|
| It's downright hostile.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse - used it literally 2
| days ago to back up a couple tens of GB of photos and videos.
| Works great.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I don't know about recently, but historically, "idevicepair" or
| whatever it's called on the Linux box, and then the iPhone
| photos come down quickly and reliably. Android is OK these
| days, but used to be really dodgy to download via USB cable.
|
| But recently I just use a wifi file server app. "Sweech" on
| Android. A couple of taps and I can download the newest stuff
| as a zip file via web browser.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Scrapbooks. Seriously.
|
| Pay the money to have photos printed, and put them into a
| scrapbook. If you have kids, this is a fantastic weekend
| project that everybody loves. If not, just having them in a
| physical photo album is good too.
|
| Quantity is a quality on its own, but not when it comes to
| photographs. Edit ruthlessly.
| nocman wrote:
| Did you reply to the wrong parent? How is this even remotely
| related to how to transfer files from your phone to another
| device?
| endymi0n wrote:
| Honestly, I'm astounded how good Apple got with it. And I say
| this at the risk of coming across like a fanboy which I'm
| definitely not. I'm very, _very_ rarely delighted by features
| that get pushed into my face, but the automatic categorization of
| "Moments" and unobtrusive integration into the UI is something I
| really enjoy a lot.
|
| It really gets the mix incredibly well between editorial ideas
| (i.e. "Among the trees" with lots of very different adventures in
| the forest), machine learning aided curation (including cutting
| videos to cue scenes!) and overall format: Fitting, vibrant but
| non-annoying music in the background, the format isn't too short
| or too long. Plus, at the end you can choose between more pre-
| curated moments.
|
| The privacy-preserving curation that just takes some background
| cycles on my mobile GPU while it's charging is the cherry on the
| cake and I think Apple really got a bullseye there.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| This is something I have anecdotally heard from many people,
| regardless of their age or experience with tech. I myself set
| up a widget for my parents (in their 60s) to surface photos and
| memories on their iPhones, and they derive more daily delight
| from that single feature than from any other technology.
| tawaypol wrote:
| I would have far preferred being able to pick a default folder
| or tag to put photos in so they're organized when I take them
| without the need for any ML. That's what the camera script I
| wrote for my Pinephone does. Important photos get human
| readable names when after the first time I use them.
|
| It turns out if you actually use your computer intelligently
| it's very pleasant to use.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Most people are not organizers.
| bigbizisverywyz wrote:
| I'm also pretty impressed with the 'Over the Years' and 'Your
| Story' vignettes that my iPhone periodically creates, which was
| probably developed in direct response to that realisation that
| people take an incredible number of pictures (I know I do,
| especially since kids..) and very rarely actually consume them
| in any meaningful way.
|
| I just wish it wouldn't select pictures of my ex-gf so often :/
| Should probably delete them, but.. nostalgia.
| navbaker wrote:
| I love these features, but am absolutely flabbergasted that
| Apple removed the ability to turn off the music that plays
| when you view the memory slideshow! It's not on-device music,
| it's not any sort of music that I chose, it's just some
| Apple-chosen soundtrack that I absolutely do not want, yet
| the only option is to turn my volume all the way down. I
| would label it hostile design.
| reom_tobit wrote:
| If pictures of people you don't want to see get selected, you
| can block them from being selected.
|
| Select the person and it's something like "Include this
| person less" that you're after.
|
| It's not perfect, but it'll allow you to keep the photos and
| not have them pop up in memories
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I'd just save the ones I didn't want to see somewhere else
| not on the phone. That way, the ones that are good memories
| can stay, and the ones that aren't can just go.
| AnonC wrote:
| Since it isn't explicitly mentioned here, I'd like to add that
| the music transitions match the photo transitions...to put it
| another way, the photos transition in sync with the transitions
| or beats in the music.
|
| Another good thing to do with these photos is to add a nice
| large widget on the Home Screen to look back everyday.
| flybrand wrote:
| The search function in Apple and in the Google photos apps are
| good. Text searches for "Turkey" or other terms is surprisingly
| good.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I am not an Apple fanboy either, more like a hater. I have
| never owned a single Apple product, and I have a lot of bad
| things to say about them. But I have to admit that when it
| comes to user experience, they can be way ahead of the
| competition. They can screw things up, but when they decide to
| do things well, they deliver.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| It's impressive, but as someone who recently broke up with
| their partner, the vignettes of our relationship highlights
| were a bit of a stab of pain.
| stephlow wrote:
| I feel your pain, I've been there. If you go to the person in
| the photos app, there's an option to feature that person less
| in memories.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| It was actually a beautiful vignette, though seeing it pop
| up on my main screen while I was on a date was a bit of a
| weird experience.
| matwood wrote:
| Same. I use the Home Screen widget on my phone that surfaces a
| pic each day, and it's almost always good.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Even better, searching works well. I can generally find
| whatever person, thing or place I'm looking for in my
| collection.
| Someone wrote:
| One thing I do when I want to make a selection of similar photos
| is to sort them by size (in kilobytes) and keep the largest
| one(s). That selects for the photos with the most details.
|
| I don't advocate automating that, though. You still want to at
| least glance at all of them because there may be a technically
| inferior one that jumps out to you.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Speaking for myself, out of the photos I take, I probably have
| maybe 10-20% that are "good". So I have a "favorites" folder
| containing sub-folders (related to the location/occassion/topic)
| to which I move the good ones. Since the percent of good ones
| isn't high, this isn't a lot of work and can be done gradually
| anytime I'm looking at "unreviewed" photos.
| noja wrote:
| I must say, I really like using (the weirdly-named) Hash Photos
| (https://www.hashphotos.app/) for quickly finding which photo in
| a bunch of similar photos to keep. You can choose which photos to
| compare, then keep marking the comparison photos as best until
| you have decided. Zooming is synchronised, and you can delete
| particularly bad photos as you go. It does that one thing very
| well.
| mkbkn wrote:
| Looks useful. Is there any such app for Android or Linux?
| noja wrote:
| Maybe this one? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id
| =ch.want.imagec...
| heisenzombie wrote:
| Thank you for the recommendation, that's an insta-buy from me.
| I love that it's well integrated to the system photos library
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I think this is one of the big unsolved problems in consumer
| tech.
|
| Everyone has a smartphone and everyone has this visual
| documentation of all of the significant events over their entire
| life.
|
| We extract so little value from our photos though. There are too
| many photos to even look at.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| As a professional photographer, I delete over 90% of smartphone
| photos I take right away. Noone will ever have time to look at
| all of it.
|
| Even for commercial portrait shoots I end up using maybe 5% of
| the photos. Weddings are different - over 25% is usable.
| dataf3l wrote:
| Precisely because I noticed this, I wrote a small tool (open
| source) which can be used to organize pictures.
|
| https://github.com/dataf3l/open-photo-organizer
|
| the main idea is that you can assign keyboard bindings to
| folders, so one can efficiently:"watch a folder", "press a key"
| and automatically organize the pics, for example:
|
| press x to delete press f for family press c for cat pictures
|
| these bindings are configurable, so you can setup your own
| folders based on your own needs.
|
| feel free to use it and I hope it can help you guys with your
| pictures :)
|
| I humbly request feedback:
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Our Sony TV (GoogleTV based) plays a slideshow of recent photos
| as a screensaver (where "recent" seems to be up to a year ago),
| which is a nice way to review photos when you're walking by the
| TV and a photo catches your eye.
|
| But it's missing a key feature to "star" a photo that you like,
| and it doesn't even seem to have a way to see metadata to find
| out when the photo was taken, so you can't easily find it in your
| library on your phone if you want to share it.
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(page generated 2022-04-04 23:02 UTC)