How do you organise and view your family pictures and videos?

[CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet]

I'd very much like to hear who all of you organise your family pictures and videos, and how you and your family view them?

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I'm finally gonna tackle the jumbled, duplicate filled mess that is my Pictures_and_Videos Dataset but I'm undecided on how to do it. There is two things I'm set on though, first being that I';ll be creating a new Dataset. There's some unrelated weirdness with the current Dataset that means that I'll be creating a new Dataset and moving files to it as I sort them. I also be renaming everything so that all the files start with the date they were created (YYYY-MM-DD_HH.MM.SS), so that I can sort everything chronologically.

There are a few things I haven't made my mind up on though. Here are the questions I've been asking myself.

1. What do I do in the event that a files original creation date is not available?
2. Should I have nested Pictures and Videos Datasets? I've always read that Datasets should be used when you want to treat the data within it differently to other data. In my case, the only way I can think of that I'd treat them differently is in the event that I wanted to replicate just the pictures or just the videos, and possibly if I wanted a different snapshot schedule as I backup more pictures, more often than I do videos.
3. How granular I should be with sub-folders... should I have sub-folders for each year? each month? etc.... I'm leaning toward no, as this'd mean that family events that take place at the end and beginning of a month, such as the Christmas period or a vacation, would be in seperate folders.
4. Should I have all the files of a given type (e.g. all pictures) in one, single folder? The upside of it would be that everything would be in chronological order but the downside is having a folder with several thousand files.
5. Should I use hardlinks and do both 3 and 4?

That just addresses the physical location and organisation of the files. The other big question for me to answer is (6.) how do I share them in such a way that it's easy to use for my family? I'm thinking Nextcloud might fit the bill but I'm also considering Piwigo if I can figure out how to get it up and running on FreeNAS. Preferably I'd like the solution that leaves the original files untouched and something that has some portatbility between different systems, in the event I need to change servers (or even operating systems).

 

[Tigersharke]

Filenames/creation dates:

• Another way to adjust the file dates is with `touch` to change the create/mod dates of the file, rather than their name(s). Any program (or simple `ls`) can sort by file date. This way you could include an abbreviated description in the file name without it getting too large. I cannot say how a filename translation would be handled between FreeBSD (or UNIX, which can accept rather large names with few constraints) and MSDOS or Windows, or Mac, it might truncate at some length or do other "automagic" tricks that would make a filename less perceptible.
• Have you checked the extended information (Exchangeable Image File, aka exif) for these digital photos? I would believe that along with the various camera data it would include a date. The info on digicam help site confirms it is likely. You might also possibly add a description in this way as well, although I do not know its limitations.
• Even a shorthand code used for the description, including holiday, family name, and other similar details will be useful when looking at a file list, and quicker than any image render (even thumbnails). Speaking of thumbnails and index pages, and so forth, image viewers may have their own method of showing an image directory such as 'Visual Schnauzer' in xv, and feh can create an index page as well do other things.

Organization, etc:
There are plenty of ways to sort, and one could even use a separate database to index things. I would have believed that symbolic links would work just as well as a hard link which I have rarely used myself. The main sticking point might end up being the number of files in a directory and how any software will handle them smoothly or efficiently or any related limits. If it includes its own database mechanism, perhaps it will store the files in a way that is efficient (thinking of how squid proxy creates and maintains its cache directories) but not very friendly outside of it.

 

[pro lamer]

I put separate events' pictures in separate folders directly under some main folder.

Folders names begin with date, year first. Granularity differs. I sort folders by name thus they are almost sorted by date. Example:
2018.12-2019.01 Christmas holiday
2018.12.07 window shopping
2019.01.20 namesday
...

Sent from my phone

 

[cobrakiller58]

Similar to pro lamer but I have the event name first instead of date since that is normally how I end up hunting for a particular picture.

 

[CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet]

Filenames/creation dates:

• Another way to adjust the file dates is with `touch` to change the create/mod dates of the file, rather than their name(s). Any program (or simple `ls`) can sort by file date. This way you could include an abbreviated description in the file name without it getting too large. I cannot say how a filename translation would be handled between FreeBSD (or UNIX, which can accept rather large names with few constraints) and MSDOS or Windows, or Mac, it might truncate at some length or do other "automagic" tricks that would make a filename less perceptible.
• Have you checked the extended information (Exchangeable Image File, aka exif) for these digital photos? I would believe that along with the various camera data it would include a date. The info on digicam help site confirms it is likely. You might also possibly add a description in this way as well, although I do not know its limitations.

Thankfully the vast majority of my pictures and videos have their creation date embed in their EXIF / metatdata. So for 98% of what I already I have, I won't need to modify or add date information. The other 2%.... the DV captures (from various formats of 8mm tape) and the scanned images (which I plan to vastly increase the number of soon) won't have camera model information or their original dates but it's less of an issues than it would be with more contemporary files.

In regards to file naming. I'm currently using an application called "Bulk Rename Utility" on Windows (as my preferred app on GNU / Linux isn't supported by the latest distro version I'm using and I haven't had time get it to work or to spin up an install of an older distro). It's able to detect the various date types that are embed in the pictures that I took with a digital camera. So when it comes to adding a date prefix, it's as simple as navigating to the correct folder and applying a preset naming filter. I'm pretty sure the same is true for my digital videos.

On Windows I'm also able to see camera make and model when right clicking a file and viewing it's properties but the same can't be said for Ubuntu Gnome unfortunately (nor for VLC surprisingly). Just when you think you're out they Windows pulls you right back in...

• Even a shorthand code used for the description, including holiday, family name, and other similar details will be useful when looking at a file list, and quicker than any image render (even thumbnails). Speaking of thumbnails and index pages, and so forth, image viewers may have their own method of showing an image directory such as 'Visual Schnauzer' in xv, and feh can create an index page as well do other things.

Organization, etc:
There are plenty of ways to sort, and one could even use a separate database to index things. I would have believed that symbolic links would work just as well as a hard link which I have rarely used myself. The main sticking point might end up being the number of files in a directory and how any software will handle them smoothly or efficiently or any related limits. If it includes its own database mechanism, perhaps it will store the files in a way that is efficient (thinking of how squid proxy creates and maintains its cache directories) but not very friendly outside of it.

RE: Hardlinks... I hadn't even considered using symlinks to be honest. My head must still be in Plex mode, which doesn't work with symlinks.

I guess the question of organization comes down to what application I use to serve the data to my family. Having folders for each month of the year might have the downside of splitting various events and logical groups of images/videos into separate folders but that disadvantage may well be almost completely negated by the right gallery / tagging application.

 

[pro lamer]

my preferred app on GNU / Linux

BTW which one is it? I might try it on Fedora...

Sent from my phone

 

[CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet]

BTW which one is it? I might try it on Fedora...

Sent from my phone

It's called pyRenamer.

I have found a few people saying that they've been able to install it on Ubuntu 19.xx (along with some suggestions to try GPRename and renrot, as they appear to have feature parity with pyRenamer) but I've held of on trying to get it working as I want to change distros first... Ubuntu is just too close to being the Windows of Linux for my liking and at this point, ease of use is no longe a big enough selling point.

[EDIT] So much for changing distros first...

Getting pyRenamer running on 18.04 is a five minute job. You just have to download the pyRenamer .deb file and make sure it's dependencies are met before installing pyRenamer. Here's a quick tutorial just in case it might help another user but the credit should go to xramtech on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffQ_HUt2W0o

1. Download pyrenamer_0.6.0-1.2_all.deb. I used the following link found on pyRenamer's launchpad but the .deb file is available elsewhere - http://launchpadlibrarian.net/230018957/pyrenamer_0.6.0-1.2_all.deb
2. Make sure you have the following dependencies met (I used Synaptic Package Manager)-

Code:

    gconf2 (>= 2.28.1-2)
    python (<< 2.8)
    python (>= 2.7.5-5~)
    python-gconf
    python-glade2
    python-gtk2 (>= 2.4)
    python-hachoir-metadata

3. Open a shell in the .deb files download location and run the following command sudo dpkg -i pyrenamer_0.6.0-1.2_all.deb

 

[CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet]

Having not used it in a little while, after installing pyRenamer I've remembered that the only type of date it can insert into a file or folders name is the current date, which in my case is of no use. pyRenamer can still be helpful when renaming a batch of files, such as TV series, as you can use it to quickly and easily delete or insert text at a specific position within a name.

In light of the above, I've tried installing Bulk Rename Utility using WINE and at first glance, it appears to be working just fine... the UI is still a rather cluttered and messy but it does the job as good as anything I've yet found.

 

[Dice]

I'd very much like to hear who all of you organise your family pictures and videos, and how you and your family view them?

We don't do anything fancy. Just another data point :)
Pictures are typically auto uploaded to the cloud, directly from our phones. In doing so, the jpegs catch a filename with date and time of the photo. That is all the reference we need.
Once a quarter, the photo blob is relocated in the archive. Particularly viewable isolated events like vacations and such are granted a separated folder.
Typically, the folder structure of a year look something like:

2019\
2019Q1
2019Q2
20190402 - homers wedding
2019xx

Viewing takes place mostly behind a desktop computer browsing files.

 

[dasti]

funny thing I'm in the middle of almost the same mess

- the tool I use to help me is digikam (on kubuntu) I use it to deduplicate, dedouble filenames, rename massively, adjust original time for people who travel and forget to set their camera properly, tagging, geo tag...

pictures names : I use that convention yyyymmdd-hhmmss (with hours in 24h format)


- for the directories
- I regroup pictures and videos just to avoid having thousands of them in the same directory, I choose themes that will require the minimum effort i.e. holidays there, anniversary of X
- for kid pictures, when there is not a special event I regroup them just by age : at the beginning it was per month and passed 3 years it's per year
- I also group those directories in batch of 5 years : that's arbitrary choice and I could change that to something meaningful i.e. period we lived in XXX, period we lived in YYY
- To add more relevant information, I use the tagging feature : to work around situations like an anniversary during the holidays
- I also started to use the face recognition feature and teach digikam to recognize people of my familly on the pictures (it just creates a special tag)
- I save those extra informations in the pictures (opposed to only in the local database) so I'm not locked using digikam

and last trick
- I use syncthing to copy all my phone pictures directly on my freenas