My Pictures are out of control
November 1, 2021 11:08 AM Subscribe
I’ve got 95,000 pictures on my phone and iCloud. I do not need 95,000 pictures. I also can’t face doing this entirely manually. It’s too much, and I shut down after a couple minutes, which means I don’t even make a dent. Is there an app or service that can help me? Reviews were disappointing on the ones I looked at - primarily it seems they didn’t work on anything synced - so now I’m hoping for a personal recommendation or one that flew under my radar when I was looking.
Best answer: I had good luck using Gemini to winnow my pictures.
posted by congen at 3:44 PM on November 1, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by congen at 3:44 PM on November 1, 2021 [1 favorite]
Previously. May you have better determination to actually doing the work than I did.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:11 PM on November 1, 2021
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:11 PM on November 1, 2021
When I did this a few years ago, I set a 60 or 90 day goal and then processed x pictures per day to get it done. I think I had about 10,000 pictures, so you x is likely to be much higher than mine, or your 90 days may need to be 180.
posted by COD at 4:15 PM on November 1, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by COD at 4:15 PM on November 1, 2021 [2 favorites]
Someone should make an app that’s tinder for photos.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 8:34 PM on November 1, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by nouvelle-personne at 8:34 PM on November 1, 2021 [8 favorites]
I've used smart folders to help with this by focusing on only one month at a time. Eg create a smart folder that has the date range as only a particular month of a particular year. Use the "Photo... is not... setting to exclude screenshots, videos, etc. Then focus on just the results for that one month - deleting photos that are obviously crap, and favouriting ones that you like. Duplicate your month smart folder and alter it to show only favourited ones from that month.
posted by slightlybewildered at 8:53 PM on November 1, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by slightlybewildered at 8:53 PM on November 1, 2021 [2 favorites]
Digital storage is cheap and occupies very little physical space; there is actually no need to winnow a collection. Get yourself a pair of 2TB USB3 disk drives, copy your entire photo collection onto both of them, put one of them away in a drawer and the other in something that adequately approximates a bank safety deposit box, then delete all your photos from your iCloud account and phone and start over.
That way they'll all be there any time you get around to feeling like leafing through them and pulling out some particularly good ones, and until that day arrives you can just ignore them.
posted by flabdablet at 4:12 AM on November 2, 2021 [2 favorites]
That way they'll all be there any time you get around to feeling like leafing through them and pulling out some particularly good ones, and until that day arrives you can just ignore them.
posted by flabdablet at 4:12 AM on November 2, 2021 [2 favorites]
This is a tangential suggestion, but I think it'll help you from making the problem *worse* in the interim: commit to paring down your photos going forward.
My photos were driving my crazy - they were stored in a bunch of different places and I had too many and my phone was taking forever to back up. So I got a SmugMug subscription, and set up a folder for each year, with a gallery for each month. Then I set up a recurring calendar reminder for the first of each month to upload last month's photos, and when I get it I take literally 5 minutes to go through and make a decision about which photos to save/upload. When that's done, I delete all the pictures from the month from my camera roll. I keep my VERY favorite ones on my phone indefinitely, along with anything unfinished (e.g. a photo for a warranty claim, which will get deleted on my next monthly pass through assuming the thing is complete), which means I have way less stuff on my phone, but with the app I can still access all of my photos more or less immediately as long as I have an internet connection.
For the backlog (and any new sets of photos that need to be sorted), I made a "To Sort" folder in SmugMug, and dropped all my old pictures in galleries in rough groups ("kid's birth" "phone pics 2012" "grandma's scanned slides"). Every so often I work through a folder and move it to a more permanent gallery. There's still a ton to do, but I know what's left and I know roughly where things are if I need to find them before I get to sorting.
Good luck!
posted by zibra at 7:13 AM on November 2, 2021
My photos were driving my crazy - they were stored in a bunch of different places and I had too many and my phone was taking forever to back up. So I got a SmugMug subscription, and set up a folder for each year, with a gallery for each month. Then I set up a recurring calendar reminder for the first of each month to upload last month's photos, and when I get it I take literally 5 minutes to go through and make a decision about which photos to save/upload. When that's done, I delete all the pictures from the month from my camera roll. I keep my VERY favorite ones on my phone indefinitely, along with anything unfinished (e.g. a photo for a warranty claim, which will get deleted on my next monthly pass through assuming the thing is complete), which means I have way less stuff on my phone, but with the app I can still access all of my photos more or less immediately as long as I have an internet connection.
For the backlog (and any new sets of photos that need to be sorted), I made a "To Sort" folder in SmugMug, and dropped all my old pictures in galleries in rough groups ("kid's birth" "phone pics 2012" "grandma's scanned slides"). Every so often I work through a folder and move it to a more permanent gallery. There's still a ton to do, but I know what's left and I know roughly where things are if I need to find them before I get to sorting.
Good luck!
posted by zibra at 7:13 AM on November 2, 2021
Someone should make an app that’s tinder for photos.
Someone did.
posted by flabdablet at 9:57 AM on November 2, 2021 [4 favorites]
Someone did.
posted by flabdablet at 9:57 AM on November 2, 2021 [4 favorites]
I use Photosweeper for this. They have a free trial which you can try it out before buying.
posted by nightwood at 3:34 PM on November 3, 2021
posted by nightwood at 3:34 PM on November 3, 2021
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Why do you think you're not making a dent in it? It's going to take time and you're going to revise what you think of the pictures as you're reminded of more and more of them. What's your process like? (I love workflows and optimising processes.) I've got maybe 1/10th your photos but I need to filter them to keep the few worthies -- when I had film cameras I thought a good 35mm reel of 36 shots might have 3 decent photos on them, but I'd be surprised if 1/100 is the ratio with digital and phone cameras.
So my workflow is going to be fraction-of-a-second gut response: bin, or 'maybe keep', or 'that's interesting'. Then review the 'maybe keep' to see if I missed anything interesting, aiming to do shorts stints of single-digit minutes to maybe a maximum of 40 minutes before moving away. The trick is to avoid it becoming a slog, then having got to 5-10% of the total picture count by the time it feels like a slog and I'm able to tell myself that I'm eating that elephant one bite at at time.
posted by k3ninho at 2:10 PM on November 1, 2021