Pogue’s Photos Unification
David Pogue (via CYME):
After 30 years of shutterbugging, my photos were all over the place. 150,000 of them were on Flickr, which was once free but has crept up to $80 a year—and is ancient and pretty terrible for photo management (can’t search by face, object, or place, for example). Another 200,000 were lodged in various bloated, slow Photos libraries. I could never find pictures or videos!
So I devised a master plan to consolidate everything. Buy a RAID hard drive (a double drive, so that if one drive fails, there’s a duplicate). Download everything from Flickr. And then somehow merge those, PLUS all of those Photos libraries, into a single Lightroom Classic catalog. That program is much better for huge libraries. (Eventually, I’ll upload everything to Amazon Photos—unlimited and free for Prime members—as another backup.)
But how could I move my stuff from Photos to Lightroom without losing my albums, keywords, cropping, face-recognition data, and so on?
He used Avalanche. I don’t hear much about Amazon Photos, but it sounds like a potentially good way to keep an offsite backup and also to access your complete collection from any device.
I still pay for and use Flickr, but it’s frustrating. For example, I recently couldn’t figure out how to resume a slideshow in the middle of an album on Apple TV. Bulk uploads from Lightroom usually take several tries before they complete without error (with videos always failing) and sometimes leave partially uploaded photos stranded with no album. And copying large numbers of photos between albums doesn’t work in the Web interface. The iOS app still can’t do most of what the Web site can—it doesn’t even support collections—though it does continue to get updates.
Previously:
- Photos, Spotlight, and iCloud
- Avalanche Can Import Google Photos Libraries
- Google Photos to End Unlimited Storage
- Avalanche for Lightroom 1.0.5
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I have all my pictures in Lightroom as well (with backups on a Synology NAS and Backblaze…).
I'm still at this point not quite sure how to manage videos though. Lightroom is clearly geared towards pictures and doesn't really make it easy to catalog and manipulate videos…
@Michael .mp4 store a lot of data, but a number of tools ignore them or worse, lose them as files are transcoded. Really not easy to deal with. The worse as far as I am concerned is the original acquisition date and time (I don't want to lose it for home content shot over the years)
