Mozz family metadata

19 May 2016

I’ve written before about the lengths I go to to keep photos safe. I don’t miss the ceremony of dragging out a physical album, ostentatiously blowing the dust off and crackling through the pages. Not for me - gathering round an iPad or a screen is just as good if you want to make an occasion of it.

My entire photo collection is over 13,000 photos at the moment, growing rapidly thanks to Iris and Finn. I carve out a small amount of time each week to discarding crummy shots and compile “best bits” videos. Painful and dull but ultimately rewarding; I’m proud of the results. Anyway, the collection is already bigger than the memory on my phone. Pleasingly I’ve just made the whole thing accessible from my phone through a nice perk of being an Amazon Prime member. For photos (annoyingly, but understandably, not video) Prime members get unlimited free cloud storage in Amazon Cloud Drive. My end-of-the-world backup is already in Amazon, easily accessible to geeks like me on s3. That’s good, but browsing it is clunky: it’s more of a backup than anything else. Since the whole lot are already up there in the cloud, it only took tens of minutes to copy them down to webfaction and then back up to Cloud Drive (I used acd_cli).

A whole new copy of over 30GB of data, stored for free and now enjoyably browsable. I’m not worried about being locked in to Amazon Prime because this is a copy, and certainly not the only one.

I like “consuming” digital photos like this: stealing odd moments to flick through albums is a bit like spaced repetition - it helps me remember. And it’s nice seeing the “date taken” scroll bar at the side extend from this week in May 2016 all the way back to well before I was born. My efforts with synthetic, approximate metadata during the family album digitisation are starting to feel worthwhile.

Tags: photo, cloud, geeky

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