[pheeney]

I have been looking for a photo meta data app for a long time, not sure if this is something you have/will offer.

I am essentially looking to leave the original photos on external drives and have an app that indexes them and stores a customizable thumbnail with the app to view them on my local machine. This way I can browse through all my photos and figure out the original file path if I want to retrieve them. The most important aspect is that I can take the drives offline while the thumbnails and index remains within the app and re-indexing when connected again.

My existing workflow is to import all photos on my mac to the Photos app. I pull them from different devices (phones, camera, etc). The photos app does an OK job at de-duping any matches. I also run PhotoSweeper to further de-dupe which analyzes the photos itself and I can leave the best ones remaining. After that I run some custom scripts to export the data as [year]-[month]/[year]-[month]-[day] [hour].[min].[sec].jpg. I then merge those onto my external drive and kick off my backup process to clone them to other drives and sync to cloud.

The closest I have come is Lightroom which indexed the drive a little bit but the "thumbnails" and catalog is huge. It allows some tagging and other features to discover old photos but some processes are a bit manual. This workflow seems to be common among digital asset management software which is expensive and way more then I am looking for.

[mceachen]

Yes, you can absolutely use PhotoStructure for your use case.

After you install, the second question you should pick "No thanks, I like my photos and videos where they already are." See https://support.photostructure.com/automatic-library-organiz...

Email me at hello at photostructure.com or sign up for the beta. I'd love to hear what you think!

[pheeney]

Already signed up, looking forward to trying it. I found this line on your blog:

https://support.photostructure.com/how-much-disk-space-do-i-... > As an example, if you have 250,000 images and videos, your library metadata and previews will consume about a half a terabyte.

I assume this is mostly from the preview image size and not meta data? This is where I was hoping for a configurable image size because I would be willing to have smaller previews to be able to store more metadata.

If the goal is to archive my entire life's photos or even use it for business use then at some point it looks like I would need a dedicated drive / computer just to view the photos on the other drives. If it is configurable then I could push this limitation further.

[mceachen]

There are some knobs you can dial in PhotoStructure to reduce disk space consumption, at the cost of browsing speed.

I just added instructions for you to that post: https://support.photostructure.com/how-much-disk-space-do-i-...