[masneyb]

I've come to the conclusion that the best way to avoid lock in with vendors like this is to use a photo organizer on your computer, and use that organizer to upload your media to $BIG_CLOUD so that you have a copy of all your media on your network.

If you go this route, then you'll need to organize your media in whatever photo manager you use, and then again on $BIG_CLOUD. Yes, your photo manager will sync some things like titles, comments, and tags as you upload new media, however not all things are synced, such as the event(s) that you want your media to show up in. Also if you make a change in your local library to media that's already been published to $BIG_CLOUD, then those changes will not be reflected there.

Personally I use Shotwell under Linux: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell and I wrote a program that generates a static HTML site based on my library: https://github.com/masneyb/shotwell-site-generator. When I make a change to my media library in shotwell, then the static site is regenerated to reflect the most recent version of my site. This also makes it super easy to backup my photos to $BIG_CLOUD (like Amazon S3) for redundancy, while retaining full control of my media.

I have my generated site on a password protected website that my family has access to. When I need to share photos with friends, I'll upload them to a photo hosting service like Google Photos or Flickr.

[neilv]

Agreed, this can be a big win, and I did something like this while I learning photojournalism on the side, and generating a lot of images.

Combined with the tech (RAID array, backups, sharing script), it also helped to have a manual practice of culling photos.

I didn't cull as selectively as I might pick photos to cold-submit to a publication. But if I had several almost identical images from the same event in my archive, I'd try to delete all but one of them.

Reducing space requirements to 1/4 has home IT benefits: maybe don't need that NAS or bigger drives yet, backups run 4x faster, backups might fit on a single backup medium or much less expensive one, can afford that second big local drive for a little extra RAID-mirroring protection, etc.

It's also good encouragement to be a little more judicious about pressing the button on the camera that makes more culling work. :)

[eichin]

Sure if you're (like me) a weirdo that uses an actual camera :-) Most people use phone cameras that go directly to $BIG_CLOUD and everything else is More Work.

(Personally I use rsync (FolderSync) from the phone to a home server and pull things into my (kphotoalbum-oriented) workflow that way. But it's more about personal control and paranoia than being something that would be useful to random people for whom vendor lock-in is actually a threat...)

[masneyb]

These days, I only use a phone camera (Pixel 6 Pro) and it is configured to not upload my photos to the cloud. Every few days, I plug in a USB cable, move all of my photos off the phone to my computer, curate the photos (i.e. delete ones I don't want), and add them to my photo manager.

Curation is key to avoid having a mess down the road since I may take 10-15 photos of the same scene, and only save the 1 or 2 that turned out the best.

[1oooqooq]

didn't google kill google photos once?

[philsnow]

they "killed" Picasa Web Albums, does that count?