Ask HN: How do you manage your digital media

[jman1]

I am facing a problem of managing our photos and videos. The problem is me and my wife take photos and video using our 2 iPhones, 1 iPad, 1 canon DSLR and 1 Fuji Point and Shoot and then find ourselves looking for pictures in various devices. Also as a result we have no physical pictures because all the photos are scattered in different places and have not been consolidated. I am sure other people (specially new parents) are facing this problem and I wanted to know what kind of tools or setup you guys are using to conquer this problem.

I am wondering if there is a solution where all this media could be housed in once location and then be viewed seamlessly by any type of device (mobile phone, home computer, overseas via browser) ?

Thanks in advance.

[neya]

At home, we have 5 HTC phones and 2 Apple devices (iPhone and an iPad) and a Canon DSLR. We face the same problem too, but then, the solution is really simple, but involves some manual work - Though it will be rewarding in the end. I have a Seagate 1 TB hard disk just for this purpose and I have a folder called "Photos". Inside this folder, there is a naming convention that all of us follow - Each family member has to create a new folder by the norm "Date, Title, Name". As you guessed, the date represents the starting date of the first photo in the album (be it the phone or the DSLR) and the title could be anything, Eg. "Las Vegas" or something. Name represents the (shortcode) name of the family member uploading the photo. this actually makes searching for a particular photo or album easier. Say, I want to find out albums uploaded just by me, so I could just search for "name" and bingo! There you go..

Now, we're a Windows family, so all we do is just share this folder for everyone else from Windows within the home network. So anyone can access the "Photos" folder from any device (Mobile OR PC) and can transfer their photos to this folder. So, there' s no confusion. For mobile devices (android) there are some apps that let you do this - either through FTP, etc. The kids in our home use it, but I personally connect it via USB, drag and drop the photos straight to the "Photos" folder.

This may appear like a complex process, but once you follow this, it's actually not. Also, I make sure I take backups of the 1TB drive and burn them to a dozen DVD's once in a while to make sure everything's safe and we don't lose any data. Probably you could get yourself a dropbox account to make all this easier, but I am still not convinced about the cloud based solutions, mainly because it takes too much time to view these images as a gallery (each image is approx. 10-30 MB depending on the device).

We've been following this procedure for about 3 years now and it sure gets the job done. Maybe there are specific apps to make some intermediate processes easier, but with Android there's the issue of some apps not working as they should in ALL of our devices. So, I never really bother with the apps, I just plug the USB and upload stuff. Oh, I forgot to mention, I have a docking station, so that makes things a bit easier - connecting the DSLR, HTC phone or iPhone, etc.