What is Reddit's opinion of PhotoStructure?

Being the author of a self-hosted app, I'm acutely aware of how many people, both technically adept and technically naive, are suspicious or outright hostile to the idea of self hosting.

Perhaps they've never done devops, or have had poor experiences, or are conflating inexperience and fear with loathing: in any event, don't let it bother you. I also wouldn't invest a lot of time trying to convince others. Just keep on keeping on.

There are great ideas and suggestions in this post already, but I didn't see anyone cover these points:

Resolution: I'd be hesitant scanning much higher than 300dpi: it slows down every scan to do higher resolutions, fills your hard drive faster, and it's highly unlikely that your prints are resolving film grain that small. I've also seen people waste tons of time scanning at <= 72 dpi, because that's what looked OK on their screen, and be surprised that they just didn't capture enough pixels.
Capture all the metadata you can: If there's writing on the back of the photo, scan that too. Was it in an envelope with other images? Add that to the metadata. Sometimes it's just a bit of additional context to push an image or album from being irrelevant into something that's part of a compelling narrative.

(Source: I paid for college working at a digital prepress shop, running a room-sized Scitex film scanner and was their on-prem graphic artist. I'm also currently building a digital asset manager, PhotoStructure).

I'm building one that you're welcome to try: https://PhotoStructure.com

I wrote it to be simple enough for my not-so-tech-saavy parents to install and run, (via a "desktop" edition that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux), but also runs on docker and NAS. Libraries are portable across machines and OSes.

If you're migrating off of Google Photos, I'd try v1.0 (currently in beta): it'll import the JSON sidecars from a Google Takeout which include album and face metadata. Make sure you extract all the archives into a single folder, though: each .zip/.tgz file contains a random subset of albums and sidecars.

>This makes it mathematically impossible

Oof, impossible is a strong word.

And sorry, that's not how ECC works. You can have data and parity bits flip together on media and pass ECC checks.

I concede that this is not likely, but "unlikely" does not equal "impossible." When you're dealing with 15TB drives, that's 15,000,000,000,000 chances for Murphy's Law to win, per drive (well, some fraction of that, as each byte is protected by an ECC block, but assume you write several times, and waves hand towards statistics book there are several other conflating factors, but this small likelihood is still multiplied by a number in the trillions).

I believe his comment that RAM was a corruption vector is a likelier source of data corruption. It's why I make PhotoStructure verify all disk copies with SHA512 (and on my library, this verification check does sometimes fail, and require a retry of the file copy op).

However, if he'd said that ECC accompanied by ZFS or btrfs data scrubbing makes bit rot all but impossible, then I'd agree.

There are at least three apps you can try for Android—links are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#how-do-i-back-up-files-on-my-phone

(I use Resilio Sync, but many of my beta users swear by PhotoSync)

Error code correction is built into modern storage media (like HDD and SSD) which should keep you safe from bitrot. Really old drives may have error rates that exceed ECC, though, due to signal logs from magnetic entropy.

If you've got image corruption from what looks to be bitrot, especially with recently-taken photos, I'd suspect a truncation from your file transfer or backup software, a misbehaving router, or bad RAM on one of your devices. If you don't address that first, no fancy filesystem will save you from borked files.

(Source: me doing research for this article)

I’ll second photostructure, especially for the OPs requirements of using the file structure. Early days, but I like the responsiveness and openness of the developer. It may turn people off, but there’s a paid tier. Decide for yourself: https://photostructure.com/about/pricing/

If you're comfortable with the command line, this is easy to do with ExifTool.

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=4409.0

is an example, and if you search on his forum there are many other worked examples.

If you'd rather use a UI, you can use PhotoStructure's "automatic organization" feature (which uses ExifTool under the hood).

Know that different cameras and phones can store the captured-at time in a ton of different tags: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/ (btw: ExifTool won't parse datestamps from sibling files or from pathnames: that's exclusive afaik to PhotoStructure).

One last thing: you can run either of these applications on your Synology, but if it's easier for you, just mount your Synology drive on another computer and run the software there. It'll be a bit slower due to network latency and bandwidth, but if you've got a big library, it'll take a long time anyway.

One last, last thing: take a backup of all your stuff before you do anything, and, preferably, have it disconnected. That way, if anything goes sideways, you haven't lost any of your files.

(you might want to fix the autocorrect typo in your title)

There are several apps that do this really well: Resilio Sync (for iOS and Android), SyncThing (for Android), and PhotoSync (for iOS and Android) will automatically back up your phone to your NAS at home.

You install the software on both your phone and your NAS, and then configure your phone to automatically back up to your NAS.

(Excerpt from <https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#how-do-i-back-up-files-on-my-phone>)

Synology has a couple (!!) photo apps that they provide. They both have different features: I'd kick the tires with a small test library first to see what they offer. Both are being discontinued with a single replacement photo app in DSM 7 (which is still in beta: don't try it yet unless you have a full system backup).

There are many other photo management options that will run in Docker, if that's not intimidating, including PhotoStructure (I'm the author).

>transfer data between my synology nas and devices on my network

If your router doesn't have upnp enabled, and doesn't expose any forwarded ports, data over your network should only be visible by computers and devices on your network. If you trust that all of those devices are not running badware/malware, you're fine.

>my banking files etc

You should employ layered security by only having sensitive files "encrypted at rest." Use free software like VeraCrypt or something like that to store your sensitive files encrypted. Make sure you use a strong password, that the password is written down and kept someplace safe, and that you have a reasonable backup system in place (your NAS RAID is not a backup!).

I write software that imports Google Takeout sidecars and album metadata, and after having several hundred users send me their problematic files, I've found that it's a total crapshoot for whether the file's metadata is completely intact, partially deleted, or even changed to be incorrect when it comes back in your Takeout archive.

I ended up having to make a crazy long set of heuristics to get the "best" captured-at time, and it seems to work well.

My point is: don't run a simple ExifTool script on your original files without first having a (couple!) backups.

I've personally messed up a bunch of my original photos because I used an app or tool that rewrote or wiped metadata sections (either by design or due to buggy encoders), so I decided to only use sidecars by default (you can change it though) just out of an abundance of caution.

You could put all of these files in a .hidden or .archive directory (like, .../pictures/.archive/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD/...). I suspect many DAMs running on UN*X will skip over directories that start with a period. Alternatively, you can mark the directory as hidden on Windows or macOS.

There's also a <code>.nomedia</code> convention on Android that seems to match up with what you're asking here: they're for directories containing files that you don't want in your library, but don't want to delete. (I adopted it for PhotoStructure, but I don't know how many other DAMs respect it, compared to skipping over hidden directories).

Image metadata is a mess. Pretty much all software and hardware vendors can't decide on which standard they want to follow, so depending on the camera you use and the software that's touched your photo, keywords might be in EXIF, IPTC, XMP, or 10 other "tag groups". The list of tags I've got here is from examining literally thousands and thousands of example files I've found on the net or provided by beta users of PhotoStructure (I'm the author).

>Hey team,

Howdy! It's just me at this point, though.

>facial recognition functions

Full disclosure: The beta of v1.0.0 of PhotoStructure currently extracts names and faces from tags that Picasa, Lightroom, Google Photos, and other apps have left behind. Native face detection is coming in a future version soon (as it's currently the highest voted-for feature: make sure you set up an account and vote for what you want next!).

>they'll get copied into the PhotoStructure folder system alongside my spouse's and voila, all our photos in the one place. Is that correct?

Yup, that's what it should do!

>do I just point PhotoSync to an "inbox" folder on the NAS and then have PS monitor that folder?

Exactly: that's what my family does.

>How do we view the PS library on our phones?

I personally have PhotoStructure running on a NAS that's always on. The NAS also runs Resilio Sync (to receive my smartphone photos and videos) and Caddy (which is a reverse proxy that handles https certificate management and basic http auth). My router then forwards 443 to my NAS.

>I've read that I can set up PS on Docker, what do I need to do to shift what I've set up from my mac to the NAS? The library's already on the NAS, so I don't know what exactly needs to move.

Set up docker on your NAS, and then point the /ps/library bind mount to the same library directory that your Mac was using.

>I don't see where that "2GB" (or whatever it ends up being) actually is.

See this: https://photostructure.com/faq/library/#where-are-my-librarys-database-settings-and-preview-files

>questions, but they're eluding me rn.

No problem: know that https://forum.photostructure.com has tons of prior answered questions, and the main website does as well. Most pages have come from answering user's questions!

Author of PhotoStructure here: this is the answer for PhotoStructure. You'll be asked this question on the initial settings page (and you can always change your mind and change it later, but it won't affect the files already in your PhotoStructure library.

There really shouldn't be a "wrong" way to configure these two: whatever other image management or editing software you use, PhotoStructure should accommodate it: https://photostructure.com/faq/system-of-record/

(Feel free to post to the forum if you find that's not the case, I'll look into it!)

Yep, disable Automatic library organization in PhotoStructure and set PhotoPrism to Read Only mode.

Author here: I wrestled with this for a while.

"Forever" software licenses are (almost) never forever: they cover a specific version which doesn't get security or maintenance updates, and give perverse incentives to software companies to only do "big bang" new versions (which requires an upgrade fee for your "forever" license).

It's best for both parties to have aligned incentives: if you, as a user, have the leverage of stopping the prospect of future revenue, that gives the software vendor a (strong!) incentive to give you better support (both by maintaining the software and giving reasonable customer support). If the revenue they see from you is "one and done," you're just hoping the software vendor acts in good faith for all the future work you're asking of them.

I wrote more up here: https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-9/#what-about-perpetual-licenses

>Sharing of directories/images privately. This appears to be on the list, maybe.

Albums and directories will be implemented as hierarchical tags, and sharing will be via a token applied to a tag (so you can easily share a full directory, recursively, for example).

I'm thinking that sharing a single asset will still be via a tag (that's created automatically), just so all "shared" items only have one place to look.

I'd thought of putting share tokens on both tags and assets, but it adds complexity that the user is exposed to when there are several ways to acquire share tokens.

If you're interested in more details, send me an email and I'll link you to the design doc I've got.

I've had a number of my users ask me this exact question, so I wrote up this primer: how do I safely store my files?

If this is a business, keep at least one robust copy, preferably in a NAS that offers data integrity, at home, and consider cloud storage as another backup copy.

"Bad sectors" isn't a case of "the drive may fail." The drive is actively failing.

The drive ships with spare sectors it doles out as it finds defective media. When those run out, you get those errors. Backup what you can, while you can. You currently have justification to buy new drives.

Read this section if the budgetary committee needs more convincing, and the two drives were bought together: https://photostructure.com/faq/raid-is-not-a-backup/#4-data-loss-from-correlated-failures

After several years helping support several different popular photo album packages, and trying many others, I've come to the conclusion that it's:

Trivial to come up with a photo gallery script than handles 10s-100s of photos. These projects spring up continuously, because it's a fun weekend project.
Uninteresting/too grinding to make something more robust that handles semantic duplicates, scales to millions of files, and works cross-platform.

So I quit my job and built it. https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/

From the signups and interactions I've seen over the past year, I suspect there will be substantial votes for "only free," but certainly some for "sure, I'll pay a subscription," and a shattering of "no way would I self host".

PhotoStructure will do this (I'm the author): install, sign up for a free trial (if you need more than 15 days, just ask), point your "library" to be the directory that you want to organize into, turn on "automatic organization" and include all the random folders as paths to sync. When the progress bar closes, you should find all your files neatly organized.

Note that PhotoStructure won't move the files that you import. It only copies (just to avoid confusion/calamity if something doesn't behave as you expect). https://photostructure.com/faq/why-doesnt-photostructure-move-original-files/

More information about automatic organization is here: https://photostructure.com/getting-started/automatic-library-organization/

If you decide to use ExifTool, please make backups first. It's really easy to get the command line arguments wrong! (ExifTool is great, by the way: PhotoStructure uses it behind the scenes!)

Howdy! I want this too!

I'm currently using Caddy to share my PhotoStructure library with my family, configured to both do https and basic http auth. There are a ton of alternatives that are pretty easy to set up, too;

https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#reverse-proxies

I will be building authentication/authorization in a future version soon: it's the fifth-most-voted-for feature.

https://forum.photostructure.com/t/secure-sharing-of-albums-and-assets/112

I totally sympathize with your concern, but know that all modern HDD storage does have built in error code correcting, which does detect and recover from small bitflips and surface defects.

The best way to keep your stuff safe, though, is with backups. Separate, automated copies of your data.

Fancy filesystems that support data scrubbing isn't really available on consumer Windows except via the use of a separate NAS. It certainly bolsters and complements built-in ECC, but isn't a substitute for backups.

I did some research about this and wrote it up here.

Yup!

https://photostructure.com/faq/library/#importing-from-different-computer

As you play with PhotoStructure, if you find anything odd or confusing or buggy, please don't hesitate to tell me via /r/photostructure or via https://forum.photostructure.com/. Also, as more-glaring missing features are apparent, post those to the forum so they can get upvoted: it really helps me prioritize what I build out next.

Nice functionalities! Maybe tangential, but wish there was a way to AirPlay or Cast a slideshow generated via such a system.

The clipping and exporting seem like a neat way to generate a custom video for an event etc.

Have you seen PhotoStructure? It seems like what you’re talking about could build on top of the structuring database used by that system.

I use Nextcloud and point it to an “External” share on my NAS. I then share that out to family so they can upload photos. This folder is also the one Plex looks at. Then I have another folder on my NAS where I use PhotoSync iOS app to automatically upload photos and videos. Something I have been looking into though is. PhotoStructure which may have the AI piece you’re looking for. https://photostructure.com/

It's here (and my wife and family want it, so it will happen):

> 🤖 Add ML-powered face-and-thing tagging. As always with PhotoStructure, all computation happens locally on your computer. Your data stays yours.

It was added in the v0.9.1-beta.1 (v0.9.0-* alpha and beta builds won't be updated again, as v0.9.0 was released).

You should be able to pull the :beta tag and get v0.9.1-beta.3.

Please tell me if the correct image doesn't pull down for you.

This is exactly why I wrote r/PhotoStructure. My photos were all over the place (and some had bitrot, and tons were duplicate, or had been down-sampled and stripped of metadata, ...).

It's free during the beta in exchange for your feedback. You don't have to use it after it gets everything organized for you. You can customize the directory structure, too.

When you install it, you'll only have 3 questions to answer:

You can either pick "auto" scanning (and then it'll look in all mounted volumes for photos and videos), or specify the directories you want to read.
Select "yes" to automatic organization.
Make your "PhotoStructure library" be the directory you want all your photos and videos to be copied into (presumably a directory on your NAS).

Read the (short!) EULA, click start, and it'll give you an ETA as soon as it can. Depending on your computer, network, and disk speed, it may take several hours to a day to compete a library that big. If you can directly connect to ethernet rather than fighting WiFi, that'd help.

Once it's done, if you don't want to continue using PhotoStructure, just delete the .photostructure directory in the base directory of your library. (This contains all the preview images and library database).

/edit: I see you wanted face tagging. That isn't in the current release, but it's on the roadmap.

QNAP will have better hardware specs for the same amount of money than Synology. Both UIs work.

Before you buy, though, search google and r/Synology and r/QNAP for security issues, with an eye towards how each company handles both disclosure and recovery from malware. They are markedly different.

In any event, when you're setting it up, you might want to go through this checklist to make sure you're getting the most out of your NAS.

When I did a bunch of research for this article, I came to the conclusion that M-discs weren't really viable if you're trying to backup several TB. It'd just take too many disks!

If all your files fit on a handful of M-discs, though, it seems like it's be perfect.

I'd also make a second copy using a different disc manufacturer, and then verify all the copies are bit-accurate with something like rsync -c.

Also consider using SeqBox, which allows the disk to suffer from some amount of bitrot and still be recoverable.

I've had several beta users tell me that they lost a bunch on photos using other photo management software and then "clicked the wrong button." It's tough to hear when backups are so cheap these days.

It's also why I decided to never move original files: I only copy them.

I think headlines from several newspapers might be interesting, but 2020 was such an unprecedented 💩🍿, it almost certainly won't be pleasant to reminisce about.

I've spent the last couple years working on a tool to manage photos and videos, and I took a lot of photos (for the time) when my kids were tiny.

I've got many thousands of photos, but I really regret not taking more video and more audio. Even when they're screaming meemies. Capture everything: when they're eating. Or snoring. Or exploring.

The time goes by quick, and those memories are precious.

I'd make an album of them, not global horrors.

I'd also buy some alcohol that can be layed down for a couple decades to mature and enjoy when they're actually people and not larvae. I commented about what to buy in another thread.

It depends on what you want to do.

I've got an old Synology 416j. It's fine for file storage, but it

doesn't support btrfs, so there's no data integrity
doesn't run any of Synology's current batch of backup software without crashing (I had to run rsync via cron, set up via the terminal)
come to think of it, I haven't had luck running any of Synology's apps on it, really, other than DSM.

If you're spending hundreds of dollars on the drives you're putting into the device, I'd argue that it's worth spending a bit more to get a device that at least supports btrfs.

With only several thousand photos and videos, that'll fit on a $10 USB thumb drive. Just realize those are only good for ~5-10 years (depending on storage conditions and the chips used in the drive). It's not "forever" storage.

If you want a bit more safety, you can put them on a couple external drives.

I had a bunch of my beta users ask how to safely store their photo and video library, so I wrote this up.

The issue was twofold: PhotoStructure automatically pauses sync if there isn't "enough" free disk space (to prevent the system from crashing), but there's a bug in v0.8.3 (that I've addressed in the next release that caused the progress panel to not always show up.

This progress panel says "Sync is paused: insufficient disk space on /", which would have been helpful... Sorry about this bug!

The minDiskFreeGb setting defaults to 6GB. For now, you can override this by setting the environment variable PS_MIN_DISK_FREE_GB=4 (but you'll want to give it more disk at some point soon).

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100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:

What is Reddit's opinion of PhotoStructure?
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