Solutions to organize and view library + Features enquiries

[mrm]

Welcome to PhotoStructure @Akula !

As far as backups go–more copies are better, and ideally, have one offline and offsite. See the post for details:

How do I safely store my files?

I’d set up Resilio Sync or some other app on your phone(s) to make sure the originals get copied to your NAS, and automatically backed up.

As far as tagging goes:

@Akula

rebuild file names a bit more cleanly, with this pattern : device_YYYY-MM_Photo-Couternumber]

This almost be with the latest alpha build of PhotoStructure version 2.1, aside from the device bit, but that might be doable using GRANDPARENT, depending on your current directory hierarchy. See How to change the naming structure? - #2 by mrm for details.

@Akula

Tag the photos with those smart/”AI” tools

AI-based tagging is really problematic for several reasons:

1. Object recognition is regularly ~50-85% accurate, but when it’s wrong, it can be embarrassingly bad.

2. The vocabulary that it tags with is in a flat namespace, or the ontology is… odd. In any case, one person’s acceptable ontology is most likely very different from anyone else’s.

3. Taggers don’t seem to support “source discrimination.” In other words, “where the tag came from.” This is required for incremental syncs to be correct–as the tagger is improved or the ontology is edited, the prior and new tags need to be merged appropriately.

I’m playing with a CLIP based approach which should avoid these pitfalls. There will still need to be a user-provided ontology if people want to browse rather than search, and that will be editable, but it’s quite promising.

@Akula

while English isn’t my mother tongue

I envy your multilingualism!

So, my TL;DR:

1. Get automated backups in place immediately. Having a full offline backup means that if your app does any unexpected behavior, you can repair any damage done.

2. Don’t use tools that overwrite your originals. It’s really hard to make even metadata edits without causing some (even minor) data loss. ExifTool does (I feel) the best job at this, so PhotoStructure uses ExifTool under the hood, but even then, I default to writing edits to sidecars. I wrote up what PhotoStructure does, and what I think other applications should do, here: PhotoStructure | DAMs, systems of record, and how PhotoStructure plays well with others

Feel free to hop into our discord: there’s a bunch of us in the same boat you’re in!