My thought is to mainly use a more powerful computer (at home) for photostructure, but in addition, have a lightweight laptop that can be carried on trips to show friends and family.
Steps toward this goal:
I currently have a bunch of ‘originals’ on a drive that is separate from the ‘library’. And yes everything is, and will continue to be, backed up to external drives that are stored in various places.
Only in the past few days, have I used the ‘auto organize’ feature, and I really like the result.
So, my next step: shut down photostructure, and move/hide the originals, and replace the top level ‘originals’ folder with an empty folder, and then let photostructure re-sync. Is this the right way to do this? My goal is to wean myself from the originals.
By the way how do i know when photostructure is finished with a major step like a rebuild or resync?
There are two parts to your “PhotoStructure library”: your “original” photos and videos, and then all the bits and pieces that PhotoStructure needs to make the user interface fast, which includes your library database, preview images, and transcoded videos. More details about this are here: PhotoStructure | What is a “PhotoStructure library”?
Your intuition is correct: you can shut down PhotoStructure and then just copy your library from your current computer to your laptop (say, to C:\photos, install PhotoStructure on that laptop, and pick the C:\photos as your library, and it should open right up.
If your library is quite big and your laptop doesn’t have a lot of storage, I can give you a set of settings that will set up PhotoStructure to only build the minimal number of preview images to make high quality viewing on your laptop and minimize disk space—it may reduce disk consumption by 30-50%.
initial results with an old thinkpad is going great! My wife is browsing directly on the laptop, and i am using my phone to browse the laptop. nice! thank you!
Good news and not so much… We took the laptop to an extended family gathering and it was a big hit! In fact some of my relatives showed me some features of photostructure that I hadn’t used myself!
But after we got home I was trying to work around an issue – ’ asset is no longer available’ is due to my own mistakes – a couple years ago we set up a critter cam at a job site where we were building a new home. About once a week we dumped the videos and still photos… After 9 months or so, the house was complete. Well, in the early days it was fun to look thru all those photos and videos. But now, they are just so much clutter, that I tried to hide with the ‘nomedia’ approach. But the preview/thumnails still hang around… And when you click on one, you get the ‘asset is no longer available’ message, and mostly it is OK but sometimes we are ‘stuck’ and the arrow keys do not work any more. ( my preferred navigation is to click on something and then use left/right arrows thereafter.
OK so I tried a rebuiild and the laptop ran out of disk space. Which brings me here: I’d like to know your tips you mentioned above to minimize disk space.
Another issue is again my own, but perhaps there is somewhere on this forum where I could get advise – my wife’s android phone takes great photos/videos but is now holding about 20 GB of stuff, which I use syncthing to one-way copy to the big pc (original home of photostructure). but doing the same to the laptop, it is a lot of seemingly wasted space. I suppose I could make a couple thumdrive copies, and then tell syncthing to delete the copies from the phone but actually we like being able to view the photos/videos on the phone itself… what to do? if you’ve read this, thank you! bill
Howdy again, glad to hear your family PhotoStructure debut went well.
I’ll be back at my desk tomorrow and will get more specific guidance for your couple questions, but this section has several Android applications you can try: PhotoStructure | How do I safely store my files?
(You can also plug her phone directly into your laptop and just drag the files to a backup drive, if you want to do it manually)
There is a built-in webserver, you can connect to it with something like this http://192.168.1.200:1787/ , you just need to know local IP of machine where PhotoStructure is installed. Even from a mobile phone it works good.