📂 Photo archive

I have about 400gb of photos for 20+ years. The question is how to store it for the next 40 years? There are some problems:
- Durability - if it's stored on the HDD I lost it or it's damaged?
- Portability - if it's stored in google phots and the service has gone. how to restore data & meta data?
- Indexing - how to find desired photo?

After some iterations I've concluded with that:

💾 Storages
1. Get a synology storage(I have enough fun at work, so i looked for almost zero administration solution).
2. Get a cloud account with webdav interface and configure mirroring to it.
3. Get an external HDD and configure auto backup to it if it's connected to a NAS.
4. Configure phones automatically upload photos to a sort directory

🗄 Structure

.../photos/
  life/
    2012/
      2012-03-23 +tag1+ Very important event
      2012-03-23 +tag2+ not that important event
      2012-03-24 +tag3+ Another important event
    2013/
    ...
    2025/
  sort/
    lev/
      ...
      2025-04-08/
      2025-04-09/
    ...

Finally the structure is timeline & some tags. There are some manual proceses
1. Run a script to move files from sort to the date directories
2. Review the photos in the date directories, add tags and move it to the main timeline

⛳️ Tags
I decided to use + as delimiter because it should be supported by linux, mac, win. Also, I've decided to use 5 chars tags to make aligned. Some of them are self-explained. some not.
- autos - cars
- bikes - bicycles
- craft - DYI
- confs - conferences & meetups
- daily - blog/vlog
- event - just an important event like marriage, graduation, ...
- fixit - apartments renovation
- furry - pets, cats, dogs
- hikes - different hikes
- tours - trips & travels
- lions - I'm collecting, the lions picture. The rules are simple: you send me a picture + GPS, I'll send you later back photo from that place
- party - parties
- sport - sport events
- shows - music perfomances & conciertos
- study - pictures from school or university
- shoot - photo session
- works - work related

🏁 Result
1. I have portable solution. I almost 100% that in 40 years I'll have a way to read JPG files.
2. I have tags in place & can use find for searching.
3. If the hdd, NAS, cloud are dead because of fire/flood/meteor I still have a copy

💡 Plans:
1. Update EXIFs for photos 1950 - 2015 years: GPS & dates are missing
2. Add external indexer to make cool videos be place/person. But it shouldn't touch the master copy
- https://github.com/jabberjabberjabber/ImageIndexer
- https://www.photoprism.app/
- Photos + mac mini
3. Scan old photos. it might be interesting https://estherschindler.medium.com/the-old-family-photos-project-lessons-in-creating-family-photos-that-people-want-to-keep-ea3909129943

#photos