I need a simple-photo-manager
this shouldn't be hard
we have a lot of photos. my wife and I have been together for almost 1/4 of a century at this point and we've been capturing images the whole time. by no means are they all amazing. there's plenty of crap in the pile but at some point it got easier to just stockpile and now there's no going back. the kids have phones too... and cameras. it's endless.
with all of that stockpiled imagery, you'd think we have endless access to our past, but the reality is bleak. copies on separate removable drives, often out of sync. more copies piled in cloud storage tools but not organized so as to be perused. this should be easier, but at scale the impact of hosting this mess is notable.
I need a simple tool to manage a family-lifetime worth of photos. breaking this down, I think there are 5 basic functions:
gather
it's gotta streamline getting data into the system. I need people to actually use this, not avoid it's potential complexity.
organize
catalog genration is critical. what's there and how can I sort it?
present
the whole point is to be able to look at these images, to see where we've been. my family should be able to peruse on various devices with ease.
remix
I've been thinking about this one a bit. I want this tool to let us build. as we peruse we should be able to build new veiws on what we've recorded. albums/playlists/collections, whatever we call them they'll need to be portable so that you can take what you build with you.
hold ownership
the big one. I need to own this in perpetuity. I need to pick where I'll store it and who has access. I will not give access away in exchange for this functionality.
so what?
alright, some goals ...
the pipe dream
photos are (can be) siphoned off of mobile devices and from folders on systems, as they are created. they're sorted and presented in a secure, user-conscious web-interface. all of this is archived to various storage mechanisms as necessary. users can peruse the stack and have a picker tool to build new collections. these can be exported as archives, printed photos or new, stand alone collections complete with viewing tools of their own.
some day maybe.
the MVP
in te meantime what's the minimum viable product?
- a script to survey a folder and catalog basic meta data, giving some means to sort
- a simple, local interface that bundles with the archive and serves the viewer
- a picker that can build new catalogs and potoentiall "copy off" the contents of those catalogs into new, stand alone collections.