Collating, processing, managing, backing up and serving a gallery of a 350GiB, 60k picture collection

In the last two days I have commented a little bit how I process and manage my photos. I'm not a very avid photographer, I have like 350 gigabytes of photos, most of them are yet not processed, around 60,000 of them. So I will comment a little bit more how do I manage all that.

I start with the camera, a 24Mpx camera, just a couple of lenses, nothing fancy. Go out, take some pictures, come back home.

I put the SD camera on my computer and I use my own software to import it. The import process is not fancy, it just empties the SD card, checks every file for the EXIF information, uses the date and time to create the filename, a sequence number if needed, and puts them all in a single incoming directory where all the current unprocessed images are¹.

Then I use this software I developed in PyQt5. It's very, very basic, but it's really quick, it's mostly keyboard based. It reads the EXIF information and present some of the tags at the left of the screen; things like date, time, size, orientation and then focal length, aperture, ISO and various other data I can get from the images. It's mostly focused on my current camera and the previous one, both Nikons². The previous one was an N90, right now it's an N7200. The image occupies most of the window, and the program is always in full screen. At the bottom there's the filename and a couple of toggles.

I can do several things with this:

• Go forwards, backwards, by one, by ten, by a hundred and by a thousand, because that incoming directory right now has almost seven years of history, probably ten thousand pictures.

• Move randomly, which allows me to pick up a new thing to collate when I get bored with the current one but I want to keep doing it to reduce the backlog.

• Mark the images in different ways. The main ones are about selecting for storing, with two modes: One is to keep the image in the original size. I usually use this for my best landscape or astro photos. The other one will resize it down to twelve megapixels³, from 6000x4000 pixels to 4500x3000 pixels, 75% on each dimension.

• Rotate the images, just in case the camera did not guess the orientation correctly, usually when I'm taking pictures right upward or right downwards.

• Select several pictures for stitching, which will use hugin to do so. It's not 100% automatic, but at least puts the pictures in a stitch directory and point hugin there.

• Select a picture for cropping or editing; I'm not going to develop a whole image editor, so I just delegate to an existing program, gwenview.

• Select images for deleting and delete them permanently.

• Select several images for comparison and enter/exit comparison mode, which means that going backwards and forwards applies only this this set. This is good for things like when you take certain pictures, but there are not necessarily sequences in the original picture sequence, which for me makes culling images faster.

• It has two zoom levels, fit to screen and full size. I don't have much the need for other options.

• 99% of the pictures I take are freehand, so in a sequence there's always some movement between images. In full size I can put every image on its own position, aligning the whole sequence and allow culling based on blurriness or other factors.

• Also in full size, I can lock the view, so when I pan one of the images and I switch to another one, it will also pan that second image to that position. It also helps when I'm checking for details between two different images of the same thing.

• Move all the selected images, resize them if needed, and put them in a folder. It also creates a hardlink between my categorization in folders into a folder that collects all the images by date; there's one folder for each month and year with all the pictures of that month inside. It uses hardlinks so it doesn't duplicate the image file, saving space.

• It also has a readonly mode, so I can hand the computer to my kids to watch the photos.

When culling, I use the comparison mode and individual position and lock view features a lot, going back and forth between images, discarding until only one is left.

That's the first part, the one I must spend my time on, just basic culling, selection and storage. My main tree is just a tree based on my way of categorizing the images.

My program doesn't have a directory view; instead, I just use gwenview again.

Notice there's no photo editing in this workflow. I rarely shoot in RAW for two reasons: a) I'm really bad at postprocessing; and b) even if I was good, I don't have the time to do it; my free time is shared among several hobbies. I only do it for astro photograpy and very few, rare occasions.

The third tool I use is digikam. I use it for two things, which are related: semi-automatic and manual tagging. The semi-automatic is face detection; digikam can find and guess faces, but requires manual confirmation⁴. The fully manual part is plain tagging, mostly with location⁵ and sometimes some other info. I sometimes also rate my pictures; I mostly use four and five, sometimes three, only for my best pictures.

Then there's another script that reads the digikam database and uses the tags to create another directory for the tags, which also uses hardlinks. It still doesn't do anything about the rating, but I could easily add that.

That's all on my personal computer. I use rsync to make a copy on my home server that has two purposes. One, it's a backup, which includes all the original 24Mpx images that I hadn't culled yet, which I think is the biggest part of my collection.

The second one, it feeds a gallery program that is developed in PHP by a guy named Karl. It's probably the single paid software I use. It's a single PHP file that you put at the root of your gallery, you enable PHP processing by your web server (in my case, Apache), and generates the gallery on the run, just reading the directories and creating all the necessary thumbnails and all that. I did a small change to this program. The original algorithm creates thumbnails based on each file's path (and other attributes, 4 or 5 I think), but because I have all these hard links, it creates duplicated thumbnail files. So I changed it to use the filename instead of the filepath⁶.

I don't have any kind of synchronization with my phone. Most of the pictures I take with it are not the kind of pictures I usually will put in my own gallery, except the times I go out without my camera and I end up taking pictures anyway. I still don't have a workflow for that, it's mostly manual. So if I ever lose my phone, I'm fscked because I have definitely no backups of it.

That lack of synchronization also means that the only way to see the pictures in my phone is by opening the gallery in the browser. It's not the best, but I don't do that that often. I have tried to use alternatives like NextCloud, which I also have installed on my home server. I have some issues with permissions because, again, this is a backup directory, so it has all the owner information that belongs to me, instead of the web server. That means it doesn't have the proper permissions to let NextCloud manage those files. Luckily files.gallery just needs a subdirectory.

Another reason is that before I was using static gallery generators: sigal, gallerpy or even nikola, which drives this glob. All those can generate the gallery statically, so serving them is so much easier. My old home server died at some point and I had to come up with something. I had a spare old laptop laying around and I used that. Now it's enough to generate the gallery on the fly. I have plans to make something bigger, but that's for another time.