Organizing and preserving 10 years of digital photography

In the next month, it will be 10 year since I got my first digital camera, an Olympus C750UZ. Since then I went through a Canon S2 in 2007 and a dSLR Canon 500D/T1i in 2009. In 2008 I also introduced iPhone to my digital photography: first the 3G, then the 4, and now the 5.

I have always been organizing my photos using a nested file system, with folders inside folders. As long as it is done meticulously, such an hierarchical system is the best way for me to keep track of the photos (or any other type of digital media). Solutions like Everpix or simply a timelined photostream  (like Dropbox) do not work for me, neither do keywords or tags. I need to be seeing a physical hierarchy.

My Photos folder has 170,000 files in it, and includes photos from the digital cameras and the iPhones. My root folders are organized by the period of my life: 2003-2008 US, 2008-2010 UK, 2010-2011 Greece, 2011-now UK. Inside each period I have event subfolders: Party at Mike's house, Walk in the Houses of Parliament, Parents visit, etc. All folders start with an ISO format date, e.g. 20130816 - Wife's Birthday, so that the alphabetical order automatically results in chronological order.

In addition, since I travel a lot, I have a separate root folder called Trips. In there I organize all the trips by location: USA, Europe, Exotic, etc., and then the (dated) event subfolders might be New York City, Florida, Chicago, etc.

Each event subfolder has a "Best of" folder in it. After each event, I go through all the photos and pick the best ones, typically 10% of the total number of photos. If it's a major event like my wedding or the trip to Maui, where I have 5000+ original photos per event, I might create another folder "best of best of" with the absolutely 1% best pictures.

Because of the 10 year anniversary, I decided to print 10 photo albums, one for each year, with my favorite pictures. I figured that if I don't do that now, I won't be doing it again due to the sheer amount of data collected. So, in the past couple of weeks I went through my whole photo library, all 170,000 photos, one by one, to pick the best ones. I picked about 2,000 of them. And after seeing my library with such a perspective, I reached some interesting conclusions.

• The hierarchical folder system I curated in the past 10 years has served me extremely well: If I want to find a specific photo from a certain time, city or event, I can browse to it in a reasonable amount of time. I will stick to that system.
  
• Almost none of the hand-picked photos are iPhone photos. Maybe 30 or 40, max, from 1,500 iPhone photos I captured per year in the last 6 years. Smartphone photos look great on the small smartphone screens, but as soon as you blow them up (I have a 27" monitor) the magic goes away. In the short term, they are good reminders of how I spent my time, but in the long term they are irrelevant, with a few notable exceptions.
  
• I realized I want to print two types of photos: i) The "Artistic" ones, where I put the effort into taking a quality, artsy photograph. These are typically photos of landmarks, landscapes, objects, and more rarely people (which I may not even know well). ii) The "Candid" ones, which are not necessarily of great quality, but include memorable moments and people. These trigger feelings of past moment to me.
  
• My plan to geotag and facetag all of my library failed. However, it *is* possible to manually tag the selected 2,000 photos. It still took me some time, but it was manageable.
  
• I had to import my "best of" photos to Aperture for editing. The main reason is that some photos fall under more than one category (e.g. both candids and artistic), and also in original folder. It is hard to keep track and edit 3 or more files in the same way. I export everything out when I am finished though. I also LOVE seeing my photos on a map.

Then there is the issue of future-proofing my photos. They've been around for 10 years already. How can I make sure they'll be around for another 50 years?

There is a new Greek startup called longaccess that aims at preserving our digital lives. One of the founders has a nice post on how he migrated his photo library from iPhoto to Dropbox. I am not sure exactly how they plan to handle the photo archive issue, but here is what I will be doing.

First, I need a feature-rich application to edit and organize my photos and also to have features like geotagging and editing the same photo existing in multiple locations. That being said, I will simultaneously keep storing jpgs on the filesystem level while having an encrypted backup online. 

• I do not expect the jpg compatibility to be dropped from computers anytime soon (and by soon I mean decades). It is simple enough to be implemented everywhere, and its already been around for more than 20 years. (The same holds true for MP3).
  
• Backing up is absolutely essential. The more time goes by, the more precious the photos become. They are irreplaceable if they get lost. I currently backup all my personal files to a NAS in the house and to an online backup service (in this case, my own FTP server at the office).

What I am missing right now is an automated way to link the two processes: having my photos in the feature-rich software, and then automatically exporting them at a filesystem level which can be backed up and accessed by the iPhotos and Lightrooms of year 2040.

Kids, revisited

There is a not-so-visited spot along the river Thames that has majestic views of the Houses of Parliament. You get there by crossing the Westminster bridge right in front of Big Ben, and then, instead of turning left towards the London Eye where most tourists go, just make a right. There are about 100 times less people on that side.

We first visited London with the Wife in the summer of 2004 (little did we know at the time that we would return as residents to London 4 years later). We discovered that spot and took some really nice photographs with the Big Ben in the background, such as the one below.

I will return to that in a bit.

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I got my first digital camera in 2003. When I got my first dSLR camera in 2009, I wanted to go back and revisit all my favorite places so that I had them in high-quality pictures.

When I got a subwoofer for the first time in 2011, I went back and re-listened to all my favorite songs. The added richness of the sound made me to want and re-experience the feeling of listening to a song right.

The same thing happened when I started to have access to HD content, sometime in 2007. As soon as some of my favorite movies were re-released in HD, I watched them again to experience them more fully.

When our twin girls were born last month, something happened that I never expected. That same urge of re-visiting experiences came back, only this time for life moments. I want to go back to my favorite places and re-live the experiences, but this time I want to do this with my kids. They enhance my experiences. It is a very strange, more real form of excitement.

And so, on the first "major" trip with the kids outside our home, we decided to revisit that spot on the Thames where we took one of our first photos in the city that our kids would be born. This time we had a much better camera and few more years and pounds on our backs.

9 years had passed.

It felt AWESOME.

A Live Birth

Three weeks ago we had our twin girls born.

I was inside the delivery room for the whole process of natural delivery, which lasted about 20 hours. The final 3 hours that included all the pushing and the delivery of the babies were one of the top 3 life experiences I have ever had (probably the top, but let's wait a few more years to settle on that).

I definitely recommend witnessing a live birth (even more so if it's your own kids). The process is animalistic, brutal and just exhilarating. Words cannot really describe the feeling of watching a human being coming out from the inside of another human being. 

We live in a mostly artificial world with artificial experiences. Most things that surround us are man made objects of our civilization. Some activities remain natural, such as eating, going to the toilet and having sex. Giving birth is taking such as non-artificial activity as far as it gets, a stunning reminder of our roots and our non-civilized past.

It's not easy to explain the awesome feeling we have when we take care of the babies at home every day. Up until a few weeks ago, for as long as I can remember I would come home from work and watch TV, make dinner, or browse online. 

Suddenly, I come home and I help my kids grow up. Feeding them, changing, them, interacting with them. Even though these day to day actions are quite mundane, the purpose of the whole thing is way more rewarding. It feels much more important to help a human being grow rather than myself just consuming stuff. Suddenly, our evenings became purposeful.

Maybe you have been unlucky enough to stay out of work or school for prolonged periods of time. You wake up and have nothing to do, so you start walking around, going online, trying to get hold of other people. It's an almost excruciating process, having to stay at home every day. And suddenly, you find a job and then your morning acquire a purpose: you go to work, interact with other people, you have a common goal, you are contributing to society. You life suddenly acquires meaning.

Having kids is an evening version of that "I got a job and now I have a purpose in society" feeling. 

Switching to OSX

An interesting thing happened the other day.

I forgot my MacBook Air 13" inside the aircraft on my flight back from Greece. I was using only Windows 7 in that machine.

The laptop was thankfully retrieved a week later, but meanwhile I had to travel to Canada within 2 days. As a result, I had to take with me and 11" MacBook Air, which only had OSX installed. This was the first time I continuously used OSX for a prolonged period of time.

I realized I can actually use that operating system instead of Windows. Here are the reasons:

1. There is a certain mathematical elegance about it. A strict, ordered, geometric design, almost godlike. Windows on the other hand still feels like an assortment of code put together. Even OSX application developers seem to care more about the looks of their app, being more consistent with the overall OSX look (much like the design consistency between iOS apps).

2. It is stylistically way more beautiful than Windows 8 (although on par with Windows 7).

3. The multiple desktop experience in OSX is very efficient for me, combined with all the touch gestures to manipulate between applications.

4. Incredible restore capabilities. By pressing command+R during boot, I can connect to a wifi and completely restore my machine from the cloud. No need for discs or usb drives. When I got my 13" Air back, I re-installed OSX and then transferred over my programs and settings from the 11" Air OSX account. I smoothly continued work where I left off.

5. Innovation.

The last point is the most critical one. My workflow under Windows hasn't changed since I started using Windows Vista in 2007. A left side taskbar with program shortcuts, fast switching between apps, gadgets on the right side, done. I am extremely efficient with this setup and two screens. With the advent of Windows 7 and 8, that has largely stayed the same (I had to restore the taskbar in Win8 to regain the efficiency).

In that same period however, OSX has introduced several tweaks that are actually focused on improving my workflow: touch gestures, multiple desktops, full screen apps, notification center, Airdrop, etc. These are features that I actually use and improve my workflow.

Then I looked at the future. OSX Mavericks and Windows 8.1 were both announced in June. OSX will be adding many more useful features I will probably like to use, such as tabs in Finder & notification syncing. Windows 8.1 is adding several nice features in the tablet interface (which I still think it's the best tablet OS out there), but nothing really for the desktop user. It has stagnated, and I feel like Microsoft has given up trying to change anything in the workflow of the desktop user.

Combining all that with the superb support for high-res displays that OSX offers, and the poor outlook of Windows for such displays, I see that Apple is truly trying to innovate in the desktop space and make everyone life's easier.

I'll still be using Windows for a while. But my time devoted to that OS will be shifting.

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

The are two reasons why I love the above painting by Joseph Wright of Derby from 1768.

First, the painting depicts a scientific experiment. These air pump devices were common in the 18th century. Scientists would use them to demonstrate that a candle's fire goes off after the air is removed, or that it is impossible to hear a ringing bell in vacuum. Joseph Wright chooses here a much more powerful experiment: a bird is placed in the chamber, and as the air is removed the bird starts suffocating, flapping around. The operator is looking at us, as if he needs our opinion: "Should I go ahead and remove all the air and see the air dying, or should I put the air back?"

The attendees' expressions are very interesting. The two girls can barely keep their eyes on the suffering bird, while the rest watch very carefully. With the exception of the two lovers on the left who completely ignore the situation.

Second, it is very interesting to know why the painting depicts the scientific experiment.

This is the middle of the 18th century. Newton, the founder of modern science, had lived the century before. Galileo, too. This is the era that marks the beginnings of science, which will lead to the industrial revolution and then onto the modern world.

This is the first time in history that people start becoming aware of science. It is an era where the physicists are still called natural philosophers, because physics is just starting to form as a science. It is the first time that science starts affecting people's lives, pulling them out of the middle ages.

How to communicate science though? Most people are still illiterate, they can barely read. Communication media are extremely limited. Thus, Joseph Wright chooses to prepare a painting about science.

This painting is one of the earliest depictions of modern science in art.

This painting is an effective method to communicate a scientific idea to society.

For all intents and purposes, this painting is the 18th century version of a PowerPoint presentation.


You can admire the painting in London's National Gallery.