What is a good strategy for managing digital photos/videos?

Photos management strategy goals

• Photo management/storage is done on Mac, backups are to rotating external hard drives. (i.e. not using iCloud)
• All photos/videos should fit on my phone (128 GB). After all, how many photos does one need in a lifetime?
• Have a process for incoming photos/videos for my wife and I.

Why now?

My photos library was reaching the size where it wouldn’t really fit on my phone anymore, around 88 GB. Not bad for ~20 years of accumulation! Around 19 GB for pictures and 69 GB for video.

Plus I was getting overwhelmed by some recent photos app changes in IOS 18:

• Photos from messages were getting mixed in (marked by a little speech bubble/lasso)
• The “recents” folder seemed to go away, so I couldn’t tell which pictures I had taken since the last import of photos to the mac.

My process up to now

I started using the Photos app on the Mac for storing photos/videos around 2005. My wife and I would sync photos from our digital camera/phone to a shared Photos app on our mac, then sync the photos/videos back to our iPhone. We make backups from the mac to external hard drives.

I started using a digital camera around 2000, but never got around to importing the ~1k or so digital photos/videos from 2000 - 2005 to the photos app. I also had a box of old-school paper photos from before 2000.

I also had about 47GB of video in my iMovie library that I hadn’t finished processing.

Getting current photo situation sorted out

In the Photos app on the iPhone there is a “View Option” to not show photos “Shared with You” (i.e. photos from text messages), which I enabled. A lot less photo clutter after that!

How to get the photos library down to a more manageable size? A key insight was to stop sharing a photos library between my wife and I and each use our own. There are many pictures that one person cared more about. It’s a little wasteful because I’m sure we’ll each want to keep 70% of it, but it also saves time because we don’t both need to be around to process photos. Plus we are starting to use our own user accounts on the laptop more (so we could have our own set of tabs open in the browser, logged in to our own password manager, etc). The time machine backups back up the whole computer hard drive, not just the current user account, so that’s still fine.

Before copying our photos library from my user account to hers I had to import our backlog of photos, which took about 30 hours to process ~1k digital photos/videos. I deleted many of them, and trimmed many of the videos. Some of the videos were in old/unsupported formats. I couldn’t find a way to keep the original “content created” timestamp when updating videos using HandBrake, so I updated them by hand in the Photos app after importing them to reflect their original date/time.

I spent about 3 hours on old paper photos. Most of them were disastrous (blurry, bad framing, people with eyes closed, etc) and I threw out. I kept a few. The Google PhotoScan app is awesome for scanning them to digital photos!

To copy the library I copied it to the external hard drive I use for time machine backups and then copied that to my wife’s user account.

One other thing I noticed: I had been backing up our phones to the Mac, but that took up tens of GB of space and really isn’t necessary since the Photos backup is all I really care about. So no more phone backups. Some apps are backed up separately (Messages, Notes) as well.

If you want to save space, you have to cut down on video. Ideally <= 10 mins of video per year.

Trimming video on the Mac iPhotos to save space is deceptive: simply editing the video shorter doesn’t actually delete the extra video, it just reduces what you see on the clip. You have to save it as a separate clip and delete the original to save space.

Only one photos library on the mac can be blessed as the “System Photo Library” for syncing to devices (or iCloud). So lame. So now to sync each phone I have to bless it as the “System Photo Library” first. Perhaps splitting our photos library wasn’t the best idea after all but I’m going to roll with it and see how it goes.

Final process

Every so often (every 3 months?)

• I import photos/videos on my phone to my wife’s photos app on her user account on the mac, then again on photos in my user account, deleting them off the phone after import.
• I do the same step above with my wife’s phone. (Perhaps there is a better way by using an iCloud Shared Library but I’ve been avoiding using iCloud.)
• We can cull/trim photos/videos on our accounts at our leisure.
• Back up to external hard drive.
• Sync the photos to our respective phones (remember to bless each photo library as “System Photo Library” first, otherwise get an “The iPhone “iPhone” cannot be synced. The required file cannot be found” error)

Every so often (every year?):

• Go back and enjoy/cull the Photos library on the mac even more.