Watch now | Watch now | Kathy Stone's program of mentorship, coaching, and brainstorming over the handling of a collection of photos restarts for 2024 with questions, guidance and a whole lot of answers
It's time for Kathy's Corner already! Jun 27, 2024 at the usual time. This week we will discuss how to choose an organizing program, and talk about what programs are your favorites! Hope to see you on Thursday.
Ya see... THIS is why we love the follow-up conversations and real engagement. Thank you, Jane. Yes, it turns out that the code that allows this elegant ☝️ insertion of PDF documents in Substack posts is also VERY picky about "special" characters in the file names. In this case, the offense was "Kathy's" corner... remove the apostrophe and the problem is solved. 🤦♀️ Thank you for pointing it out.
@Kathy I've looked and can't see if there's an option to do that. If anyone knows how, I'd love to know. My downloads are named by the camera information. eg., IMG_xxx
Haha, okay, to be sure I'm not an apologist for Google here, and I agree with all of you on, well, all of this. More than anything I'm the poster child for the technologist with a very messy closet. 🙄
The thing is that given the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone OS market (Android and iOS) the two of them are going to dominate the connections from mobile devices to cloud storage. They both do it very well today. I've simply decided to invest my cloud storage dollars in Google instead of Apple. (Apple gets my hardware dollars, and I've got a long history with them — part of why I've split the loyalty.)
Living with Google photos at the front lines of real-life with mobile phones has been helpful to me professionally as it gives me insight into how real people live with this. (That's my excuse, anyway.)
Personally, (as Kathy knows) I've been on a journey to find a suitable course correction for my dependance on Google Photos. The promise of our beloved Ponga was an elegant solution to facial organization (I still carry a torch). I know what's possible even if it's not available today.
Post-Ponga, my thinking had been to keep the Apple Photos-to-Google Photo as a basic work flow automation, but to build into that a new photo hub ideally built around something that I can seamlessly use to add metadata elegantly manage archives and backups. I've seen the promised land, I'm not there yet.
My next step is the purchase of very large SSD and updating of the workflow. ACDSee (or something else) will form the core to it for the fast-and-easy facial organization based on that downloaded Google Photos baseline. I'm honestly disappointed in both the facial recognition tech AND the UI on ACDSee so far, but I also haven't seen a good, cost-effective alternative. I may end up at Adobe, but I'm also offended by their cost structure.
I hope my experience can be that cautionary tale. 😉 (This community is all about learning from each other, right?) So now you've heard my confessional. Sigh.
Indeed it was. I took all mine out with Google Take a couple of months ago. It too forever. But there's no metadata with the photos unfortunately. I have no unzipped them all.
@Barbara, re Google Photos. I use it too, but have you noticed any stories you might write in the description do not download with the photo? Another reason why I decided to try Forever.com storage. I was pretty disappointed in that and paid for the extra storage to get better-resolution photos.
It's time for Kathy's Corner already! Jun 27, 2024 at the usual time. This week we will discuss how to choose an organizing program, and talk about what programs are your favorites! Hope to see you on Thursday.
Hi Barbara, sorry but I could not download the chat PDF. It came up with an error message.
Ya see... THIS is why we love the follow-up conversations and real engagement. Thank you, Jane. Yes, it turns out that the code that allows this elegant ☝️ insertion of PDF documents in Substack posts is also VERY picky about "special" characters in the file names. In this case, the offense was "Kathy's" corner... remove the apostrophe and the problem is solved. 🤦♀️ Thank you for pointing it out.
Thank you for working it out!
Argh! Thank you for the alert, Jane 🤦♀️I'll see if I can't get on this!
Oh, you and me both! THIS should not be a project! Our time is too valuable.
@Kathy I've looked and can't see if there's an option to do that. If anyone knows how, I'd love to know. My downloads are named by the camera information. eg., IMG_xxx
Hey, Jenny, you're not alone. The short answer is that it's complicated, but possible. There are a number of online resources out there and I'm right there with you on this challenge. 😉 I have a massive collection in Google Photos and have already pulled a copy using Google Takeout with the nifty little Zip files including both images and JSON files. The trick is to put them back together. I found this discussion from another user quite helpful: https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/google-photos-1/how-to-download-all-autobackupped-pictures?authuser=0#h.p_ID_331 In that section they reference a couple of tools, of those I think I'll use https://metadatafixer.com/ and also follow the tip of a user referenced here: https://support.google.com/photos/thread/163012929?hl=en&msgid=167282725
What's annoying is that I now have to go through a time consuming process to download and add on and extract that information. I wish it was easier.
@Barbara, Google Takeout is what I was thinking of. It is very time consuming. This is one of the many reasons I dislike Google photos
Haha, okay, to be sure I'm not an apologist for Google here, and I agree with all of you on, well, all of this. More than anything I'm the poster child for the technologist with a very messy closet. 🙄
The thing is that given the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone OS market (Android and iOS) the two of them are going to dominate the connections from mobile devices to cloud storage. They both do it very well today. I've simply decided to invest my cloud storage dollars in Google instead of Apple. (Apple gets my hardware dollars, and I've got a long history with them — part of why I've split the loyalty.)
Living with Google photos at the front lines of real-life with mobile phones has been helpful to me professionally as it gives me insight into how real people live with this. (That's my excuse, anyway.)
Personally, (as Kathy knows) I've been on a journey to find a suitable course correction for my dependance on Google Photos. The promise of our beloved Ponga was an elegant solution to facial organization (I still carry a torch). I know what's possible even if it's not available today.
Post-Ponga, my thinking had been to keep the Apple Photos-to-Google Photo as a basic work flow automation, but to build into that a new photo hub ideally built around something that I can seamlessly use to add metadata elegantly manage archives and backups. I've seen the promised land, I'm not there yet.
My next step is the purchase of very large SSD and updating of the workflow. ACDSee (or something else) will form the core to it for the fast-and-easy facial organization based on that downloaded Google Photos baseline. I'm honestly disappointed in both the facial recognition tech AND the UI on ACDSee so far, but I also haven't seen a good, cost-effective alternative. I may end up at Adobe, but I'm also offended by their cost structure.
I hope my experience can be that cautionary tale. 😉 (This community is all about learning from each other, right?) So now you've heard my confessional. Sigh.
Me too Kathy.
Indeed it was. I took all mine out with Google Take a couple of months ago. It too forever. But there's no metadata with the photos unfortunately. I have no unzipped them all.
@Barbara, re Google Photos. I use it too, but have you noticed any stories you might write in the description do not download with the photo? Another reason why I decided to try Forever.com storage. I was pretty disappointed in that and paid for the extra storage to get better-resolution photos.
@jenny I think there may be a way to download the descriptions and any other info you add to Google Photos. I don't use it, so I can't test.