this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Advice on Migrating (Messy) Photo Library from OneDrive to iCloud (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I've been slowly converting my digital life over to Apple and one of the sticking points is a giant mess of photos that I have backed up in OneDrive. Some are organized and some are not, there are many duplicates, a few Zip files, and older ones may not have EXIF data.

I'm downloading them all to a Windows PC (I don't have a Mac, only an iPhone and iPad Pro) and then will be importing them to iCloud via the web. (Actually, I heard that connecting my phone via USB and transferring them that way is a better method.)

Any advice or tips, or software suggestion? Here's my basic plan:

  1. Download all photos.
  2. Try to organize them at least into year folders.
  3. Deduplicate with (?) software.
  4. Use (?) software to make sure all photos have dates in EXIF data.
  5. Upload to iCloud.

So the end result is not just to have the photos organized on my PC but to have them in iCloud for viewing and sharing.

BTW, if this would be better served on one of the photography subreddits please let me know… which one.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Get a mac mini! It’s dirt cheap for what you get. I switched from Windows home PC to mac mini specifically for home media library management. The built-in Photos app in Mac OS is absolutely incredible for photo/video organization. I have TBs of photos and videos accumulated over the years. They are stored on external HDDs (some used to be in Google Drive). With the Photos app you can import all your media w/o copying files to the tiny SSD of mac, it creates small reference files. The Photos app has indexed over 200,000 photo and video files that I have, organized by people names (faces), pet names, locations, dates, etc. It also created tons of auto memories which I is better than anything I could come up with. I don’t think Windows has anything even close to this level of organization and no software purchase needed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Thanks. I’ve been thinking of getting a mini. I’m a little confused though. When you say you have photos on external drives so they don’t take up space on the mini, are they always connected? Or do you mean they’re uploaded to iCloud?