Hey Lemmy!
I’m taking the opportunity from migrating away from Reddit to also look at other centralized aspects of my tech life. I dislike how my music was being kept by Apple Music, so now I use a local library managed by MusicBee - the software is like a free, actually good version of iTunes. It also syncs new music to my phone automatically in the ideal format.
But I’m really struggling with photos - it seems like the old photo library design principle is dead, you either get tools for editors or cloud services. Does anybody know a way to simply connect my phone, have pictures transfer to a central library, and then have that library managed locally? I want to see all pictures, sort by date, maybe by place if I’m feeling nostalgic, zoom in… And that’s it. I’m very dumb when it comes to photography so no editing needed, no color balancing - I just want all pictures on the PC, and peripheral devices like phones and cameras to sync to the PC. Is that possible? I don’t mind paying for the software, as long as it’s one purchase and not a subscription. Though as the community might imply, I’d heavily prefer FOSS.
I recently went through getting all of my photos (tens of thousands) out of Apple’s clutches. For me, the answer was https://photostakeout.com/ to get them all back to my local machine in a reasonable format, and then https://www.digikam.org/ to manage them. The nice thing (for me) is that Digikam runs fine on Mac but will let me migrate easily (I hope!) to Linux when I finally toss this laptop in the river.
As far as syncing, it’s less elegant: connect the device to the laptop, and manually drag the photos over. But I can live with that. Avoiding the big player centralized clouds is important to me. I use https://www.backblaze.com/ to make sure I have an offsite backup of everything, just in case. So rather than the workflow be
Camera => Central Library => Download and manage on laptop
it’s now
Camera => Laptop => background backup to central location