How do you deal with managing old photos. My cloud is on a family usage acct and has a crazy amount of photos stored. Do you have any recommendation on how to timely go through and mark for keep and mark for delete?

Following as I have this exact same problem. Namely I'd like to have the ability to export to an outside storage as to have the ability to free up the cloud storage.

Use iTunes to sync with your pc. Then use the 3rd party photo management software of choice.

caleblyn said:

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How do you deal with managing old photos. My cloud is on a family usage acct and has a crazy amount of photos stored. Do you have any recommendation on how to timely go through and mark for keep and mark for delete?

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Any reason why you need to do this? We're at around 188k photos right now with no plans to ever go back and delete.

AggieFrog said:

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caleblyn said:

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How do you deal with managing old photos. My cloud is on a family usage acct and has a crazy amount of photos stored. Do you have any recommendation on how to timely go through and mark for keep and mark for delete?

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Any reason why you need to do this? We're at around 188k photos right now with no plans to ever go back and delete.

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+1

I "manage" my photos by not managing my photos (or allowing Apple to do it for me, to be more accurate).

As long as you're paying for a subscription that comes with storage, iOS will do the hard work of keeping local/cloud versions of everything and optimizing space used.

Where I'd be more concerned is creating "People" albums and using Apple's algorithm to retroactively sort in to albums, memories, etc., so I can get better featured photos.

Kinda unrelated but the new update allows library sharing. It's confusing to grasp at first but then you understand how beneficial it is. I'll break it down…

Personal Library
This is what's on your phone and can be offloaded to iCloud automatically if you have iCloud Photo Library. It's recommended to buy Apple One family subscription which gives you 2TB of shared storage. If you want more, it's $10 a month for every TB added. I'm hoping apple ups the storage in the future.

Shared Library
Keep in mind this is very intimate, the only person I can think to share with is my Wife (idk what happens if divorce comes into play). For kids they'll grow up and get one of their own intimate persons so I wouldn't recommend having them on the shared library. Anyways, I'm the camera app you have a switch like Live Photos to share to shared or personal library. When you take a photo and it goes to shared, it will upload to iCloud and show up on your partners photo stream. This is great because now you don't have to air drop photos/video to your partner anymore and have duplicates on personal libraries that take up iCloud space. You can retroactively do this as well, label existing photos as shared library photos. Example use case: wife and I are at an event, we're both about to take a photo of the same thing… I realize we're on a shared library and I just put down my phone and let her take the photo. 12mb saved.

iCloud Album Sharing
This is where you share photos and videos to anyone in the Apple eco system for collaboration on an album. Family members, kids, and friends. Idk how it takes up storage on iCloud though.

Amazon Photo through their prime service is unlimited photos, full resolution, and the iOS app will automatically upload all your iPhone photos as you add them. The app is also very intuitive and make's searching for a specific photo easier.

I really hate this world of relying on subscription services. Obviously there is a huge market for it, but I personally like to manage and store my own stuff. Now with that said, there is indeed more risk involved (i.e. fire, drive failure, etc.) if you don't have an appropriate backup solution. But at the same time, I also don't trust these cloud storage providers. And we've already seen examples of some of them shutting down or severely limiting the storage they offer you to the point where you have to go through the task of moving everything to a new service. With all that said, I personally move all my photos and videos from my phone to my PC storage (RAID 1) on a monthly basis as a primary means or storage. I'm currently exposed as I'm still seeking the best means of secondary backup. Trying to avoid cloud subscription of at all possible, but don't currently have a better option right now.

It's not an either/or. I keep a backup at home, but also keep photos in both iCloud and Google Photos.

In the next 5 years, I plan to build a climate controlled barndominium / entertainment area significantly away from my house (100+ yards). I intend to extend my network out there and sync my storage drives between my house and out in the barn. This would reduce my risk due to drive failure, fire of one unit, etc.

I store them on a few different portable HDDs and keep the HDDs in different physical locations. I edit the bad photos out before dumping onto the HDDs via my MacBook.

Nobody Knows My Name said:

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I really hate this world of relying on subscription services. Obviously there is a huge market for it, but I personally like to manage and store my own stuff.

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Unfortunately, the market figured out that SaaS is the best way to squeeze the most money out of everyone.. It's not going to change anytime soon.

Coincidentally I'm looking for a similar solution due to Black Friday. I'm looking for a NAS with the ability to upload automatically from my iPhone, similar to Amazon photos but to include videos. I'd prefer no monthly fees and just purchase the equipment. Right now I'm thinking about Synology but not sure what app or software interface to allow seamless uploading, viewing, downloading. Multiple accounts would be great, that way wife and kids can upload to separate folders on the NAS.

AggieBarstool said:

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AggieFrog said:

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caleblyn said:

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How do you deal with managing old photos. My cloud is on a family usage acct and has a crazy amount of photos stored. Do you have any recommendation on how to timely go through and mark for keep and mark for delete?

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Any reason why you need to do this? We're at around 188k photos right now with no plans to ever go back and delete.

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+1

I "manage" my photos by not managing my photos (or allowing Apple to do it for me, to be more accurate).

As long as you're paying for a subscription that comes with storage, iOS will do the hard work of keeping local/cloud versions of everything and optimizing space used.

Where I'd be more concerned is creating "People" albums and using Apple's algorithm to retroactively sort in to albums, memories, etc., so I can get better featured photos.

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This is my solution. I admitted to myself several years ago that managing them is mostly pointless because most people never go back and look at them anyway.

People take so many pictures these days (because they can) it's almost as if taking pictures has become diluted and pointless.