Personal photos - I delete low quality images and close duplicates; then I either share publicly, privately, or not at all; shared or not they are all put into a redundant backup system
Game screenshots - I delete or share; I care more about creating public archives of game media (I’ve never taken a game screenshots that had any sentimental value)
“Gifs” (images shared for comedy/context) - share; I only save these if I am preserving the context
Art - I used to collect individual images, but now I’m more likely to share it in a conversation; preserved as conversation
Generative art - images like text macros and AI-tech output; this is something between “gifs” and art for me, since I produce a lot for storytelling that is essentially comedy bits
video
Personal video - rare to take, rare to share; if I keep a video I intend to archive it for the future
Game video - the Nintendo switch made it easy for me to have thousands of 30 second clips, most of which I will delete without sharing; when shared publicly I’m just going to put them on the internet archive; I don’t plan to preserve these privately
Consumer video - I don’t buy physical media, so shows and movies are digital; I intend to share with people I want to discuss media with; I may keep copies of hard to find media, but do not intend to archive it (in fact, I want to delete it as soon as it is discussed)
audio
Personal audio - rare to record; I sometimes share privately (to hear peoples voices from the past); I archive all the recordings
Music - as a hobby I’ve built a satisfactory library; I keep the hifi lossless files in storage and cut reasonable formats for listening devices; as a hobby, I will drop this if storage becomes prohibitive
Voice messaging - either voicemail or meno sent over xmpp (Snikket does this); I listen once and never again, and set storage to delete these after a short while
text
Messages (chat/xmpp) - I set to autodelete after a reasonable time; I copy any notable details into a place like these notes
Email - forwarded to a different system for reference, deleted otherwise; I don’t need to archive email, I have none
Books - I tend to collect a lot of ebooks since there is a lot of info in a small storage unit; however, once I’ve processed a book I’ve copied and shared the parts I wanted and I’m done with it, at which point I remove it
Web pages - I download, process, and copy web pages is various ways; I tend to send them to the way back machine when I access it, and then focus on the part I copied
Personal writing - I share publicly or privately, and archive nearly everything that is not confidential, over a long enough timeline
I have an RX100 IV that I haven’t used in years; all my photos are taken by phone from the Google Pixel line, most times with Google camera software. Noting for the practical hardware considerations; using a mobile device is completely fine for any daily photography I produce.
I have a daily todo item for processing photos: I plug my mobile device in which activates syncthing, which copies the photos to a directory for that device on my computer.
Then I either:
delete a photo - this is for blurry images, accidental pics of the ground, photos that are identical, etc. Obvious duds.
share a photo - this may be on the public web, or in a private space; after this has been shared, it is archived:
archive a photo - this goes into a syncthing share for the year, which has a further 12 directories for the month in it. So a photo for today would go into ~/pictures/archive/2024/12; each year I create a new syncthing share and new month directories as they occur
I archive a lot of photos without sharing. These range from practical (I wanted to read a flyer later) to funny pics of folks. I still archive them because I think they are important to the future, where contextual information may provide insight and connect us.
Because I archive and backup all photos I keep, I don’t go out of my way to make the shared versions redundant. In fact, because of the way I process conversations in the public and private spaces I share photos, even those shares are temporary, on the way towards a personal collection (someone downloads it as part of the discussion) or a long term public archive.
Long term public archives have many layers, including source files, metadata, version control, internet archive, etc. I’m not quite there yet; I need to stabilize the sharing systems and get the backlog shared before that process kicks in.
That solves a temporary storage, editing, and sharing platform. But it is primarily setup as a photo API. Two other steps are needed for this daily process:
I need to query an amount of individual photos to update - I need to upload photos without description or keywords and add them over time, due to the way I produce photos (some days there are too many to process, others there are no photos, hence a separate processing loop)
Produce tag based galleries - these will be published to other sites for viewing the images as I’m uploading them
Individual photo updates
This will be something like… sort all the photos by update date and create a topic for a reasonable number of photos with the oldest update date.
Then I will discuss the photo, and update as appropriate. This will make change the update date for the photo, removing it from the query.
This will allow me to upload images from all sources without concern, since I know I will eventually be directed to each for updating.
The topics will be updated as well, and will have some editorial automation done to assist with descriptions and keywords.
Tag-based galleries
This is three agents in Huginn (I think):
Loop for all tags (this gives ID, tag name, and last updated), creating events for new/updated tags
Take new/updated tags, query latest photos, template into content block event
One or more posting agents, takes the content block and publishes it on a website
For instance, I plan to take my photo tags and create a topic of each. I’ll do so here in my notes, and also our family forums.
Note: these two steps completed will mean I can upload photos and as I update the description and keywords all the galleries will eventually also update. That’s nice!
