Digital media processes

computing
1

Here are media types and what I do with them.

images

  • 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 :smiley:

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
2

The lifecycle of a personal photo

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.