Photo and Video Management

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I have a lot of photos and videos. Well over 100,000. When I started migrating from film to digital photography, I quickly started using Apple's (long discontinued) Aperture software. I was quite happy with it, but I had to run it on a single computer. The library started crowding the harddisk as well.

Once Apple discontinued Aperture, they offered a migration path to Apple Photos. From there, I went from Apple Photos, to storing them in iCloud, and then shared libraries. While it has gotten a lot more convenient, the shear size of things makes it a bit unwieldy. Not to mention, dumping 4k raw video into Apple Photos is a bit impractical.

So I've started a quest to move the media library elsewhere. But where? Instead of enumerating all of the issues, here are the features I want / need:

  • Easy sharing
  • Cloud-based backups
  • Integration with other photo and video software

Perhaps the solution will be... multiple solutions. For example, a NAS for storing photos and videos, Blackmagic Cloud for projects and proxies, and Lightroom for photos? And then synchronize / backup the NAS to Google Drive, S3, etc. using the NAS backup software?

Here are a few of the options I'm considering:

  • darktable. Open source. Linux and Windows. Photos only
  • Adobe Lightroom. I almost switched to this when Apple discontinued Aperture. Maybe in retrospect I should have. This is also photo only. It's $20/mo for 1TB, and $10/TB afterwards
  • Photonix
  • Nextcloud - does a lot more than photos.
  • digiKam - KDE-based. Lots of features. Can index remote libraries. (So, for example, I could store the photos on a NAS.) Could I bulk extract things from Apple Photos?

I think I'm going to go with the multi-solution solution for now. I'm already using some of the above. At some point I'm going to upgrade my NAS to a hybrid SSD / HD model with at least 2.5 Gbps.

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