I am in the final stretch of consolidation between Immich and my main library but I hit a snag. I have 197 GB of files in the Immich library to reconcile with 390 GB of images in my main library. Due to the Immich folder structure I can’t run a simple rsync command to combine the two. Option A with Jdupes Alone The first option is to ask jdupes to check the main library with the uploads folder.

Picasa and iPhoto Picasa and iPhoto were great apps. Both were free. Both allowed you to manage your photos locally and both allowed you to take pictures with photo cameras, or your phone, and sync them then you got home. Over time our phones synced via the cloud to these apps. We lost the habit of getting home and ingesting photos because everything was done automatically. We took pictures and they appeared in Picasa and iCloud and we didn’t think about it too much.

As I write this my consolidated photo album is being uploaded to kDrive, to serve as an offsite backup but the journey to this point took about two weeks, due in part to experimentation and learning to use various tools. Tools I used rsync Google Takeout Flickr Export jdupe Gemini Euria Le Chat, by Mistral Work Flow The first step is to request your data from Google Photos via the Google Takeout Tool, the Flickr Export tool for flickr, and to download all your photos locally from Apple Photos before disconnecting the local library from iCloud.

When I see spiders in nature they don’t bother me but when I see a large Nosferatu spider waiting in ambush in the stairway/hall it makes me deeply uncomfortable. If you’re hiking on snow, in April, in Switzerland, you will often see hundreds of spiders crawling across the snow. It doesn’t bother me. If you do the Via Ferrata Illuminé on the Moléson you will see plenty of spiders as well.

De-Instagramification it amuses me to read about how Instagram and YouTube are addictive today, when the opposite is true. Imagine, you live alone. You’re in the middle of a pandemic. Your only social exchange is at a petrol station when buying a coke or similar. You exchange three sentences and then you go back to abject solitude. Now, imagine that at the same time as you deal with abject solitude you see social media pivoting from being about your friends and family, to people living a better, more social, more fulfilled life than you.

Today I woke early. I set the alarm for 05:30 and again at 05:40 and yet again at 06:00. The reason for so many alarms is that it’s easy to set the first, wake up to turn it off, and then wake too late. It’s also as a backup. Usually the first alarm is enough to wake me. I can be a morning person, if other people are not noisy at night when I want to go to sleep at a reasonable time.

In the Age of the AI bubble, but long before this, photographers and camera operators have been vanishing from television studios as well as from events. Where you would have hired a camera operator and video editor you now hire a video editor/graphist because video editing has moved from editing video footage to creating graphics filled videos. This is part of why I became disenchanted with video and why I pivoted towards media asset management and self-hosting.

I chose to experiment with Le Chat by Mistral, the French AI alternative to Gemini, Claude and CatIFARTED (ChatGPT). For the experiment I copied my Photoprism photos from the drive I use that is connected a Raspberry pi to a laptop before running scripts to sort and remove duplicates. It worked well, with a nice little bonus which I’ll expand on later. Goal: Clean Up Duplicate Photos My objective was to Remove duplicate photos from a large collection while keeping the best version of each file.

For several days now I have been playing with Gemini, Google Takeout files and Flick Export files, first to re.marry json data to relevant exif fields, and then to create a folder structure library by year, month and day. In the process I have had to itterate, and itterate, and think lateraly in order to achieve what I wanted to achieve. Verbose One of the biggest frustrations I have is that when I ask a follow up question for more specific detail of something it re-calculates everything.

Let’s begin by saying that Flickr is not intended for video. It’s meant for photographers to backup and share their photos with like-minded individuals. When you use the Flickr app for iOS and Android it automatically backs up videos, and photos. After some trial and error I was able to get the exif data attached to photos and then sorted chronologically into folders. In the process I noticed that almost 10,000 files were missing when the transfer was finished.