One of the many iOS flaws is that if you download photos and videos it defaults to throwing them into your photo album, whether they’re yours, and that’s why it’s good to tidy up. For the tidying up effort today I used ffprobe, find and the kDrive desktop drive, as well as terminal and a secure shell. The premise is that as you’re living your life, activity friends, family and apps like TikTok all post files, that you might or might not download intentionally.

It’s amusing. I look through Immich and Photoprism and I am struck by how many names I have forgotten, but how easily I remember certain faces. I’m also curious to see how I remember certain names after scrolling through faces yet to be identified. Decades ago when I was playing with iPhoto and Picasa I knew all these people well, and I saw them daily. It was easy to match faces to names.

Photosync is a photo uploading app that allows you to upload to various devices and cloud solutions with ease. Photo Uploader for Photoprism is a specialist app for Photoprism. The reason for which I bring up both of these apps is that they allow you to sync to photoprism. When I was testing uploads with Photosync I noticed that I can upload to the Photoprism library directly but that it creates a “current_phone” folder, and adds photos within this folder.

Last night at around 05:30 the alarm went off and either before or afterwards I heard lightning. I also heard very heavy rain. The question was whether the weather app was to be trusted. I could see that it would rain heavily while I walked from home to the meeting point but that for the duration of the rain it would remain dry. I chose to take a good raincoat and walked in the rain towards the meeting point.

For the last two weeks I have been playing with AI heavily, to get it to help with the task of re-organising my libraries. I played with Gemini, Le Chat and MyAI. I focused on Gemini because it gave me good results, whereas Le Chat gave good answers but I hit the token limit too easily, and MyAI is better, but the answers made me waste time, rather than move forward.

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.