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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. I Used jdupes to identify duplicates and a custom script to decide which files to keep.

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. If you ask “Is this output expected” and it says “yes” it then repeats everything from the previous post into the new post. In so doing it gives us a lot of reading, but it also makes it hard to keep track of what it’s doing.

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. The reason for this is that they were video files.

I downloaded my photographs from Google Photos via Google Takeout before using Exiftool to repopulate the exif metadata. Once this was done, I had to move the files from the mac to the Raspberry Pi running photoprism. For this I used rsync because it can run in the background as you sleep.

The Rsync command

The command is rsync -avzP /source/ user@remote_host:/destination/

-a is for the archive mode

• v is verbose. It tells you what it’s doing -z compresses data to save a little on bandwidth -P gives you a progress report in the form n/total number of files.

The Process

With Photoprism I moved the files from the takeout folder, in full, to the import folder in Photoprism. As there were a lot of files I let it run overnight.

Yesterday was cold and grey when I set off on my daily walk/run and my intention was to go up to Cheserex across to Tranchepied and then back down towards Nyon. I had no intention of running a semi-marathon.

The reason for which I ran so far is that I saw dog walkers and their dogs were not leashed. Years ago I was agressed by three dogs, one of them every time we crosssed paths, so now, if I’m alone, and I see a dog, I cross where the field boundary is, and then I continue my walk, run or bike ride.

Recently I decided that I would backup my Flickr library locally despite having over a year left on my pro account. In so doing, when the decision comes whether to dump, or keep using flickr, I will know that my data is safely backed up locally. Of course I decided to play with the archive but came upon a snag.

E6 Microdegrees

That snag is that Flickr uses the E6 Format, also known as Microdegrees. With Google Takeout, when I exported photoss I used the exiftool to add metadata to photos and it worked fine. Because it worked fine I then moved photos to Photoprism and Immich without issues. With Flickr photos using the E6 Microdegrees format photos displayed as being taken in the middle of the Atlantic near the coast of Africa rather than the canton de Vaud.

I know, without a doubt that if I ride with one group, especially if there are only 25 people, that it will be hard. It’s because of how hard I know the ride will be that I am not keen to join that group. despite this I still considered going for a bike ride this morning, until noisy neighbours made it impossible for me to have an early night.

There is a bad habit among alcoholics that they need to make noise at night without considering that others may want to sleep. I use the label noot because the people are alcoholics but rather because, in my experience people who behave in a toxic, selfish manner, are usually fuelled by alcohol. They only made noise until midnight but that still scuppered any chance of me going for that ride.

Imagine, you decide to backup your photos from a website such as flickr, but you find that it generates over a hundred files. Imagine going through and downloading every file manually. Imagine clicking hyperlinks one hundred and sixty eight times. Imagine having so little pressure on your time.

That’s where a quick ai prompt will get AI to get a shell script to do the work for you. A shell script is a few lines of code that you run via a dot sh file to do a repetitive task, or chore for you.

For years macs have come exclusively with USB-C ports but hard drives have come with usb-a and usb-b adaptors. When ordering an HDD recently I noticed that there is a niche item. The Ugreen USB-C — USB Micro B is the type of niche cable that all mac users could be tempted by. The reason for this is that in the good old days, when you bought a mac, you got useful ports, sd card readers and more. Now you get two USB-C ports, of which one is for power and one is for everything else, or four, if you spend more.

In an ideal world Google Photos, iCloud Photos, MyCloud (Swisscom) and other photo backup solutions would back up your photos into a directory structure that you can access and download from with ease and convenience. Unfortunately non of them want to offer that. That is why finding a workflow to get data out is worthwhile.

Remember, a cloud solution, where you can’t get media files back out, is not a backup solution. It’s just a synching solution. That’s why Immich and kDrive are interesting alternatives.