Migrating Photos from Facebook to Google Photos

Migrating Photos from Facebook to Google Photos

Byrichard

There has been a shift within cloud services such as Google, Facebook and others. That shift is to make migrating photos from one service quick and easy. The old fashioned method would be to download media from service A before re-uploading it to service B. This requires lots of space on hard drives and this could be a luxury you do not have, especially with laptop drives being as small as they are.

By some paradox laptops have become so slim and small that we are still using 250gb to 1TB drives in devices, that if fatter, could hold 8TB disks. Imagine a laptop with an affordable eight terabyte drive. Imagine how different laptop user experiences would be.

Clicking Easy

That is not the point of this blog post. The point of this blog post is to say that moving photos from Facebook to Google Photos is as easy as to or three clicks, and most clicks are to say “yes, allow meta to access blah blah”, in this case Google services.

Fast

Moving Data from Facebook to Google Photos was very fast. It took a few minutes. It moved all the files from Facebook to Google before then incrementally adding photos to the relevant albums. Remember, back in the zeros and the tens we would upload photos deliberately and add album names. Facebook has sent these to Google Photos and Google Photos is now populating all of these albums.

Temporarily empty

Plenty of albums are “empty” as I write this post, but that’s because it takes time for Google Photos to read the JSON files and re-create the album structures with the right photos and other data.

Wrong Date

The other issue is that all the photos are marked as being created today, i.e. the date that the photos were moved from gallery A to Gallery B. I suspect that this will be corrected at a later stage, once the albums have been populated with the right images.

The Nice Thing

The nice thing about this quick experiment is that Facebook made photo sharing awful. There was a time in 2007 when Facebook was a network of friends, and friends of friends, but from Zynga onwards it became rubbish because it became about marketers and others getting ROI, at the cost of users getting rubbish.
Now within seconds I have access to photos from two decades of my life. I can, at a glance see photos, with the name of the event, and be transported to another era. It’s nice.

And Finally

This experiment was done with my backup Google account rather than the primary one. This experiment was with the free account and I am using 8.5 GB of 20 GB. I am well within the free tier.

Try it, it’s “free” and you’ll find exploring photo albums easier.

Of Photos, Aperture, and Sliding Between Volumes

Of Photos, Aperture, and Sliding Between Volumes

Byrichard

Over the years I have used Aperture, Picasa and the Apple Photos Apps. In that time they have organised my files chronologically, automatically, as soon as I took pictures, in some cases.

What They Do

Aperture was well behaved. It would organise photos by year, by month and by day, so it’s easy to migrate a library from drive A to drive B. Apple Photos on the other hand makes a pig’s breakfast. It renames the files with a chaotically huge number, and then moves files into folders from 0-9 and then from A to F or some similar chaotic mess.

The Issue.

If you want to migrate an aperture or Photos library from one volume to another it will take hours, despite there not that being much data. That’s because Aperture and Photos create preview files of different sizes, caches and plenty of other files. The result is that you’re not moving x number of photos and one or two json files with the appropriate metadata. You’re moving 200,000 files within that library folder.

The 500 Gigabytes of photos that you want to move, and that would take up to five hours to move, if they were just photos in folders then take 24 hours or more.

The Cause

There are two principle reasons for this collection of aperture libraries. The first is that for a while I had a mac book air for daily use, and a mac book pro for video editing. As a result I had two libraries simultaneoulsy. The second reason is that I would backup the laptop to external hard drives every so often, and in doing so I would have several versions of my photo libraries.

Time machine is also partially responsible because it creates multiple copies so you need to reconcile the differences between versions, to avoid losing files that are not backed up.

The Solution

If you have aperture libraries that have not been converted to Apple Photos folder structure then you’re in luck. In my case I opened up each library and moved the folders containers from within the package to an external folder structure where I kept the chronological organisation. I methodically worked my way through several years of photos within half an hour to an hour, and then told Finder to move the files from Drive A to Drive B. It told me “about one hour remaining” so I took the time to write this blog post.

In the Mean Time

One of the funniest things I have noticed, while playing with my video and photo archives is that I have not seen some people that I have forgotten many of their names. It is for this reason that I need to keep at least one Photos photo library, until I have renamed faces that are recognised on Immich, or PhotoPrism, before deciding what to do with the old Photos libraries.

The Next Stage

Out of curiousity I tested to see whether I could import the experimental photo folder structure into photos and I saw that I can, and that duplicate detection works.

Combining Old and New

At the moment I have three photo libraries. I have the Google Photos and mobile phone based on on PhotoPrism. The next photo library is the one that I got out of extracting photo galleries from Aperture and Apple Photos. The final library is the one that is based on the files and folders that I have from storing files manually, outside of Photo management apps.

The next step is to clear a four terabyte drive. It will be dedicated to photos and audio books. PhotoPrism will take care of the photos, and AudioBookShelf will take care of the books.

Why I Chose Four Terabytes

I want room to expand. When experimenting with one terabyte I found that my photo library immediately fills the entire drive and when I tried with two terabytes I feel that with audio books I will be tight on space. With four terabytes I can have one terabyte for photos, one terabyte for books, and two terabytes for the libraries to grow, without having to swap the drives.

The other reason is easy backup. I plan to free storage space on at least two four terabyte drives with the newest being the primary drive and the older one being a backup. If one fails the second one will take its place.

The final reason is price. Four terabyte drives have the best price. They’re cheaper than smaller and larger drives per terabyte.

And Finally

In the past we would go out, take photos and video and when we got home we woulc create a folder with the name of the activity. Over time we would have plenty of folders but everything was organised, by default.

In the modern era our phones and cameras do all of this for us. They add the date, the location and more automatically so we don’t organise anything ourselves. The result is hundreds of folders organised by year, month and day, but without any further information. That chaos makes it so that we need Photos, PhotoPrism and other solutions. They “organise” our files.

Conclusion

Photos, by Apple, and other apps ingest our images and organise them out of sight, which is great when we’re using their apps, but awful when we’re trying to use another software solution. It makes sense to have a drive with two folders. Photos and videos, with everything organised by year, month, day and project or activity name.

In so doing we can see in the finder, which files are duplicates, or missing, within seconds. We need to organise our files, and software should just help us look through our archives.

What’s Old Is New Again – Live Google Location Sharing

What’s Old Is New Again – Live Google Location Sharing

Byrichard

Almost two decades ago we had Google Latitude. Google Latitude allowed us to share real time location with friends and family 24 hours a day. We didn’t need to ask “Where are you” because there was already an app for that. Today I saw “Google’s real-time location is here: this is how it works” as a headline. I have to ask, do the writers study their history before writing their articles or is anything that wasn’t in their own lifetime brand new?

This is an old feature from the mid to late 2000s that was removed bit by bit because people worried about privacy complained. We went from being able to share our location 24 hours a day to it being on demand for a limited time, to having a lifetime history of locations to it being removed from new users.

I am grandfathered in to the original Google Latitude so I have location history spanning back to 2007-2008 or so. I love this, because it allows me to see when I travelled, and how fast I travelled. If I see that I got from Spain to Switzerland in an hour I know I went by plane. If I see that I went from Geneva to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Romania or Poland then I know that was another flight. I can see where I was and when.

I can also see how much I cycled and walked, and how much I drove or took trains in a month. With iCloud you have live location sharing too, but it’s restricted to the people you want to share with, for example when you’re driving from A to B, or when you have family sharing enabled.

Years ago I said that I don’t mind Google or Apple, or other companies knowing where I am, because telecom providers have that information anyway, so if they have it, so should I. My fvourite use was to check “The car got a fine at this location on that day but at that time on that day I was at the gym so I wasn’t the one driving the car.

By sharing your location with Google latitude it gives you information about whether an event could have been you or not. I wasn’t worried about the fine, or paying it. I wanted to confirm that my drivers were not slipping back into the habit of getting fines again. At one time I drove so much that fines were no longer rare. I eventually saw phantom flashes and switched to always setting the limiter to the speed limit.

And Finally

It boils down to one phrase. Live location sharing with Google is not new. It was removed because people worried about Google knowing too much about where they had been and where, and they wanted to remove location history. Now we are finally seeing the reverse coming back into being. Live location sharing, as well as location history is useful. I am happy to see that it is coming back.

Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

Retiring Google One and iCloud for Photo Cloud Storage

Byrichard

Since I am planning to downgrade my Google One plan from two terabytes to 200 gigabytes as Kdrive offers me a better deal I took the time to check when, and how easy it would be to downgrade the plan. It’s actually very easy and I have a few months to back things up before downgrading.


In the process I was reminded that Google One originally had one terabyte of storage. They automatically upgraded all those with a one terabyte plan to two terabytes back in 2018 or so. We were getting twice what we paid for.


Of course we’re not getting twice what we’re paid for. We’re paying for storage we’re not using. For most of the time I have had Google One storage I have used less than 500 gigabytes of storage, out of two terabytes so a plan that offered 500 gigabytes of storage would have been closer to what I might have wanted.


The problem with cloud storage is that the more you have, the more you use, and the more you use, the more trapped you are. You’re trapped because either you need a two terabyte drive, and several days to download everything or you’re trapped paying 100 CHF per year until you invest the time it takes to download everything.


What I Do


I have the three franc apple plan and Google One. I usually backup my photos to iCloud, until I run out of space. I also simultaneously back them up to Google Cloud. When I need to make space for an OS update on an iOs device I delete apps and photos from the iPhone as they’re backed up to Google One where I have plenty of storage.


It Backfired


Rationally I would expect Google Photos and Google Drive to be stored in the same place. You use Google Photos when you want to look at photos specifically and you use Google Drive for media asset management. Unfortunatley Google doesn’t think that way, so Google Photos is completely seperate and a pain in the abs (intentional spelling) to deal with.


iPhoto and Google Photos make it very easy to backup up photos to the cloud, but not retrieve them. Whilst this is fantastic for keeping us trapped it has the opposite effect. I never upgraded iCloud to the two terabyte plan because I saw how difficult it was to retrieve photos.


With Google Photos they make it very easy to backup your photos to the cloud, and offload photos from the phone, but in so doing it’s easy to exceed the storage capacity of a laptop drive, or mobile phone drive. According to the Google Photos app on Android I have half a terabyte of photos.


What I Require


For me to see iCloud and Google Photos as viable primary photo backup solutions I want it to be as easy to download and store cloud photos locally as it is to send them to the cloud. If it’s easy to send them to the cloud but time consuming to get them back then this is not a solution because it is very easy to lose images, if we swap from one provider to another. We need backing up locally to be as fast as backing up to the cloud. We need it to be invisible and simple.


The Android Advantage


Android has a huge advantage over iOS in that we can by a 500 gigabyte micro sd card, or even a one terabyte SD card, and when we change phone we can swap the card from the old device to the new one and all our images are in the same place. With iOS devices we have to buy dedicated hardware to do the same thing, and we need to get a large external drive for the laptop to back up our images. In theory we wouldn’t need cloud storage to be more than a backup if apple allowed SD cards in iOS devices.


Using Nextcloud as a Home Alternative


That’s where Nextcloud shines. I spent a few days trying to sync all my photos from an iOS device to a Raspberry Pi running Nextcloud and it failed, mainly because I played around instead of letting it sync. The quicker, rational solution is for me to download all the photographs from Google Photos locally, and then to send them from a windows or macOS device to the Raspberry PI, make sure it’s up to date, and then sync new photos as they’re being taken.


The Saving


Without photographs I could use the 50 gigabyte option with iCloud and the 100 gigabyte option with Google One. I would save one franc per month with Apple but 80 CHF per year with Google, from 100 CHF per month, to just 20 CHF per month.


And Finally


Although it’s fantastic that we can store photos to several clouds whilst we’re on our daily walks, bike rides and more it comes at a cost, both in terms of storage and financial. By using a solution like a home based storage solution like Nextcloud we can automatically backup our photos locally before deleting them from iCloud, Google Photos or both. In so doing we go from needing an expensive cloud storage plan to a cheap one. We also make it easier to flit from the previous cheapest storage solution to the next, without worrying about data loss.


I enjoy the idea of storing photos online but I hate the idea that they’re hard to retrieve, and for this reason I want to have a locally based, automatic cloud download solution, such as Nextcloud running on a home based machine. I won’t do away with the cloud storage solution but by having the primary backup locally the cloud storage can be swapped within minutes rather than days.

Conversing With Google Bard

Conversing With Google Bard

Byrichard

Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.


Swearing


Some of us sometimes swear at Siri, out of curiousity, to see how she reacts. I find that she sometimes sulks. I asked Bard how it felt about swearing and it responded that it will try to understand the question, rather than stop responding.


  • That’s interesting. I didn’t know that Siri sulks when she is sworn at. I can see how that would be frustrating for users.

  • I think it’s important for AI assistants to be able to handle being sworn at without getting upset. After all, people are going to swear at them sometimes, whether it’s intentional or not. If an AI assistant sulks or gets angry when it is sworn at, it’s not going to be very helpful.


Bard Humour


I asked Bard about bards, being tied up at the end of stories, during banquets and Bard gave answer that was based on American culture so I specified that I was thinking of the Asterix bard so it gave a more relevant answer, going so far as to quote two or three specific story incidents.


When I asked specifically about humour it answered that it does not have a sense of humour, itself, but that it does know how to write a joke, by studying the jokes that it has been taught.


Tic Tac Toe in PHP


I asked Bard to help me write a game of tic tac toe in php and it gave me the answer, but wheras chatGPT would give me the answer and stop there, Bard gives a hyperlink to the source it used, for the instructions. If you write something helpful, and bard uses it, then it will drive traffic to your website.


Sharing


When you are happy with the answer you are given you can either share entire threads of conversations, or just a specific question and answer. This means that you can share the series of questions that got Bard to give you the answer that you wanted to get to.


Feedback


Bard allows you to give feedback. You can give either a thumb up or thumb down. You can also ask for a reply to be longer, shorter, simpler, more casual or more professional. If you click on “view other drafts” you can see two more draft answers and select the one that you prefer. By default it gives you these three answers.


It Remembers


Google Bard remembers the thread of the conversation so if you start speaking about a topic then you can get from point A in a conversation to point B and elaborate on ideas. I had a conversation with Bard about the current COVID situation in CH and it gave good answers. It used the low rate of 3 cases per 100,000 to explain that the situation will be worrying when it reaches 50 per 100,000. It has given one of the best answers I have seen from humans, or AI because it quantified its answer.


A Learning and Studying Tool


As I ask questions about the Léman water flow, water use, and consequences downstream I see that Google Bard is an excellent learning resource. It gives good answers, and you are either given links to the articles that the answer is based on, or you are encouraged to search for other answers, on the web, to learn more.


A Conversation with Bard About Existentialism.


As I was playing with Bard, asking a series of questions I asked a question where I mixed English and French and it automatically switched to French and gave me an answer to that question in French. Bard is as multilingual as we are. it can help you explore and develop questions and answers. It can help you learn about topics by asking questions. Learn about one thing, read more, learn about something else. Read morea about it.


The AI Learning Rathole


With Bard you can spend hours learning about things, asking a series of questions and getting answers. It doesn’t get tired of your questions so you can ask, until you lose focus or attention. I especially like that with some answers it gives hyperlinks to three more resources, to be checked.


And Finally


Although I could keep writing about this topic I believe that the key strength of Bard compared to ChatGPT, is that it encourages you to follow links to read from primary or secondary sources, rather than trusting AI blindly. It also provides us with a new and more conversational apporach to “google searches”. We go from phrasing a question for a search engine to give a usable answer, to chatting with AI. By chatting with AI we learn more, and once we know what we really want to learn about, Bard has signposted the way, to learn more.


I was sceptical about AI and Google search but now that I see how it has been implemented, I like it. It works well, in my eyes. Rather than limit us, it encourages us to explore. AI should be a stepping stone, rather than the end point.

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Thoughts on The Google IT Support Course

Byrichard

I am currently studying the Google IT Support Course. I am familiar with many of the topics and I have used many of the tools discussed. What the course offers, and the reason for which it has so much value, is that fills my knowledge gaps.


One example of this is the TCP/IP model. Until I studied the networking module I never thought about the five layers. I never thought about the complexity of getting packets from one machine on one network to another machine three or more hops across on another network.


Before I studied this course I was familiar with adding an IP address and Gateway address but did not understand how subnetting works. In the process I learned to count in binary. It is a simple concept to understand once you have played with examples a number of times.


One of the strengths of this course is that it tests you at the end of the chapter to ensure that you remember what you learned. In some cases it took more than three attempts to pass certain quizzes and I had to wait twenty four hours before I could continue. I like that there are these challenges. It encourages you to do some background research to ensure that you understand the topics that are making you struggle.


I also like the practical tests where you have to either SSH or RDP into remote clients and accomplish tasks using what you have just learned. You can fail here too, and that is where you invest more time in ensuring that you have really learned the topic.


One exercise I liked is SSHing into a test server, fixing a file name, checking that the page loaded, and then SSHing into the production server and doing the same. I had often seen SSH mentioned but until recently I had not had the curiousity to accomplish tasks with it.


On Linkedin Learning I studied AWS Provisioning And Deploying before I took the Google IT Support Course and I was able to get through the course and understand most of the concepts and tasks, but the Google IT support Course really added to my knowledge and understanding of the entire workflow and environment.


Yesterday I was learning about the opportunity to record actions in terminal and if I had known about this earlier then I could have written scripts to deploy and breakdown instances that I was required to install for projects.


When studying web development I had to install Ruby, Ruby on Rails, NPM, Angular, React and more and they sometimes interfered with each other. If I had the knowledge I have now then I could have had a clean install for each, and I could have configured and used virtual machines.


I started the course with knowledge of how to use computers. Now my knowledge is well founded, with many of the gaps in knowledge and understanding filled.


Playing With Grasshopper

Playing With Grasshopper

Byrichard

Grasshopper is a Google app to teach adults and children about Javascript. It provides people with short, easy to understand modules to get a grasshopper to do things.


The curriculum is divided into seven modules. These are:


  • Fundamentals
  • Fundamentals II
  • Intro to Interviewing
  • Array Methods
  • Animations
  • Animations II
  • Using a Code Editor
  • Intro To Webpages


So far I have only played with part of the fundamentals course. You don’t need to write much code. You can select which function and variable you want to use, rather than typing lines and lines of code.


This is the type of app that you can use almost anywhere, and anytime you have a few minutes free.


One of the challenges, when you want to learn a new programming language, is to set up an environment before you start playing with code. That can be a long process and it’s easy to lose interest before you have even written two lines of code.


With such a simple app you don’t need to set anything up. You can play with code, see what it does, and then try something more complex. You can familiarise yourself with the language before you install a development environment on the machine you use.


An example of Grasshopper on a desktop.


As soon as the app is installed on your phone you start learning.


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Google Arts & Culture

Byrichard

Google Arts & Culture App

Google Arts & Culture is an app that allows people to look at Arts and culture from around the world easily and intuitively.

This app allows you to learn more about arts and culture based on your current location as well as by topic, art medium and more. With this app, you can look at 360 images of monuments and locations. You can also zoom into artworks. When we were teenagers we studied the history of art. We looked at artworks in books and in documentaries. We then went to Florence and saw some of these artworks in person. We saw Michelangelo’s Statue of David and more. As children in Europe, we went to Pompei, to the Vatican museums and many other locations. When you walk in the Sistine chapel you see this art in context and you see how large it is.

This app, by Google allows you to do the same thing. It allows you to study art from your phone as you commute or as you queue or do other things. In effect it helps to educate and inform us about Art and culture. We are no longer restricted to small pictures in arts books.

Google Arts & Culture Experiments.

Google Arts & Culture Experiments is looking at ways in which to present arts & Culture in new and interesting ways. It uses VR, machine learning and other technology to establish connections between works of art and more. It teaches people about the context of art.

We Wear Culture

Our culture is also reflected in the clothes we wear as well as the wearable technology we use. By wearing event t-shirts we tell people about culture. People wear band t-shirts with tour year and destination information and others wear t-shirts for film festivals, World VR forums and more. In this region of Switzerland you often see people with Paléo t-shirts from the years when they worked as volunteers.

Wearable culture is also reflected through the fitness tracker we wear, whether it’s a smartwatch, a step counter, breathing sensor or more. Google’s WeWearCulture project brings attention to the cultural significance of what we wear as well as provides context.

 

Google Local Guides and I
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Google Local Guides and I

Byrichard

Google Local Guides and I are mutually beneficial. I love to go up to the mountains and document their beauty and Google Local Guides needs images and reviews. I have been sharing images with Google Services for several years but it Google Local Guides is relatively recent. When I was added to the program they had already included several of my contributions.

The images that you see below are from Via Ferrata and hikes in Switzerland. They show the Leman, the Alps, the Jura and other peaks and valleys. In Summer I am among them every single weekend. Recently I have started to document these trips as 360 photographs which I then share with this service.

My goal is to contribute at least 140 more images because I want to get a terabyte of storage for my pictures, to use as an online backup. As I use an android phone it logs the locations that I have been to and when I get home or to a computer I can review my location history and write a short review of the places as well as add images. This is an easy and intuitive process.

The perks that I am currently entitled to are:
Get noticed with your Local Guides badge in Google Maps.
Connect with other Local Guides in our exclusive Google+ Community.
Lead the conversation by moderating Local Guides community channels.
Receive invites to Google-hosted events in select cities.

For now the community travels internationally but it is principally United States cities that are active with Barcelona, Edinburgh, London, Madrid, Paris and Sydney providing the international side of things.

Some would say that Local Guides will challenge other services offering the same features but as Local Guides offer one terabyte of storage for images I am motivated to contribute a further 140 photographs and reviews as the opportunities come up.

 

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The Demise of Google reader

Byrichard

Google Reader was a great tool because it made gathering and sharing content from specific sources intuitive and easy. It provided us with one place from which to do most things. Today Google have announced that they are pulling the plug on Google reader.

In my eyes Google reader had become obsolete four years ago. That’s when I moved to services like Feedly, zite and others. Each of these services was more interesting because it took our feeds but used algorithms to make relevant content discovery faster and more intuitive.

Feedly was fun for a while but eventually I stopped using it in favour of zite. Zite was excellent until they decided to downgrade the user experience to a pinterest like interface. I don’t want the kindergarten treatment when searching for information. I want headers, I want a line or two of content and I want to have a lot of information displayed in a small space. Zite fell out of the useful apps category and was deleted from the ipad and iphone as a result.

The next project I’m looking at is Scoopinion. They have a plugin which tracks which news sources you visit and which articles you read. Based on your browising habits it recommends future articles. So far it estimates that I have spent 22hrs reading news over the past month or two with over 980 articles. By this logic it should be good at recommending stories that I would enjoy but it is too tabloid at the moment. This is probably due to the relatively small user base as this is a new project by developers in Finland.

I love content aggregators that study my habits and give recommendations based on this. It makes the surfing experience more enjoyable. You also don’t suffer from RSS burn out.