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Managing Photos and Videos

Where are our photos and videos and what is the process for managing them?

Inbound Process

  1. All digital assets taken with any device are uploaded to the server to the following path /mnt/user/Media/Inbound/<device> where "device" is a folder that represents the device that the photo or video was capture on.

  2. Currently, using Lightroom Classic, those assets are imported to the Lightroom Classic photo-library.  There are two libraries:

    1. Family Media
    2. Renovations - reserved only for media related to the house.
  3. Importing them moves them to their main folders.  For family media, this is /mnt/user/Media/familyMedia/<sub-folder> and for Renovations it is /mnt/user/Media/Renovations/<sub-folder> where <sub-folder> is a date based folder.  In the family media, folders are arranged as <year>/<month_number>/<day> and in the Renovations library, they are in the format <year-month-day>/.

Organizing

Once media is imported and moved to the proper location, Lightroom Classic can be used to edit, tag, categorize, re-publish, delete, etc.

Lightroom Classic keeps track of all media, its location, meta-data, etc.  Any media that is manipulated outside of Lightroom Classic will not be reflected in the Lightroom Classic database.  There are tools in Lightroom to re-sync photos if this happens, but it's generally not a good idea to change media outside of Lightroom.

Main Library

Limitations

As Lightroom is our sort of "gateway" for all media to be tagged and managed, the media in Lightroom Classic, being stored in a shared network location, is accessible only by a single computer running Lightroom.  Libraries can be moved to other computers, but there's no way to share the library for simultaneous collaborative use.  Furthermore, Lightroom Classic is one of the Adobe products licensed by a monthly subscription.  So, installing it on another computer means moving the license to that computer.

Q: How do we get to the photos without Lightroom?  There are a few ways, but to get to the raw files, see the next section, Network Location.

Network Location

The path to the media was given above /mnt/user/Media/<etc>, but where exactly is that?

Windows

In Windows:

  1. In the search field in the taskbar, type \\tower.
  2. Press Enter.
  3. In the resulting window, double-click the "Media" folder.
  4. Double-click the familyMedia folder.  CAUTION: Be super careful not to move any files or folders.  If you need a copy of a file, copy it to the computer you're using first.
  5. All relevant media is stored in the <year>\ folder for that year.

Alternate Photo Galleries

While it's great to have a repository of photos, it's not very convenient for viewing.  Using Lightroom, we can pick and choose specific photos to publish to additional locations including:

Google Photos

By far the easiest tool for sharing and displaying photos is Google Photos, but not every photo we have in Lightroom is uploaded, for obvious space saving reasons.

How do we get photos from Lightroom Classic into Google Photos?

I'm glad you asked.

We have a plugin installed in Lightroom Classic that handles one-way sending of photos from Lightroom Classic to Google Photos.  Under that plug-in, named 'Photo upload', we have multiple "smart collections."  Smart collections are groups of photos that are created automatically based upon customizable criteria, such as the name of a tag attached to a given photo or video.  When media is given a qualifying tag, it is automatically added to the smart collection.  From time to time, that collection is Published, which uploads those images to Google Photos.

Photostructure

Photostructure is a self-hosted type of photo album like Google Photos, but without as many cool features.  It can only be accessed using a web browser, but the advantage is that we have complete control over the resources as they are all stored on our server.

Like Google Photos, the files that are sent to Photostructure need to be tagged with the word 'ps' for the family album instance, and 'ps2' for the renovation album.

To access the family album in Photostructure, point your browser to http://192.168.1.140:1787, or http://jongriffith.com:1787. (public facing url.)

For the renovations gallery, http://192.168.1.140:1788, or http://jongriffith.com:1788.

Fallback

The immediate fallback for photos is storage on our iPhones.  I download all of my photos from my iPhone to the server.  Melanie tends to leave her photos on the phone.  Occasionally I download those photos to the server as well.

Permanent Archives

In Lightroom, we also have a smart collection that published to a folder that is backed up to Amazon S3 storage, off-site.  Anything that is not tagged as "archive" in Lightroom Classic is semi-vulnerable to disaster, and 100% vulnerable to fire.  Permanent archives are a paid storage location based upon the size of the storage, so being selective about the media we save is important.

 

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