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. Disconnecting Photos from iCloud gives you 30 days to realise you made a terrible mistake and fix it.

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. It doesn’t bother me either. It’s in nature and they have every right to be there. It’s their natural environment.

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. Imagine being exposed to binfluencers. Imagine seeing them get hundreds of likes, and comments. Imagine commenting but being ignored.

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. Being a morning person requires living somewhere that is either quiet, or filled with white noise that covers other noises.

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. 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.