elodie

I have wondered this about an open source project I wrote about a decade ago [1] and still use. It's an order of magnitude less popular than Monica at 1.5k stars. The code base and logic is complex enough that it's hard to fix bugs and add features nowadays since they're few and far between. The test coverage is the only thing that makes it remotely possible. I've considered doing the same, rewriting it so that AI can reason about it better. I think it would be a net positive compared to where it is today. But it's also stable, as I mentioned, so I don't have enough motivation to do it. Just saying, I can see myself doing what this person is doing. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

I have used this approach with exiftool to add custom tags for “album”. https://stackoverflow.com/a/68284922 Here is my source file for it. It was so long ago I don’t recall all the details but you can retrieve this information using exif commands. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/configs/ExifTo...

My 10+ year old photo management system [1] relies on the file system and EXIF as the source of truth for my entire photo library. It’s proven several times over that it’s the correct approach. Abstractions (formerly Google photos, currently Immich) should just be built on top - but these proprietary databases are only for convenience. For work, I’m having the same experience as the author and everything is just markdown and csv files for Claude Code (for research and document writing). [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

I did say it was robust… I include video [1] and audio (.m4a) [2] files via EXIF. For text files [3], I add a JSON block at the top to mimic EXIF. I don’t want to deal with an additional sidecar file per asset. The risk of losing one during a transfer between systems is too high. It’s a conscious decision and not an oversight. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/2645bf25b81c63f65d6f1... [2] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/a... [3] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/t...

I founded 2 photo startups (2004 and 2012). My second startup was focused on data portability and was open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trovebox After failing to integrate the software into Western Digital's MyCloud NAS line of productions, I left and decided to try something different. I created a photo management tool that could feed into other photo programs. It's open source and available on github. https://getelodie.com https://github.com/jmathai/elodie I started off using it with Google Photos. Explained here, https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go... I've since switched to using it with Synology Photos. 8 years and counting.

I have an 8 year old app that reminds me a lot of this article. Something that's worked really well for me was that I created a plugin feature and most new features are actually plugins. This lets me add capabilities without touching or adding logic to the core code. Last night I added SQLite support as a plugin. 2 code files and one is unit tests. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/pull/443/files I don't know if this is the best approach but it's worked better than others in my 20+ years of writing software.

The 1k true fans approach is the most suitable one for most people looking to build a business or income stream. It lets you hyper focus on a niche that may not be well served by more general purpose solutions. But don’t let the 1k number fool you. Getting even 1 true fan is incredibly difficult. But the idea is that if you can get 1, you can find your 2nd, then 4th, 8th, 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th, 256th, 512th and finally your 1k. It’s a tractable number of steps. Hard, but something you can wrap your brain around and small enough to start focusing. A personal example is that I’ve a few hundred passionate users of my photo management software [1]. It’s open source so they aren’t paying for it. I’ve tried a few ideas without much success to provide a fiscally beneficial aspect of it - without much luck yet. But it remains one of the best op

I stopped using Google Photos in favor of Synology Photos which comes pretty close in terms of functionality and polish. Google Photos is excellent. Synology Photos is really good. And this seems to be a worthwhile tradeoff for me. Disclaimer: I founded 2 photo startups and have documented the solution I've finally landed on and have been using/evolving for 7 years now. 1. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie 2. https://medium.com/@jmathai/understanding-my-need-for-an-aut... 3. https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal... 4. https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin... 5. https://medium.com/@jmathai/one-year-of-using-an-automated-p...

EXIF is the greatest thing about photos and videos. It makes every photo a tiny portable database of itself. A library of photos is a collection of these tiny databases which share a schema. Doesn’t matter what device takes the photo - and it’s been like this for decades. I wrote a program that’s been organizing my photos based on EXIF for 7+ years [1]. I’ve also blogged about my reasoning (have co-founded 2 photo startups prior) [2, 3, 4, 5]. I’ve since moved off Google Photos to Synology Photos but haven’t written about that yet. Relying on EXIF makes that super easy. 1. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie 2. https://medium.com/@jmathai/understanding-my-need-for-an-aut... 3. https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal... 4. https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin... 5. https://medium.com/@jmathai/one-

I primarily care about photos and videos. My solution is simple and has worked well for the last 7 years. /--Dropbox Synology NAS -> normalize file names \--Google Photos I wrote this tool to normalize folder and file names <https://github.com/jmathai/elodie>. I wrote about the rest of the system in the following posts. 1. https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal... 2. https://medium.com/@jmathai/understanding-my-need-for-an-aut... 3. https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin... 4. https://medium.com/@jmathai/one-year-of-using-an-automated-p...

I really miss the GPhotos / GDrive connection. FWIW - I wrote this plugin[1] to recreate my workflow[2]. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/tree/master/elodie/plugins... [2] https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...

I've been using this fully automated system for the last 5 years. I store my photo archive on a Synology NAS at home which syncs to Dropbox and uploads a copy of each photo to Google Photos for browsing and sharing. I'm hoping to switch to Backblaze, from Dropbox, once Synology Photos is available and drop Google Photos as well. I've documented the entire process and include source code on Github. Github repo to automatically organize photos based on EXIF: https://github.com/jmathai/elodie Series of posts on Medium (to be read in order): https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto... https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal... https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin... https://artplusmarketing.com/one-year-of-using-an-automated-... https://medium.com/vantage/how-to-protect-your-pho

Pasting my own answer from [0]: --- For myself and my family, I wrote my own tool [1] that runs everyday on an "input folder". A quick google on "github photo organizer" shows a lot of others having done the same :) It organizes all traversed photos by date (extracted from exif or from filename), and puts them in a "failed" folder if it can't parse the date. If any photos get the same name, they are either deduped because they are exact duplicates, or are marked as conflicts (e.g. A.jpg and A_conflict1.jpg) if they are different. Last time I used it for a large input it took 3h for 200GB, though I suspect network latency was the main bottleneck. It's around 300 lines of python - verify the code for yourself if you want to use it! You probably also need to fork it if you don't intend to run it on a Synology NAS. However, as I mentioned las

I moved my photos to Synology 5 years ago and have never looked back. I did some very thorough research into a number of options including iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. and they all had some really odd behavior which kept me from using them (i.e. getting select photos into iCloud Photos was impossible - it was every photo taken or nothing ... and don't get me started on iCloud Drive's incompatibility with iCloud Photos). Right now I'm using DS File from Synology to transfer photos to my NAS and from there there's a script [1] that organizes it into a destination folder which is then synced to Dropbox and Google Photos simultaneously. So I get to use Google Photos as my primary photo viewer but it's just essentially a cached copy of my library (which I could trash and restore at any point). I have a series of blog posts [2] about my