The last time I wrote something here, it was about how to keep family photos. I was using Picturelife to upload photos from our phones. I used a feature of theirs to host my own photos on Amazon S3, so when their service imploded after an acquisition a while back, I managed to avoid disaster.

There's a great episode about the end of Picturelife on the Reply All podcast - they talk to the eventual owner about what actually happened.

Anyway, I gave up on public services and bought a WD MyCloud Mirror NAS box - a little Linux-based appliance with two redundant disks that is available over the network, so phones can back up to it, and it can back itself up to S3 for extra security. I spent a couple days loading all our phones and flash cards into it, and it's up and running. It's a little slow (there are fancier boxes available for more cash), but it seems to be good enough for now.

However backup is all it does, so now I'm kind of in the opposite place I was before - I feel secure that I'm not going to lose these photos, but they're all just sitting there, unorganized and not easily viewable.

I'd like to find a nice program to organize and de-dup them, without buying into a big online system or some soon-to-be-dead proprietary database format. It seems like maybe I'm in the minority, though. Maybe next fall's blog post will be about what I've found. If you have any recommendations, let me know.

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