Moving the Motherlode
This is going to be a very nerdy post. Just warning you in advance.
On a network connected external hard drive at home sits somewhere in the region of 135 gigabytes of family photos. If the hard drive dies, we willlose data. Most of them are already uploaded to Google, but we're not entirely sure which are, and which are not.
I've just removed the Linux partitions from the old desktop computer, and am busy copying all the photos across. I'm then going to organise the folders of photos a bit better, before spending a little money on a piece of software that will upload all the photos to Flickr.
Years ago I used to religiously upload photos to Flickr whenever we returned to the house after a day out with the camera – and would label, categorise, and title all the photos for future reference. At some point along the way I stopped doing it, and just threw the photos into folders on the network.
Somewhere along the way I stopped using a camera too, and just put up with whatever mobile phone camera I happened to be carrying. Those photos became completely disorganised, and got dumped into folders every few months with titles such as “2015-04 Mobile Phone”. Not good.
I'm secretly hoping that image search technology will be getting much better in the near future – allowing us to search for “a photo of our youngest daughter at the school last year”, and it will figure it out for me.
It's going to take weeks for all the photos to upload. I'll leave it running on a schedule to work while we are all out of the house, or asleep. Even copying them across the network is going to take hours. Snore.