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How do you organize images you've collected? (e.g. memes, art, inspiration, etc)
I imagine most people don't save or just keep images together with the photos they've taken on their phones. But it would be nice to have a simple place to store and organize those images.
I've seen these recommendations: https://tildes.net/~tech/1l48/pinterest_alternatives , but I don't know if that's the best format. Maybe I'm just overthinking it. For now I only have a folder on iCloud with sub-folders. Quick and simple, syncs across devices, but not super organized.
What i've done is to save images separately from, say, actual photos of family and friends...Why? Because whenever i display photos like in a photo gallery, no one - not even me - wants to see non-relevant images mixed in with photos. Imagine you start displaying photos of a family trip/vacation, and in the middle you start viewing some anime images...sure, not te end of the world, but it slightly ruins the vibe.
And, my mechanism for separation is simply place/save images in a separate folder hierarchy than photos. Within the "images" (non-photos) hierarchy i often save a .txt file named the same as some image...so, that the image has some easily accessible metadata - which helps for search as well as attributions, source info, etc. I don't use any app for managing any of my image or photo albums...i keep things pretty old school - just folders and some text files for meta data...and so far its served me well.
Not sure if this is what you were looking for, but i hope my comments help!
If you were to take this a step further, you're practically implementing a Johnny Decimal esque catalog.
@gil if you want to separate by specific trips manually, this may be worth looking into.
Personally, I just keep my phone's photos synced with an instance of Immich and will go in and delete screenshots etc by hand.
I actually tried Johnny Decimal shortly after it first came out several years ago...but migrated away from that approach after about 1 year or so...i like many of the ideas, but just didn't suit my way of thinking, working. I would not be surprized if some of my current ways of organizing stuff is still inspired by at least some elements of Johnny Decimal...I've used other approaches like PARA method (https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/) as well, but also moved away from them. Basically, nowadays, my approach is a hybrid that i have evolved to - which shaves down some complexity of several different approaches that i tried, and have kept things simple. i would not say i am at nirvana of organization just yet (I'd say i'm at like 90% for my system)...but at least for imagery and photos, i'm good.
As far as Immich, i have heard a great many things on some podcasts that i listen...But, since its still early days, i think i will wait and see. By the way, i do still sync my photos as well as non-photo images, etc. between phone and computer...but simply using syncthing to do so...and as far as photo gallery, i use the Simple Photo Gallery (from simplemobiletools.com)...so far the setup is ok, but not yet 100% perfect. I do hope immich continues on its trajectory and all the awesome work that team is doing, but for now, my approach is simple but does what i nedd.
You may want to find an alternative to Simple Gallery: Simple Mobile Tools was bought by ZipoApps about a year ago. There haven't been any updates to the app since October 2023 (before the sale), but people believe they will do something to ruin it eventually (like add ads and trackers).
People have already forked it into https://github.com/fossifyorg, though I haven't tried it myself. I switched to https://github.com/deckerst/aves and have been satisfied.
Ah, thanks for this reminder! Now that you mentioned it, I vaguely recall some shakeup a while back about Simple Tools...and, i plumb forgot about it! I guess I'll be taking a look at both options you mentioned. Thanks again!
Nice, that's exactly what I was looking for and very close to what I've been doing more recently. I like the
.txtfile suggestion, I didn't know what to do with the metadata or any extra context related to the images but that should probably work well enough.From like the late 90s to about early 2000s (maybe even up to early 2010s even?), i used several different types of photo management tools - some paid, some free, across Windows, linux, etc...and eventually they all lacked something for my workflow, how i like to grok my photos, or made system upgrades/machine migrations supremely intolerable, etc. Ultimately, i just gave up on such tools, and adopted a basic approach of managing folders, including txt files with searchable metadata...basically handling things manually (mostly). While it does cause me to work a little more - such as creating txt files, creating subfolders, etc. - my approach does allow for ease of moving between computers, ease of synching, flexibility of working with imagery either via desktop UI or from terminal, ease of backup and recovery, etc. That's kind of it. I'll caveat that this is what works for me...and it may not work for everyone, and i'm sure i'll keep evolving things...but so far the simple approach has dones its job - again, at least for me.
Good luck on your journey!
Hydrus is a powerful and open source tag based system for managing an image collection. I haven't really gotten deep into it but it seems pretty cool from playing with it.
https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html
Hydrus is very cool, and extremely powerful. It definitely takes some effort to set up tags and tag images as you import them, and it doesn't do things a photo-specific application would (face recognition, EXIF parsing, etc) but for images more broadly it's great.
I unfortunately don't have a solution to what you're looking for but I can say that I've also looked around for a way to organize photos that was visually-pleasing, in the exact format I wanted, and didn't contain any elements of social media while allowing me to easily share any subsection I wanted.
I even tried having a FigJam board of photos (one for each category) but it didn't scale well (blur intended).
I'm now writing a custom web app solely for this purpose, haha.
I use an ancient copy of Picasa. I still haven't found anything I like better, so I am watching this thread with interest.
Apple has a built in tagging system does it not? Tags + folders is about as good as you're going to get. There might be software that does it better (I know there's a variety of solutions for tagging files in windows), but it's a pretty great way to organize large swaths of data.