Organising my photos
I’ve done quite the trip yesterday. That’ll probably be it’s own blogpost someday. One thing I will divulge here is that I used a compact camera instead of capturing the photos with a phone. It’s pretty nice having something for one specific purpose and nothing more. Plus I don’t check my phone that much during the trip because I’m holding my camera. Usually I’m glued to it.
Once we finished our trip we rested at home, which continued on today. Since we’re not going out I decided to organise all the photos that we took into an album on an external HDD we have. While I’m at it might as well put all the photos on my phone and the cloud (Google Photos) into that external hard drive as well. The HDD has a capacity of 2TB (not exactly 2TiB, more so around 1.8TiB), with barely anything on it. Also, I’m looking to empty my Google Photos anyway. It’s currently taking a space of 10GiB as of writing and I don’t want to pay for Google One or lose any emails sent to me.
So first things first, the camera photos. I’m fortunate to have a modern laptop that also has an SD card slot for some reason. Like a full size one. I know I’m thankful for that now; no need to buy an external adapter like all my other friends who’re into photography. I’d just have to copy the photos to my laptop and then transfer over it to the external HDD. All the photos took around 1GiB, thanks to each photo taking a whopping 6MiB. For comparison my phone only takes ~3MiB for each photo encoded in heic.
Now it’s Google Photos export. I just went to the settings in the Photos website and scrolled down to the section about data export. Following the process to create a data download. Originally I wanted to just have one archive to download, so I selected to have it be 50GiB size for the zip files. Unfortunately it failed, even when I selected it to be in tgz format. Guess I have to download several 2GiB zip files and unzip them separately.
Downloading and exporting it is just time consuming really. Other than pressing the download button 10 times it’s just waiting for the download and unzip those 10 files at once. All in all the export was around 20GiB (half of it was when Google Photos still offered free storage. Ah the bliss).
Then comes sorting the albums in the takeout with the ones in the camera. This is actually less hassle, as the export from Google Photos already separates the pictures into folders. All that I had to do on my end was copy and paste the folders into place. Well that and renaming the folders, I don’t like having spaces in my folder names :P
Oh yeah there’s also photos from my phone. For that one I transfer it to it’s own folder on the HDD and defer organising it to future me. How to transfer it is simpler than my camera. So when you connect your (Android) phone to your laptop you are given 3 options, one of which is to mount photos via MTP (which stands for Media Transfer Protocol). This means that your phone will only expose the photos. One ctrl-a ctrl-c ctrl-v later, and I have transferred all of the photos.
It’s nearing midnight as I’m finishing this blog post, and I would like to say that I have done all the transfers needed to my external HDD. It currently sits around 34.3GiB. Quite the storage, though somehow it feels less than other people’s. I’m not the type to take a pic of everything, so even on my phone, pictures aren’t taking most of my storage hostage. Maybe I should take more pictures now that I freed my storage somewhat.
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