I need to beg your pardon and hold off what I had planned to write about this week: that new photo organization tool I teased last Tuesday. This is because of two main reasons:
- I did not prepare the content far enough in advance
- My primary computer's motherboard decided to stop working over the weekend
As unfortunate as this is, at least my laptop was still functional. However, I had to sink a ton of time unexpectedly into troubleshooting and eventually replacing the guts of the PC I do almost everything with, and as a result I've had to play catch-up for the last 48 hours to deal with some other very urgent tasks. I've been running around so much that I honestly didn't even remember the Tidy Bytes newsletter today until about five minutes ago.
Despite the fact that it was staring at me all day on my to-do list.
Yikes.
(For anyone wondering, backups didn't even come into play in this case because the only failed component was unrelated to data storage--I swapped in new parts and came right back to a working system just the way I left it. Whew.)
However, while I'm not in a position to write about it yet, last week's experiments with the photo management tool yielded some interesting information. So as not to keep you waiting too long, I'll drop the name of the platform I'm testing: Immich.
Note, it's a self-hosted solution, which means it's probably a non-starter if that term is unfamiliar to you. However, if you've done and self-hosting before, Immich is pleasantly easy to set up. It aims (quite well in most ways) to be a private version of Google Photos, right down to the user interface structure and many of the features. For now, I'll leave further exploration up to you as I delay my intended write-up.
While I'm still impressed, I've revised my outlook in light of some discoveries and discussions with my wife. We (attempt to) manage our shared photo library together as well as possible, but our individual workflows for taking, editing, and using photos are not the same. There's nothing wrong with this, but it means some photo management apps or platforms work better for me than for her, and vice versa.
There's a semi-humorous but extremely important concept in the nerdy tech world known as the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF), which basically functions as a subjective rating of how likely your spouse (usually the female of the pair) is to accept and even appreciate some technical thing you're working on: home automation, a new expensive computer, or photo management.
It doesn't matter if you pull of the most incredible technical feat that you and the rest of your geek friends could imagine; if it's annoying to your wife, it loses much of its appeal and value. If it goes even further and adds frustration to her day-to-day activity, well...bad news.
My long-running experiment with Mylio has been good, but I have to admit it doesn't fit 100% with my wife's ideal photo workflow. It's still a very good platform, but as I experimented with Immich this week, I also started considering other options that could fit better with our family--options that might have a much higher WAF. I think I'm onto something, although it would mean ditching Mylio...maybe. Maybe not.
For now, consider this a brief rain check on the deeper write-up. I'll leave the fuller write-up for a follow-up once the dust settles.
Happy data-taming!