Introducing: PhotoStructure!

A long time ago, in a different millennium, a young nerd convinced his beautiful wife to give up her SLR film camera, and switch to digital.

Boy, was that a mistake.

📷 Physical vs Digital

With physical, printed photos, you put them in a box or in an album, and they’re on that shelf, over there. You can walk over and touch them.

Let’s be real, though: when was the last time you opened one of those boxes of photos?

Let’s be real, though: when was the last time you opened one of those boxes of photos?

Digital photos are different. Hard drives fail. Backups break. Online and desktop photo services are doomed to disappear. Entropy always wins.

💾 My digital disarray

hard drive overflow from only one of my boxes of old drives

hard drive overflow from only one of my boxes of old drives

In my fight against entropy, over the last 20 years I’ve amassed several boxes stacked full of old hard drives from backups and old laptops and crashed servers. My family and I only had access to a small fraction of our photos and videos.

What I had was a disorganized mess:

  • many, many duplicates from old backups strewn across thousands of directories
  • lower quality images from online photo service backups
  • a bunch of unreadable or corrupted photos from failed backups and bit rot and buggy photo service exports

What I wanted was a single, automatically organized and de-duplicated folder structure with all my original photos and videos.

I couldn’t find software that did this, so I built it.

When I got this working, though, I found that I was back to the boxes-of-photos problem: sure, you have the photo, somewhere, but it’s almost impossible, and certainly not fun, to find anything other than the latest photos you’ve taken. Your memories get ignored; you might as well have them in a dusty box next to your old photos. I resolved to make browsing a lifetime of memories fast, simple, and delightful.

After a lot of experimentation and some innovation, I realized that the rich metadata in these files could automatically provide structure to your library (see? PhotoStructure), and this led to inventing both streams and samples.

With physical photos, you have to decide what box or album to put the photo in, but digital photos don’t need to live in only one place.

PhotoStructure tags every photo with hierarchical paths like When/2019/January, Camera/Apple/iPhone XS, and Where/France/Paris/Musee d'Orsay. When viewing a specific photo, you can browse “nearby” photos for all related tags. Read about hierarchical tags →

🎨 Samples to keep you interested

My first PhotoStructure prototype had a standard newest-first home page. Within a week, I’d memorized it without trying. It was boring.

Random samples within each hierarchical tag fixed it. Click When, and you get a taste from every year you’ve ever taken a photo. A 15,000-photo India trip resolves to a handful of samples, so it doesn’t drown out the 15 photos from a quiet walk through the redwoods the next month. Every visit you rediscover the images of your life.

PhotoStructure’s home page. “Tag samples” show different thumbnails every time.

PhotoStructure’s home page. “Tag samples” show different thumbnails every time.

Read the design story behind random samples →

❤️ Mea culpa

I’ve spent more than a decade of my life working in the internet ads business (commonly called “adtech”).

There’s one constant in adtech: more data = more money. The ability to monetize a visitor is directly proportional to the amount of information an advertising platform has for that given visitor.

Photos and videos are richly personal, valuable data for advertisers. It astounds me that we freely share our most intimate images, and the data within, with companies that are not aligned with our best interests.

The images of your life should stay yours and not be used to classify you into some consumption demographic.

PhotoStructure isn’t just an effort of love.

It’s also a small act of penance.

Install PhotoStructure - It's Free to Try