We're excited to announce a new release of PhotoStructure! This is the biggest update to PhotoStructure ever, containing over 30 new features and bug fixes, many of them driven by beta user feedback.

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.

Every time you take a digital photo or video, your camera or smartphone records a bunch of information about the image that you just captured.

Your PhotoStructure library contains your image database, library settings, as well as preview images that make viewing your photos and videos instantaneous.

When PhotoStructure encounters errors, it automatically sends a report to our error system, Sentry. These error reports include system information as well as recent log messages to help us determine both what resulted in the error and how to resolve it in the future.

PhotoStructure is designed for million-asset libraries, so you shouldn't need to switch between libraries in most cases. If you want to have a couple separate libraries, though, you certainly can.

When PhotoStructure is importing files, it automatically excludes all hidden files, as well as operating system and application support directories.

PhotoStructure’s photo and video deduping, or de-duplication, are a set of heuristics to determine if different files on your computer are actually the same image.

PhotoStructure is designed to be a very safe home for the images of your life. You should consider older hard drives, especially more than 5 years old, as fragile parchment that must be handled with care.

Windows can be persnickety when it comes to network shares, causing processes to “hang” or get stuck. You can run a quick “health check” just by opening the About page (from the System Tray).

On all platforms, when you click the close button on PhotoStructure's main window, PhotoStructure continues to run in the background, which may include processing images and videos.

Your PhotoStructure library contains your image database, library settings, as well as preview images that make viewing your photos and videos instantaneous.

PhotoStructure's settings page is pretty simple (by design), and only offers a handful of configuration options. There are more than 60 configurable settings within PhotoStructure, though, including

PhotoStructure for Desktops follows standard installation procedures for each operating system. Please note: you must first install VLC or FFmpeg if you have videos.

So, you've got PhotoStructure installed, and it looks like it's importing every photo and video you've got. What should you know now?

If your photos and videos are disorganized, PhotoStructure can help bring some order to your chaos. If your photos and videos are scattered across many different disks and memory cards, you might have duplicate files, you'd really like everything to be organized into one, tidy place, and you have enough free disk space in your library directory, choose “Yes, please copy my photos and videos into my PhotoStructure Library” when you're setting up PhotoStructure:

TL;DR: Use a large external hard drive for your library or, ideally, a NAS with RAID protection. Your library’s disk space is proportional to the number of photos and videos you have in your library, and whether or not you choose to have PhotoStructure organize your photos and videos by copying them into your library.