Howdy, and welcome to PhotoStructure! Here’s a “guided path” through some of PhotoStructure’s documentation. Please don’t feel like you have to read through all of this! We’ve tried hard to make PhotoStructure “just work” right out of the box, and for most of our users, they don’t have to read much (or any!

PhotoStructure is designed to be a safe, permanent home for all your photos and videos. There are many, many software packages to help manage photos and video libraries. PhotoStructure is uniquely focused on

Your PhotoStructure library contains 📚 your image database, ⚙️ library settings, 🖼️ preview images, and 🎞️ transcoded videos (if enabled). These files are created when PhotoStructure imports your photos and videos, and enable PhotoStructure’s fast and fun user interface.

PhotoStructure can run on both Desktops and on “headless” servers (like x64-based NAS). How are the desktop & server editions of PhotoStructure different? All editions of PhotoStructure, running on any operating system, are designed to be interoperable with each other, and the main user interface is the same.

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.

💻 PhotoStructure for Desktops This is not a stable build. Read more about alpha and beta builds here. Click here to install the latest stable build. If you have 🎥 videos, follow these steps

🌱 PhotoStructure is entirely subscriber-supported. 🛡️ PhotoStructure will never make money by sharing data from or about our users. Read more. 🎉 Most new features will only be available to plus subscribers.

PhotoStructure v2023.9 is still experimental. The stable release should be available soon. 🤔 v2023? What happened to v2? As of August 2023, PhotoStructure versions will use “calendar versioning,” or CalVer, using scheme YYYY.

This is a detailed list of changes in each version. Major releases have posts summarizing bigger changes. See the posts tagged with “release notes”. New releases, starting in 2023, use “calendar versioning,” or CalVer, using scheme YYYY.

OR: How to Help Save the Earth, and save a couple bucks on your electric bill PhotoStructure is (mostly) developed on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X workstation. It’s nice and speedy, but consumes 500+ watts when busy, and 200 watts at idle!

Note that these are notes for versions released in 2022. Please see the current release notes. v2.1.0-alpha.7 Released 2022 July 27 🐛 There were some crash-bugs in alpha.4, alpha.5, and alpha.

What’s a PiBox? A PiBox makes it easy to run self-hosted software, like PhotoStructure, at home. It’s power-efficient (about 5W idle!), has slots for 2 SSDs (up to 16TB), and has an easy to use “app store” to install and manage the apps running on your server.

Please scan any software for malware before installing. PhotoStructure, Inc. only recommends software that we’ve either audited (like third-party libraries in the PhotoStructure product), or that we’ve scanned for malware and regularly run on our own systems.

Raspberry Pi support is new and experimental. If you see anything odd or buggy, hit the forum or discord and we’ll get things sorted. The Raspberry Pi is a power-efficient “single-board” computer.

Note that these are notes for versions released in 2021. Please see the current release notes. v2.1.0-alpha.1 This release will happen in 2022. Click here for details. v2.0.0-beta.1 Released 2021-10-24

These instructions are for PhotoStructure version 2.1, which is not generally available yet. These new features are only available to plus subscribers. Learn more Version 2.0 includes our most popular feature request: support for deleting and hiding your photos and videos!

All of PhotoStructure’s tags are “hierarchical.” This article will try to explain how they work, and why they’re useful. Flat tags Most popular tagging systems, or folksonomies, are “flat.” Twitter’s hashtags are an example of flat tags; there’s no explicit relationship between any two hashtags.

If you’d like to take the photos and videos that you have in your Google Photos account and import them into your own PhotoStructure library, the best way to do that is with a Google Takeout.

👩‍🎓 PhotoStructure is graduating from beta! Since our first closed-beta build in 2018: ✨ We’ve added more than 300 major and minor features 🐞 We’ve fixed more than 200 bugs (cross-platform code is hard!

Entity Contributor Exclusive License Agreement (including the Traditional Patent License OPTION) Thank you for your interest in contributing to PhotoStructure (“We” or “Us”). How to use this Contributor Agreement If You are an employee and have created the Contribution as part of your employment, You need to have Your employer approve this Agreement or sign the Entity version of this document.

Why subscribe? PhotoStructure is entirely subscriber-supported. We don’t make money through advertising or any form of data sharing (learn more). Most new features will only be available to paid subscribers.

Introduction Welcome to PhotoStructure, Inc. PhotoStructure, Inc. (“us”, “we”, or “our”) operates photostructure.com websites (hereinafter referred to as “Service”). Our Privacy Policy governs your visit these websites, and explains how we collect, safeguard and disclose information that results from your use of our Service.

Introduction Welcome to PhotoStructure, Inc. (“Company”, “we”, “our”, “us”). These Terms of Service (“Terms”, “Terms of Service”) govern your use of our web pages located at https://photostructure.com and operated by PhotoStructure, Inc.

Asset search was a user-requested feature: be sure to join us in the PhotoStructure forum to discuss and vote on what gets built next! What do search queries look like? A search query includes one or more search terms.

We consider the security of our users a top priority. Unfortunately, there may be vulnerabilities found in any software, and PhotoStructure is not an exception. Supported Versions Only the latest, released version of PhotoStructure is supported.

PhotoStructure is new software: there’s already a lot of nifty features that are unique to PhotoStructure, but there are tons of additional features that we want to build out. When you pay for a subscription, you’re directly helping to make these new features a reality.

Note that these are notes for versions released in 2020. Please see the current release notes. vnext See v1.0.0 v0.9.1 Released 2020-11-08 Main visible changes: ✨ Keywords are now shown in the Asset Info panel

If you maintain an open source project that’s hosted on GitHub, and you’re frustrated by one or more of your current continuous integration (CI) providers, good news: GitHub Actions is a free CI service that supports running tests and other tasks on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Why? Several smartphones default to storing photos as .heic, rather than .jpeg. These .heic files are compressed with the High Efficiency Image File Format. Unfortunately, due to patent and licensing issues, it’s up to you to manually install one of these software packages on your own computer if you’re not on macOS.

One of the most important pieces of metadata about a photo or video is when a given image or video was captured. PhotoStructure has advanced heuristics to determine this “Captured-At” time.

PhotoStructure is designed to work smoothly as your only photo and video manager, or as a “friendly sidekick” to other applications that you’re already using. This article will discuss why this is an important feature, and how it’s implemented.

A printed photo in an album can easily last 20+ years without deterioration. Digital files are another story altogether: computers fail, hard drives crash, and CDROMs deteriorate. Reliably and robustly storing digital files used to require an IT staff and rack of expensive hardware.

When PhotoStructure is importing files, it automatically excludes all hidden files, as well as operating system and application support directories. Additionally, across all platforms, the following rules are also applied:

When PhotoStructure encounters errors, it may automatically send a report to our error system, Sentry. These error help us determine both what resulted in the error, and how to resolve it in the future.

PhotoStructure’s UI is web-based, and designed to work well with both mobile and desktop browsers. PhotoStructure’s web service defaults to only being accessible to the computer running PhotoStructure. This prevents other computers on your local area network, or “LAN,” from viewing your library.

🎊 Version 0.9: 💯💯💯-file edition This version includes improvements for very large libraries, new features, new security enhancements, updates to several major dependencies, and many other bugfixes and improvements, both visible and behind the scenes.

PhotoStructure has several strategies to ensure your library matches your filesystem. 🩳 Briefly A “sync” focuses on your filesystem. Sync updates your library with changes made to your filesystem. A “rebuild” focuses on what’s already in your library.

Version 0.9.0 added a bunch of metrics about your PhotoStructure library to the about page. This page tries to explain what exactly these numbers represent. Screenshot of PhotoStructure’s about page

You can use environment variables to configure PhotoStructure’s settings. The defaults.env file describes all of PhotoStructure’s settings, and how to change each with an environment variable. This file will also be found in your root app directory (from version 0.

Computers can be, and frequently are, persnickety. If you’re having problems with PhotoStructure on Windows, you’re in the right place. 🩺 Health checks PhotoStructure runs health checks regularly. For issues like low free disk space, PhotoStructure will clean out it’s cache directory, but if that doesn’t suffice, it pauses synchronizations.

These are instructions for advanced users, wanting to run PhotoStructure for Servers via Docker Compose. Before you begin… Please read the first sections of the PhotoStructure for Docker installation instructions.

Safely storing your most important files requires both using filesystems that can detect bit rot, as well as keeping copies of those files on different devices. What’s a “RAID”? A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, or “RAID,” lets you gather together several hard drives to form a single “volume” to host your files.

By installing PhotoStructure for Node or PhotoStructure for Docker you’ll get access to a number of tools that can help answer a number of questions about your PhotoStructure library. Some level of proficiency with the terminal is required to use these tools.

Browsing with PhotoStructure is designed to be fast and fun. As you navigate through your photos and videos, and you have duplicate photos or videos, clicking “next” or “previous” can result in seeing the same thing.

When you set up your library, you’ll see this option: PhotoStructure uses the words “disk,” “drive,” and “volume” to mean any storage device available to your computer. This includes: The internal hard drive of your laptop or desktop An external USB hard drive or thumb drive An SD card in a built-in or external card reader A shared network directory from your NAS, possibly spanning several drives in a RAID.

If your photos and videos are disorganized, PhotoStructure can bring some order to your chaos. If you’d like all your photos and videos to be organized into one, tidy place, choose “Yes” on PhotoStructure’s settings page:

If your PhotoStructure library isn’t opening because you recently downgraded from an alpha or beta build, or due to database corruption, know that you can manually restore your library’s database to a previous version.

PhotoStructure’s settings page is simple and only offers a handful of configuration options. There are many configurable settings within PhotoStructure, though, including: how “nice” PhotoStructure is with your system’s CPU: should it auto-pause imports if CPU exceeds 75% (which is the default), or is it running on a server, and can use 100% of the CPU?

Say hello to a brand new PhotoStructure! We’re really excited by what’s in this new release: thanks to our beta users for their help and their feedback! If you’ve already signed up for beta access, expect an invitation email with installation instructions soon.

When you upgrade to a new version of PhotoStructure, you may see this progress bar: What’s going on here? New versions of PhotoStructure frequently introduce new features. Some of these features may require revisiting the photos and videos in your library.

If you’re on a desktop or laptop, knowing a couple keyboard shortcuts will help you get around your library faster. Hover over any button to see a description, and if there is a keyboard shortcut, it will be in the tooltip as well.

PhotoStructure uses a bunch of methods to pull out keywords from your photos and videos. Keywords from metadata PhotoStructure extracts keywords from the following metadata tags: CatalogSets Categories (this is typically XML-encoded) HierarchicalSubject Keywords LastKeywordXMP Subject TagsList XPKeywords (these are keywords added by the Windows Explorer) This set is configurable in v1.

PhotoStructure has a number of filters that all must pass for a photo or video to be added to your library. Directory filters PhotoStructure doesn’t import any files from system directories, hidden directories, or NoMedia directories.

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? Tip #1: Initial PhotoStructure imports Importing thousands of photos and videos is a workout for your computer.

PhotoStructure requires additional software to be installed to support videos in your library. Why? PhotoStructure uses open source video processing software to extract preview images and transcode the videos in your library so they can be streamed to browsers on your mobile and computer.

PhotoStructure has a several ways to view your photos at different magnification levels. PhotoStructure’s new loupe slider (added in v0.8.0). Zoom Select a zoom level directly by clicking the loupe slider in the header.

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.

Your copy of Windows 10 may be configured to only support Latin-character filenames. This may prevent programs (like PhotoStructure) from accessing your files. To enable UTF-8 on Windows 10, follow these steps:

Uninstalling PhotoStructure is easy: just follow the steps specific for your edition. If you have a moment… We’re sorry to see you go! If you have time to send us a chat message or short email saying why PhotoStructure didn’t work out for you, that’d be wonderful.

Note that these are notes for versions released in 2019 and before. Please see the current release notes. v0.7.2 Released 2019-12-12 ✨ Added a link to the post-install tips in the “starting up” message ✨ Platform-default “back” and “forward” keystrokes now work for PhotoStructure for Desktops.

These are instructions for advanced users, wanting to run PhotoStructure for Servers. Please make sure you’ve read the pros and cons of both approaches before continuing. Prerequisites PhotoStructure for Servers requires:

These are instructions for advanced users, wanting to run PhotoStructure for Servers via Docker. Background reading You should read the pros and cons of both Docker and Node editions before continuing.

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.

You’ll want to install PhotoStructure for Desktops on a computer that you can leave powered on for a while, at least during the initial import. Ideally, you’ll install PhotoStructure on a computer that you can leave on all the time, so you can have access to your library whenever you want from wherever you are.

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. Information about something is called “metadata.

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.

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.

When you close the main PhotoStructure window, PhotoStructure continues to run in the background, which may include synchronizing your library’s photos and videos. Shut down PhotoStructure by clicking the ☰ navigation menu in the upper-left corner of your PhotoStructure window, and selecting “Shutdown.