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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.