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.

Your PhotoStructure library contains 📚 your image database, ⚙️ library settings, 🖼️ preview images, and 🎞️ transcoded videos (if enabled).

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.

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.

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

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 designed to work on both mobile and desktop browsers. PhotoStructure’s web service defaults to only being accessible to the computer running PhotoStructure.

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.

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.

Computers can be, and frequently are, persnickety. If you’re having problems with PhotoStructure or seeing error messages, you’re in the right place.

Safely storing your most important files requires both using filesystems that can detect bit rot, as well as

Browsing with PhotoStructure is designed to be fun and fast. If you’ve got a bunch of files that are of the same photo or video, and you have to click “next” several times to see something different, it’s irritating and decidedly not-fun.

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.

If your PhotoStructure library isn’t opening due to database corruption, you can restore your library’s database to a previous version. Although your library’s database is very robust, an incomplete backup or incomplete shutdown may lead to this situation.

When you upgrade to a new version of PhotoStructure, you may see this progress bar: What’s going on here?

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:

PhotoStructure has a number of filters that all must pass for a photo or video to be added to your library.

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.

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.

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.

When you close the main PhotoStructure window, PhotoStructure continues to run in the background, which may include synchronizing your library’s photos and videos.