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Chances are that you know about Google Photos[1]--you may even be a user of the apps and service. I, for one, am a Google Photos user--and quickly digressing, have been since before its odd birth from Google+[2] and Picasa[3]. Anyway, since Google Photos came along and eventually offered automatic backup to the cloud from Android devices I've been full in. That means, however, that I've collected quite a few different photos, memes, and screenshots along the way and had them disappear into the dark recesses of my photos archive, never to be seen--until now. See, while I may go back and view photos on occasion through either the app or on the web, I usually only go looking at things by using the albums that Photos creates for me--or if I've got a specific image in my mind that I want to view I might use the search to try and find it. Rarely, if ever do I take the time to go scrolling back through the decades of photos I have stored online. Yes, decades--I can't believe that I've actually been a user of the service in some fashion for that long; and, I've honestly got photos from decades prior to Photos inception--remember, I said I was a user of Picasa, and when I was I had been using the service to not only store digital photos of the then present day, but uploading and organizing older family photos I scanned into the software[4].
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa_Web_Albums
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa
Anyway, with all that said, you might guess I've got a slight bit of an archivist or digital information hoarder in me. As such I'm always wanting to try and play with the odd program or tool to save and organize the digitized portions of my life. One tool that I had discovered over a year ago was a python app called Google Photos Sync (gphotos-sync)[5]. Once I discovered it, I started making regular local backups of my photos from the cloud, onto an old netbook I have. Yeah, I know, you'd think I would already have local copies of these memories, wouldn't you? Well, once upon a time, I did; then a nasty divorce happened, followed by depression, and then finding an awesome new love, followed by a very demanding job--I kinda just let that part of me fall to the wayside. Now, I've had more time to tinker and rediscover my computing and archiving interests. Still, I've only been syncing what I've had go into the cloud with a local hard-drive. Today, however, I went a bit further.
5: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync
Over the past few months I've been working on a lot of geeky things--including attempts to get myself into writing here more often, as has been mentioned in numerous previous posts. Well, along with all of that has been the on-again, off-again with getting my desktop PC set the way I want it. Today, I reached a point where I thought it was time to try and bring the photos from the aforementioned netbook over to the desktop, and start syncing things over there, as well as start getting back into the more hands on approach to photo album management. So far, everything from Google Photos is synced to the desktop--down-sync only--and imported into what had been my previous goto on Linux for photo management--Shotwell[6]. My next steps will be to see how to have Shotwell and gphotos-sync cooperate in uploading any changes I make back to the cloud. This is where I'm unsure how much of a headache I'm going to give myself. I would like to use Shotwell to make potential simple edits, like crops and tags, as well as helping me identify "junk" photos that have been saved in the cloud. I've just got to see if when I upload via Shotwell from one of the pre-existing gphotos-sync directories and then perform a gphotos-sync if there's going to be a conflict. Unfortunately gphotos-sync doesn't currently support[7] upload.
6: https://shotwell-project.org/doc/html/
7: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/issues/119
And there is what sparked me on writing this entry in the first place--"junk" photos. All those screenshots, memes and other non-sense that Google automatically backed up for me, that I completely forgot about.
After Shotwell imported everything into its little database I took a few minutes to scroll through my collection and noticed there's quite a few images that I really don't care enough for to keep--at least not as a part of what would have once graced a family's shelves of photo albums. There are several images, however, that I wouldn't mind keeping in a scrapbook--or something akin. So, for the next few posts, I think I'm going to share those oddities here so that I do still have a copy somewhere once I delete them from my collection. I will try to include a story--if I can remember one--to go along with whatever images I end up sharing.
This could be a fun little journey.
Tags: #Google, #GooglePhotos, #gphotos-sync, #photo_album, #Picasa, #Shotwell