Photo Albums

As someone born in the 80s, I grew up during the era of film photography. Although my family didn’t own a camera, I was fortunate that my grandfather was the first professional photographer in our hometown, so I had more childhood photos than most of my peers. To ensure their longevity, my family had all of the photos laminated.

A Fortunate Accident

Over a decade ago, I used an external hard drive to store my digital albums. One day, I accidentally formatted that hard drive while trying to create a bootable USB drive for Windows. I spent a restless night, hoping for the best. The next day, I went to a tech repair shop to see if my data could be recovered. I was initially hoping for just a 50% recovery, but to my surprise, everything was restored.

That experience left me with a heightened sense of responsibility when it comes to protecting my albums.

My Storage Methodology

I am somewhat obsessive when it comes to organizing my digital files. When I see someone’s computer desktop cluttered with unorganized icons and folders, I feel physically uncomfortable.

I don’t trust cloud storage services from mainland China and avoid storing important or private files on them. Foreign cloud storage services aren’t cost-effective. So I rely solely on local storage.

Unlike some who primarily use their phones, I’m very much computer-centric in my use of electronics. I don’t store photos long-term on my phone, nor do I use iCloud for storage. I regularly archive my phone’s photos to my computer and back them up on an external hard drive. After each backup, I immediately clear my phone’s albums to avoid confusion about which photos have already been archived. This approach also applies to my camera’s SD card—after each shoot, I back up the photos and clear the card, ensuring that I’m always prepared for unforeseen accidents, such as losing a phone or having an SD card failure.

My archives include software projects, albums, movies, TV shows, etc. Here, I will only focus on my albums. Over time, my directory structure has undergone several revisions due to changes in my thinking and circumstances.

1. Over 10 Years Ago: During the transition between film cameras and smartphones (the era of point-and-shoot cameras), my directory structure was simple. I had an album folder called “album,” with subfolders for each event, named in the format yyyyMMdd-title.

2. In 2018: After I got my first DSLR, I started taking more photos. With the idea of “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” I began organizing my albums by year, such as album-2022.

3. In Late 2022: I started taking at least one photo or video daily to document my life. I then began creating a folder for each day within the yearly folder, using the format yyyyMMdd for casual shots or yyyyMMdd-title for events. According to this method, the 2023 folder alone would contain 365 subfolders.

4. Recently: I found that categorizing by exact days became too tedious and made it difficult to retrieve files, so I revised my structure once again.

My Latest Directory Structure

This method allows me to maintain a consistent, organized structure that adapts to different types of content and devices.

1. Organize album folders by year.

2. Each album folder contains two subfolders: casual and topic.

   • Casual: This is for everyday snapshots taken with my phone. I currently use an iPhone, which automatically organizes its media into folders by yyyyMM, making it easy to transfer to an external hard drive. I don’t separate photos and videos into different folders.

   • Topic: This is for specific events. The folder names follow the format yyyyMMdd-title. If I use multiple devices, I create separate folders for each one. If both photos and videos were taken on the same device, I further separate them into Photos and Videos folders. If I shot a time-lapse with my camera, I create a subfolder named sequence-xxxx (where xxxx is the number of frames) inside the photo folder.

Sample case:

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├── album-2022
├── album-2023
└── album-2024
    ├── casual
    │    ├── 202401
    │    ├── 202402
    │    └── 202403
    └── topic
         ├── 20240215-乌哩丹岛出海钓鱼
         │    ├── eos-5d4
         │    ├── eos-r5
         │    └── iphone-14-pro-max
         └── 20240326-梦幻街
         │    └── eos-5d4
         │    │    └── sequence-1100
         │    ├── eos-r5
         │    │    ├── photos
         │    │    └── videos
         │    └── dji-mini-4-pro
         │    │    ├── photos
         │    │    └── videos
         │    └── gopro-hero-10
         │    │    ├── photos
         │    │    └── videos
         └──  └── iphone-14-pro-max
                   ├── photos
                   └── videos