Looking for Methuselah while motorbiking from Vegas to Yosemite through Death Valley.

I wanted a better way to archive, unify and experience my photos and videos. Of all the great software that’s available today none of them addressed my needs.

I came up with a solution and I wanted to write about it because I don’t think I’m alone in wanting a workflow that brings sanity to the tens of thousands of photos and videos I have.

My goals in order of importance

Preserve. My photo library needs to be future-proof for decades into the future. Unify. Photos from my wife and my phones need to be combined into a single library. Experience. The photos and videos need to come to life and help us re-experience the moments when they were taken.

Given the plethora of software I should briefly explain why I continue to have this problem.

iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom and other desktop apps

Most desktop apps rely on an internal database which they use to keep track of photos in your library. They also store files on your hard drive in ways that make most sense to them; not you.

Proprietary databases and file structures fail to future-proof my photo library. It’s difficult to stop using these programs once you’ve invested a lot of time in them.

Preserve? D-

Unify? C

Experience? B+

Flickr, 500px, etc.? Sorry.

Online photo services also store information in their own database. It’s not so bad if they give you a programmatic API to manage your library but it still falls short. If you’ve ever tried to move all of your photos from one service to another then you’ve felt this pain. I do not envy the person tasked with that job.

The experience they provide is pretty great since you can share and converse around photos but the lack of preservation is a deal breaker.

Preserve? F+

Unify? B-

Experience? A-

If you really like Google Photos you’ll want to read through this series because I come back to using it later.

Building a Better Mouse Trap

I’ve been doing this long enough to know whatever I end up choosing needs to be simple, feel natural and be rewarding.

So daunting.