datahoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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How do you store your metadata? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by howrar@lemmy.ca to c/datahoarder@lemmy.ml

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By metadata, I'm talking about things like text descriptions of a photo/video and where they come from, or an explanation of what a certain binary blob contains, its format, how to use it, etc.

The best solution I have right now is xattrs, but those are dependent on the file system, and there's no guarantee that they will stay when the files get moved, especially if the person moving them is unaware of its existence. The alternative is to keep a plaintext file with this metadata alongside every photo/video/binary/etc, but that would be a huge pain to keep in sync since both files have to be moved together.

So my question to you: do you keep this kind of metadata? If so, how do you manage them?

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[–] Screak42@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago

I do take a lot of photos with my DSLR. I used to use Lightroom when it was a one time purchase software and kept everything in there. But the days of good photo-management software are over as it seems.

Now I'm using a folder structure that works for me

Year > Month > Date (or range of date) In each Date(or range) I have a "RAW" folder for the raw un-edited originals and an "iPhone" folder for my phone pictures in case I took some. I actually keep the original file name of my camera for all photos.

If it's a particular event I sometimes add a some kind of diary textfile in markdown in that particular folder. This can be in the "month" folder if I'm on a trip for 3-4 weeks, or just for a day, if I'm ... let's say on an exhibition.

It sounds clunky and probably is, but it works for me. It's OS agnostic, (I work on mac os and linux machines at home) it's easy to create backups or copies and move stuff around. All is stored on a big 8TB harddrive and I have several copies of it. (No cloud)