Guides and notes on family photos

Nine tools for reading and organizing decades of family photos already sitting in folders on a drive (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Immich, digiKam, Excire Foto, Peakto, Mylio, Tonfotos, and All Our Years), compared on what each is built for.

Why file formats, storage media, and cloud services quietly go obsolete, how the 3-2-1 rule fits in, and the yearly verification and migration habit that keeps decades of photos readable.

A comparison of the three options for storing a family photo archive, covering cost, setup, access, and what happens when each one fails.

Scanners vs. phone apps vs. mail-in services, resolution and file format advice, and what to do with the originals afterward.

Twelve years of hand-named event folders became the ground truth an event-clustering pass was tuned against, plus three wrinkles: camera clocks, digitized tapes, and where "home" is.

Face embeddings drift as children grow, so one clustering pass can't hold a newborn and a ten-year-old. Half-year windows, a union-find chain, a purity gate, and why siblings get flagged for a person to confirm.

Read-only by construction, an index on the internal disk, and a WAL journal that survived two power cuts with zero data loss, plus the resource limits that keep a full study unnoticeable on a base Mac.

One real drive (314,391 photos and videos, 1998 to 2026, 1.7 TB, read in one night over USB) and what that scale does to import time, disk space, browsing, tagging, and duplicates.

Why keeping a family photo archive local is a reasonable choice on privacy, cost, and independence, and the tradeoffs: no phone access away from home, and local isn't the same as backed up.

Google Photos' advantage is platform independence. Where that holds up for a family archive, and where the cloud-only model starts to cost you.

Apple Photos is good at a rolling camera roll. Where it strains is a multi-decade archive with folders several people built by hand, and where each one wins.

One pattern, a year folder with dated event folders inside, sorts correctly forever and outlives every app and OS. How to apply it, including the edge cases.

A system for 20+ years of photos scattered across old laptops, phones, drives, and a shoebox of prints: consolidate first, structure by year and event, cull conservatively, and don't tag every face by hand.