Guides, and notes from the workshop

A system for organizing 20+ years of photos that are already scattered across old laptops, phones, drives, and a shoebox of prints — in the order that actually works: consolidate first, structure by year and event, cull conservatively, and don't try to tag every face by hand.

One folder naming pattern — year, then a dated event folder — sorts correctly forever, reads clearly to a human, and outlives every app and OS you'll use between now and then. Exactly how to apply it, including the edge cases.

Apple Photos, Google Photos, and All Our Years, compared on what actually matters for a family archive spanning decades and multiple contributors: does it touch your originals, is it a subscription, and what happens if you walk away from it.

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

Google Photos' real advantage is platform independence — it doesn't care if your family is mixed Android, iPhone, and Windows. Where that strength holds up for a family archive, and where the cloud-only model starts to cost you.

What actually matters when choosing Mac-native software for a multi-decade family photo archive — Apple Photos vs. a folder-reading local tool vs. All Our Years — and when Mac-specific isn't the right call at all.

Why keeping a family photo archive local instead of uploading it is a deliberate, defensible choice — on privacy, cost, and independence — plus the honest tradeoffs: no phone-away-from-home access, and local isn't the same thing as backed up.

What actually breaks in consumer photo apps once a family archive crosses tens of thousands of photos — import time, disk space, sluggish browsing, and manual tagging that never finishes — and what a huge archive specifically needs instead.

A practical, honest guide to digitizing old prints, slides, and negatives: scanners vs. phone apps vs. mail-in services, resolution and file format advice, and what to do with the originals afterward.

An honest comparison of the three real options for storing a family photo archive — external drive, NAS, and cloud — covering cost, complexity, access, and what happens when each one fails.

What the 3-2-1 backup rule — 3 copies, 2 kinds of media, 1 offsite — actually looks like for a family photo archive, and why irreplaceable photos are worth the modest effort it takes.

A backup you can't open in 20 years isn't a backup. Why file formats, storage media, and cloud services all quietly go obsolete, and the periodic verification and migration habit that actually keeps decades of photos readable.

Twelve years of hand-named event folders turned out to be a labeled dataset. How the family's own naming habit became the ground truth an event-clustering pass was tuned against — and the three quiet wrinkles (camera clocks, digitized tapes, and where "home" is) that would have corrupted it otherwise.

Face embeddings drift as children grow, so one global clustering pass can't hold a newborn and a ten-year-old at once. Half-year windows, a union-find chain across the gaps, a purity gate that cut clusters in half, and the honest limit where siblings get flagged for a human instead of auto-merged.

Read-only by construction, an index on the internal disk, and a WAL journal that survived two literal power cuts with zero data loss. Why "runs locally" is a much bigger architectural commitment than it sounds, and what it costs to keep a full study invisible on a base Mac.