My photo library backup strategy, circa 2025

We got our first digital camera in late 2003, when we knew we had our first kid on the way. Over the years an assortment of cameras has filled our digital photo collection. I’ve done only minimal collection management over the years, with my focus being mainly on ensuring I had good backups and didn’t lose anything.

For a long while I was using Google Photos as an online backup/library sharing service. This worked fine while I was only sharing photos with my wife, and while Google accommodated an unlimited number of photos. But eventually Google wanted to start charging money, and I wanted to be able to add my older children to the shared library as well. Since we’re an iPhone family, an Apple-based solution felt like the right way to go. So I’ve slowly been making the transition to a new setup, which just for grins I’m going to detail out in this post.

A few notes to set the scene:

  1. At this point we are taking all our photos with our iPhones. We don’t have any other cameras.
  2. I have already conceded that I’m going to pay Apple on a monthly basis for iCloud space, at a minimum so the family all has iPhone backups. That gives me enough space for a photo library, too.

The Old Way

My old strategy included:

  1. Google Photos app logged in to my Google account on both my phone and my wife’s phone
  2. PhotoSync app on both phones doing automated backups to our local Synology NAS
  3. Synology backup to Backblaze online

This worked fine for quite a while.

Moving to Apple Photos

When I decided to start using iCloud Photo Library and using Apple Photos as my primary storage/organization means I set up my main library on a big external drive hanging off a Mac Mini. I told it to import my photo backup from my Synology and walked away. A couple days later I came back and it looked like it was done. OK, fine. Eventually my wife did some more thorough inspection and noted that it failed hard on the import for everything before about 2019. So, I did a more structured walk through the import, importing one year at a time and more actively monitoring the imports to ensure they completed successfully. (I get an occasional network drop-out from the NAS for some reason that will kill the import mid-stream.)

Eventually that import was successfully completed, with just about 100,000 photos in the shared library. Apple Photos identified about 10k duplicate photos, which didn’t surprise me too much. I manually reviewed a bunch of them, concluded Photos was handling them correctly, and went ahead and told it to just go de-dupe the library. That got me down to just about 90,000 photos.

At this point we all realized that the Google Photos backup and PhotoSync apps weren’t going to be useful any more. Google Photos sees the full 90k photo Shared Library on your phone and tries to back it all up, immediately using up all your Google shared space. (Google then immediately tries to sell you more space. Pass.) PhotoSync does the same, saying “hey you have 90k new photos… let’s back them up to the Synology!”. Yay, more duplicates.

The New Way

The new solution looks something like this:

  1. iPhone photos go into the Shared Photo library when we take them. This stores a copy in the Apple iCloud Photo Library.
  2. The Photos app on the Mac mini sucks those into its library, creating a local copy.
  3. I’m running iCloud Photo Downloader on the Synology, which logs in to my iCloud account and pulls down a copy of all the photos in the Photo Library onto the Synology NAS.
  4. The Synology NAS photo folder gets backed up to an attached USB drive.
  5. Backblaze backup then puts that Synology backup up in the Backblaze cloud.

At that point I have two separate cloud copies saved in addition to three local copies, not counting whatever is stored on our phones. That feels secure enough to me. But the biggest win here for me is that the backup path is easier - no Google Photos app required, no PhotoSync app required. Just take photos, add them to the Shared Library, and everything else downstream just happens.

Recommended reading: Excavating AI

I hadn’t run across this until today when Michal Wozniak shared it on Mastodon, but it’s an excellent read: Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets.

One of the “standard” image sets used for training models to do image recognition is ImageNet, originally published in 2009. It contains more than 14 million images which were categorized by humans via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project. The challenge, of course, is that when you use humans to create the training data, all the implicit (and explicit) bias of the human trainers is trained right into the data.

[ImageNet] provides a powerful and important example of the complexities and dangers of human classification, and the sliding spectrum between supposedly unproblematic labels like “trumpeter” or “tennis player” to concepts like “spastic,” “mulatto,” or “redneck.” Regardless of the supposed neutrality of any particular category, the selection of images skews the meaning in ways that are gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist. ImageNet is an object lesson, if you will, in what happens when people are categorized like objects. And this practice has only become more common in recent years, often inside the big AI companies, where there is no way for outsiders to see how images are being ordered and classified.

While I don’t think the current AI tech boom will sustain in the long term, certain applications are very useful and probably will stick around. As we employ systems that are trained, we must always interrogate the assumptions and biases that have gone into that training.

There is much at stake in the architecture and contents of the training sets used in AI. They can promote or discriminate, approve or reject, render visible or invisible, judge or enforce. And so we need to examine them—because they are already used to examine us—and to have a wider public discussion about their consequences, rather than keeping it within academic corridors. As training sets are increasingly part of our urban, legal, logistical, and commercial infrastructures, they have an important but underexamined role: the power to shape the world in their own images.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Migrating to Eleventy

If you’re reading this post, you’re seeing the updated ChrisHubbs.com as generated by Eleventy, a static site generator. After being on Wordpress for nearly twenty years, this was a significant change!

Why leave Wordpress?

I mean, twenty years of history can’t be all bad, right? Wordpress was originally released in May 2003, and by October 2004 I had a blog up and running it. (Well, Geof was administering it for the first couple years. RIP.) And Wordpress has had amazing growth over two decades and runs a lot of the internet’s websites.

But Wordpress was starting to get frustrating. They seem to be working harder and harder to monetize it, even for users of the free product. Want any social features, sharing, analytics, etc? Use the Jetpack extension. Which is free for some functionality, paid for other. OK, I guess. But then they start giving you dashboard “site health indicators” which will tell you that you have problems and the only solution is to subscribe to the paid service. No thanks.

Why Eleventy?

There are a bunch of static site generators out there. I considered both Eleventy and Astro and did some demo work with each. In the end, I found a nice site theme/template I liked build in Eleventy, and it managed to build my full site without any hiccups. It’s a big site, so that’s a win. My path to publishing is a little more intensive than it was under Wordpress, but when I only publish weekly at best, I can survive that. It’s not that hard.

So, almost twenty years?

Yeah, it was a lot of posts. I cleaned up some of them that were just dead links, but I kept most of them around. Once all the cleanup was done I have 1263 posts migrated over. This one now makes 1264. It feels both monumental and trivial at the same time.

I’ll do a separate post with some more personal thoughts that were prompted by going through almost 20 years of my written thoughts. But for now, hey, at least it’s functional!

Protect elders! Ban television!

danah boyd has a fantastic piece out today about the current furor to ban teens from social media, saying basically that (a) it’s complicated, and (b) it’s more about control than it is helping teens. A brief taste:

Does social media cause mental health problems? Or is it where mental health problems become visible? I can guarantee you that there are examples of both. But here’s the thing…. Going to school and church are often a “cause” of mental health duress. Parents and siblings are often a source of mental health duress. No one in their right mind would argue that we need to prevent all youth from attending school or church or living with their parents or siblings. We take a more tempered approach because there are also very real situations in which we need to remove some children from some environments (namely abusive ones).

So why do we want to remove ALL children from social media?

This is a story of control, not a story of protecting the well-being of children.

danah is one of the foremost voices to listen to these days regarding the social impact of technology, particularly its impact on teenagers. This reminds me I should go read her most recent book, too.

My current side project

One of my favorite 2020 discoveries (which, ok, only came out in 2020, so I was on it from the beginning) is the Young Adult Movie Ministry Podcast. A production of Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson, two journalists and movie critics, YAMMPOD approaches movies from a sort of post-evangelical perspective. In Episode 1 of the podcast, Alissa notes that she was homeschooled through her youth, and then says that when asked about being homeschooled, her usual response is that she was very homeschooled. I resemble that remark.

The podcast moves quickly and is rife with references to other movies, books, and other cultural artifacts. The podcast show notes are perfunctory but not particularly detailed. Hmmmm, I thought, I know how to fill that gap.

Enter YAMMPOD.info, where I’m creating a post per episode to itemize all the movies and references that the hosts and guests drop. 28 episodes in, this is kinda fun.

If I were to recommend one particularly meaningful episode, I’d go to Episode 21, “Bread Alone”, with guest Jeffrey Overstreet discussing Babette’s Feast. Other standouts are Episode 6, “Sullied by Monotheism”, with the hilarious Lyz Lenz discussing The Story of Ruth and Episode 12, “Noir 101”, with guest Jamelle Bouie addressing not just The Maltese Falcon but the whole noir genre.

Head over to YAMMPOD.info to check out my project, then go visit YAMMPOD itself to listen and subscribe!

Positive Politics: Internet and Technology Policy

Well I’m not ready to jump into one of the big ugly topics yet, so maybe this one will be a little easier. (Maybe.) Let’s talk about the internet and overall technology policies.

Access / Control of Internet

There’s a current debate about a concept called “net neutrality” that, as typical, is highly spun by both sides on the issue. So I’m going to avoid that term in my discussion. I’ll try to make this one fairly simple.

Access to the Internet should be thought of and regulated like a public utility, analogous to water, gas, and electric. Market competition is difficult here because the cost for infrastructure development is relatively high and a physical connection is required to each home and business. (We don’t expect that we’ll have three electric companies run lines to our house so we can choose the one with the best rates!) Pricing should be overseen and controlled just like it is for other utilities. Access to the internet should be unrestricted - no paid “fast lanes”, no filtering, no blocking.

Once that level of utility access is in place for the internet, I’m more open to allowing mobile providers to offer variation and experiment within the market space, because there is more room for genuine competition within the mobile internet (aka cell phone) market.

Encryption

The government should not restrict the use of encryption or push for the inclusion of “back doors” into encryption systems. From a technical standpoint, if a back door exists, the probability is 100% that at some point the bad guys will figure out how to get through it. The FBI may complain that good encryption slows their investigations down, and may dream up scenarios where they suggest having a backdoor would help avert some impending attack; I don’t believe that because we can imagine such a scenario that it justifies crippling our encryption systems. Encryption helps enable the right to digital privacy. We need it.

Consumer Data and Privacy

Big data analytics, whether by the government or by corporate interests, are affecting our lives in ways we struggle to understand (or are hidden from us). While it’s folly to think we can get the genie back in that bottle, I’d be interested to explore the idea of a Consumer Data Protection agency similar to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created after the 2008 financial crisis. We need awareness of what’s being done with our personal data, and we need real penalties for companies that mismanage or abuse it.

Social Media Transparency

And then there’s Facebook. And #FakeNews. And election meddling by way of Facebook propaganda. I don’t know what it’ll take for the giants like Facebook to get serious about trying to patrol that type of obviously fake material - maybe they shouldn’t. But what we do need is a populous that is more educated about how to identify fake news stories so they can evaluate things on their own.

Evaluation

So let’s evaluate these against our five-principle framework.

1. Is it good for the poor?

When compared with the possibility of pay-for-access, a Net Neutrality position is good for everyone, and benefits the poor who otherwise might be shut out of the benefits that internet access provides.

2. Is it good for the planet?

I’ll rate this one as neutral.

3. Does it promote peace?

The internet can be used for peaceful ends… or for not so peaceful ends. Better consumer education about how and what to consume would help us learn to ignore propaganda, which would be a positive and usually peaceful improvement.

4. Does it challenge the powerful?

Net Neutrality and awareness / limitation of big data collection would serve to at least give us awareness of what the powerful are doing with all that information… and knowledge is the first step toward taking action.

5. Does it let the marginalized have a seat at the table to speak for themselves?

Free and neutral access to the internet would provide each user, regardless of wealth or status, the same ability to distribute their message as anyone else. While access to already-popular channels isn’t automatic, the internet provides more ability than ever before in history for an unknown person with a notable message to spread virally.