Ever since Google Photos shut down their free storage to high-res pictures, I have been using my own photo storage setup. I think it is really great to try and not buy Google One storage space. Granted, it is fairly cheap, but I’ve had several different reasons to not use Google One. Yet…
I’m not terribly in favor of Google’s business model of setting up advertising profiles for all their users. Yes, it would be very secure, and I would trust that Google has all their advertising profiles secure tightly. They probably do realize the pressure they get with all that info they have on their users. I just don’t like behavioral info to be collected on users. That is something I have chosen to try and follow for my career.
So, I have been using Resilio Sync. Resilio Sync is an encrypted P2P (Peer-to-peer) file-sharing solution between users. Coming from being a big Google fan-boy, that sounds great! It is free and secure and only shared on my devices that I authorize. I’ll use that to share my photos.
In order to store my photos, what I’ll do is share my mobile photos to Resilio Sync. When I’m done with the photos on my mobile, I’ll pull them into an external hard drive to store for later. At this point, I’ll most certainly be done with the photos. But then I encountered a problem. I have one huge folder full of unorganized photos and videos. How can that be a more enjoyable experience like Google Photos?
I have found multiple solutions, but here is what I ultimately ended up doing. Shotwell is a decent photo viewer software. I’ve downloaded that on my Linux to view my pictures. But what I would also like is if I can organize my pictures by date in different folders. Early on, I was organizing those manually. But then I realized, “Hey, I’m a programmer! I can make this easy.”
So I started to make photo-organizer in Rust. I was able to learn more things about Rust! It was great. I really do think that Rust could be making an impact in the future of web development work, so I am learning more and more how to use Rust. For example, I was able to publish a crate! Maybe I’ll be sure to do this more in the future.
Later I tried to make a GUI with electron, but I didn’t that that was useful. Yet. As I was using photo-organizer, I realized that I couldn’t sort videos. I needed to expand photo-organizer a little bit more.
So I transitioned photo-organizer to media_organizer. I learned that FFMPEG can provide the creation date of videos, like how EXIF data provides the creation date of photos. After I developed out media_organizer, I was able to sort my entire media_library.
Just as a personal project, I can invest to make media_organizer better in the future. I’ll work on it every now and then. But for now for my career, it might be better for me to jump into open-source projects and contribute to open-source code at large. I can help my belief of open-source code by actually contributing to source code.