How do you store all your photos?

TheBigK

Well-known member
I've a collection of gigabytes of photos clicked (each photo is about ~4MB+) and I was wondering what'd be the best way to store all these photos (and videos too) so that I can access them easily over my home network and at times over the Internet? I was looking at Flickr and 500px; but I'd often have to connect to Internet to view them. Maybe setting up a local media server would be a better option? How do you do it?
 
I've a collection of gigabytes of photos clicked (each photo is about ~4MB+) and I was wondering what'd be the best way to store all these photos (and videos too) so that I can access them easily over my home network and at times over the Internet? I was looking at Flickr and 500px; but I'd often have to connect to Internet to view them. Maybe setting up a local media server would be a better option? How do you do it?
Are you streaming full length hd movies around the home or small low quality clips of internet filler type vids?

Sharing pictures with other machines locally and for your devices on the go is a matter of network configuration and possibly port forwarding your desired port through your router to the machine hosting the media. Not sure how mac does this but on windows you could skip all that and simply make a homegroup and share the directory and all other machines in the group will basically see the shared directory like you would see a drive under 'My Computer'.
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Video is a bit different and it really amounts to what you are trying to stream (actual file properties, container and encoding format). If they are tiny mp4 files h.264 encoded for example, players like media player classic can use network buffering no problem and assuming you have feasible hardware holding the source video, and a halfway decent device for playback you could get away with locally "streaming" up to maybe a 1gb video file but beyond that is all horseshoes and hand grenades.

If you have tons of encoding formats/video containers you may want to actually purchase a media streaming software, or setup a dedicated linux machine and build a halfway decent media server using free software and all it will take is a small amount of research to go either route.

I could get into specifics but I talk too much as it is. If you want to do something slick and be able to customize it for rooms in your home... try something like this

https://www.mythtv.org/detail/mythtv

you will need to do a bit of reading but if you really want a decent media setup that is a nice way to go as you can fully customize it though if you are not capping cable, storing your movies and eps or wanting to stream to the home entertainment center as well as the basics you mentioned this may be complete overkill.
 
Thank you for your responses. I can setup a shared folder and store all my media their. But that requires me to keep my machine on all the time. I was wondering if I could connect a HDD to my router and have all my media dumped on it. I can then access it from a TV, my PS3, iPad, Android phone and so on. I think that's something I'm going to try to do over the weekend.

Talking about cloud storage - do you have any recommendations? Flickr or 500px? I'm okay with paying a small fee for cloud storage.
 
Thank you for your responses. I can setup a shared folder and store all my media their. But that requires me to keep my machine on all the time. I was wondering if I could connect a HDD to my router and have all my media dumped on it. I can then access it from a TV, my PS3, iPad, Android phone and so on. I think that's something I'm going to try to do over the weekend.

Talking about cloud storage - do you have any recommendations? Flickr or 500px? I'm okay with paying a small fee for cloud storage.
Some routers have a port for and can support that and if you don't have that type of router a NAS device like Matt mentioned would word just fine (more than likely better than the previous), however video format and rate still makes a difference for device capability. Not all devices can play all videos. You may also still have problems with larger videos.



Cloud...nope, no cloud recommends from me.
 
I have a stupid habit from when I needed untouched copies of files for submissions. I would do 2 dumps, one unaltered in any way and a second dump.

I batch rename all my files by the exif date time down to the sub second to make sure every file has a unique name and then sort them by date or date/event in folders. Typically keep a copy on a disconnected backup as well as the main machine. Move alot of this to cloud storage.

My tablet came with Office 365 free for a year so I dropped my 1tb of drive down and now use onedrive for its 1tb. At $120 a tablet (60 for the peice of crap version) I might just get a new tablet every year since it costs about as much as google drive for a year lol.
 
Are you streaming full length hd movies around the home or small low quality clips of internet filler type vids?

Sharing pictures with other machines locally and for your devices on the go is a matter of network configuration and possibly port forwarding your desired port through your router to the machine hosting the media. Not sure how mac does this but on windows you could skip all that and simply make a homegroup and share the directory and all other machines in the group will basically see the shared directory like you would see a drive under 'My Computer'.
View attachment 97395



Video is a bit different and it really amounts to what you are trying to stream (actual file properties, container and encoding format). If they are tiny mp4 files h.264 encoded for example, players like media player classic can use network buffering no problem and assuming you have feasible hardware holding the source video, and a halfway decent device for playback you could get away with locally "streaming" up to maybe a 1gb video file but beyond that is all horseshoes and hand grenades.

If you have tons of encoding formats/video containers you may want to actually purchase a media streaming software, or setup a dedicated linux machine and build a halfway decent media server using free software and all it will take is a small amount of research to go either route.

I could get into specifics but I talk too much as it is. If you want to do something slick and be able to customize it for rooms in your home... try something like this

https://www.mythtv.org/detail/mythtv

you will need to do a bit of reading but if you really want a decent media setup that is a nice way to go as you can fully customize it though if you are not capping cable, storing your movies and eps or wanting to stream to the home entertainment center as well as the basics you mentioned this may be complete overkill.
I never figured out how you set up that shared directory thing since I'm more used to OS X.

I have a substantial amount of photos that are spread across a few drives. Looking in to a NAS solution though since they take up a lot of space and it'd be nice to get them easily on different machines in the house. Not too well versed in that whole thing though so will probably need to research.
 
For the guys using NAS, are you using a hosted NAS, or your own NAS device, or ??? Just curious, would like to keep one in the house, or build one, but haven't decided yet.
 
For the guys using NAS, are you using a hosted NAS, or your own NAS device, or ??? Just curious, would like to keep one in the house, or build one, but haven't decided yet.
I've got an Iomega IX2-200, had it for 3.5 years. It's been flaky recently, so currently running a Raspberry Pi with Debian installed, and a 1TB USB HDD attached to it.
 
Do you need any custom software to manage it, or can Debian do that out of the box? All of the ones I've seen (a year or more ago) were all running FreeBSD
 
There is not a lot of bays in that unit but for the price in a home setup I'm sure you could just stack units if it came down to needing more space. Based on research or do you just prefer HP?
 
Yeah, I suppose the Raspberry Pi + USB Storage isn't considered a classic NAS system, but it's cheap enough where you could keep another drive as a backup with all your data, and backup when you need to
 
I mainly use it now for my nightly server backups, as it supports Rsync. I could actually whack a 64GB SD card in it, as that would be enough to keep the nightly offsite rolling backups, but the external 1TB is fast enough for what I need.

I have my photos and music on 3 external drives, as well as the Iomega NAS.
 
I have photo's (and most other things) on a 128gb USB drive which is connected to my router (WD MyNet N900), and also synced to Google Drive.
 
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