Would be interested in hearing from folks here - what techniques do we use to enjoy our work?
I’m a year or so in to really learning this hobby of photography. I want to make more prints than I do (to hang on the wall and have photo books).
But what about showing the digital versions?
How do you:
Organize on your hard disk your “favorites” throughout the year?
Display this work for you and others to enjoy?
I’ll answer and hopefully generate some discussion and ideas.
I have file folders for each “shoot” (“trip to X” “Dec At Home”) and the keepers that I edit and produce a JPG for go into a subfolder called “Processed”. I have Photo Prism scan these folders into it’s library. What is the next step? It’s much like google photos backup in that yeah, it’s all there but now what? Photo Prism seems to be a decent FOSS replacement for google photos, but… now what?
I want to set up DLNA or something that could connect to Photo Prism and show only the “Processed” folders (or JPGS), I think that would be cool to have that playing on the 4K TV.
Alternatively, I guess I could buy a digital photo frame, but then I’m copying the work into a 2nd storage location. Which is probably fine / maybe necessary. Curating is part of the process.
Thanks for reading, any thoughts appreciated!
Edit: Looks like I’ll be investigating Immich for a local database instead of PhotoPrism:
I use Amazon photos. Unlimited storage as a prime member. They look really good on my large TV screen, 65 inches. Also you can invite others to view your photos even if they are not prime members.
As I process the raw files I export them to a folder which I then upload to Amazon.
Works well for me. I realised a long time ago that the only person interested in my photos was me!
I export all my JPEGs into DigiKam, and that’s mostly where they stay. If I want to see the best ones only, I’ll filter by rating.
Additionally, I usually write one monthly blog post, to keep our extended family up to date with our stuff. I say “write”, but it’s mostly showing off the month’s family photos, with some light annotations.
Additionally, I print a monthly A3 calendar page of the current month last year. This gets hung up in our kitchen, for everyone to see.
Additionally, true favorites get printed and hung up on a huge magnet wall we have in the hallway. Or on my office’s whiteboard, if it’s not a family photo.
For the new year, I want to additionally print a sort of contact sheet of my favorite non-family photos, just for my own enjoyment, to go onto my office whiteboard.
Last year, I bought my grandmother a digital photo frame, and considered buying one for us, too. But for the price of a decent model, I’d rather print more. Printing is just way too satisfying…
Locally? They land in their directory and stay there.
Online? I stick some on Flickr and occasionally post a couple here or there elsewhere. But that’s it. There’s no interest in my family, really, so there’s no need to “show” them at home.
I do print some of my photos. Before I started doing that folks who printed would say how satisfying it was - they were right.
I use Immich for my own personal cloud - mostly uploading from my phone so as not to use Google Photos etc. For photos that I want to share I created a website using Piwigo which is a FOSS app. Works out well because Darktable can export directly to Piwigo. I do have my own NAS so that keeps my cost of operating the website down to about $15 per year (that’s what it costs to renew my address through Cloudflare).
I found my niche photographing Parkrun runners. They’re a very appreciative audience because they’re really interested in seeing themselves in photos after the event. And I just upload the photos to Facebook. That’s where my audience is.
I know building your own is often off-putting due to the time investment, but for the home I recently built a photo frame for around 200€.
Raspberry Pi 5 + 150€ “portable” Arzopa 100% srgb, 1440p IPS screen, bought on aliexpress, and less than 15 hours of personal time invested in “gluing” the pieces. The screen surprised me, it’s really good for the price.
It boots into sway and runs a python script which registers itself in my home assistant through mqtt.
On home assistant I configure schedules for when it turns on so power is conserved. I also added a few functions like shutdown, reboot, next picture, previous picture, etc. It pulls the pictures from Immich albums using its API, and then launches my image viewer in fullscreen slideshow mode, that’s it. Since the screen is off most of the day and the Pi is idle, energy usage is insignificant and I am hopeful the hardware will last.
I was surprised how easy it was to set everything up and am planning on building one more when the time is right, maybe with an OLED or higher quality screen if I can find one.
Who doesn’t? My father just migrated his doctor’s office from an RDP-based system to a web-based one. Now he has a few dozen leftover pis lying around.
A really good use for a Pi is ADS-B tracking as a piaware - I have been contributing for a couple of years. Being a contributor of data then gives you free access to data normally only available at a subscription membership level. This is useful if - like me - you also do some plane-spotting and like to nerd out on details like origin and destination.
