We can set up websites for cheap, using a multitude of tools. We can create directories, or field guides, or fan pages for anything we want.
We can link to each others things from our websites, our newsletters, our DMs, our Discords or forums.
It might feel slower, since techbros at social media giants have been feeding you the Kool-Aid that without them you’ll turn to dust, but that just ain’t true.
I’ve been going through so many old photos and images since ditching Apple Photos, and found this from 2013, a screen shot of Twitter, with my Twitter user number as evidence of being one of the first 3,000 to sign up for the service. Un freaking real that I used that service for 17 years.
I knew I could plug in my iPhone via USB cable and then use Image Capture to get the photos, but transferring the photos wirelessly would be really nice.
I was looking at USB thumb drives that I could plug into the Lightning port (on the iPhone 14 Plus), export the photos, and then plug into my Mac via the USB C plug.
This seemed fine, except I’d be using SansDisk software. I watched a few YouTube videos, and it looked atrocious.
Not to mention, sure, that’s another $50 purchase.
I then remembered that Dropbox has cloud photo storage. I’ve got the space in my account, and it seems that a month’s worth of photos on my phone is around 5GB of space.
So now, at the end of every month, I can export the images from Dropbox on my Mac and drag them into my new file system.
There is no clunky SansDisk software, no extra purchase, and it all works seamlessly in the background. I did it today for the images, too, and it’s absolutely fine.
The photo you see on the right is from 2002, which is 22 years ago. Apple’s iPhoto launched the same year, but I didn’t get my first Mac until 2003, which is when I must’ve started pouring photos into my computer.
Here we are 20+ years later, and my Photos library is over 350GB in space, but too large to sit on my my new 512GB MacBook Pro.
So the file sits on a 2TB external HD. Everytime I click on a photo, or an album, or anything, I get a beachball.
And since I’m getting more into taking photos with an actual digital camera, that means I need to put more photos into iPhoto (or whatever the fuck it’s called now), which just means more of the same – beachballs, slow, partially downloaded images.
So I finally exported all my photos by year into their own folder.
Yep, everything is out of sort, nothing is tagged, I lose the whole AI functionality of finding the word “burger” in a sign from a decade ago, but that’s ok with me. I also can’t bring up any photo on my phone at any time, but oh well.
I have over 3,000 screen shots.
What the fuck do I need all those for?
And did you know if you have LIVE PHOTOS turned on, like every image has a corresponding video file of a 2-5 seconds?
So 1000 photos is really 2000 files. Of shit I’ll never need again in my life.
Somehow I have duplicate files – sometimes 3x, 4x, 5x copies. Zero idea why.
Not sure the designers of Apple Photos planned on people like me with 22 years of photos, but here we are.
