My desk drawer is overflowing with printed photos—mostly from my iPhone, hastily exported and forgotten. A stack of 4×6s, a USB drive labeled “Photos_2023_v2_FINAL,” and three old external drives blinking faintly in the corner. I know exactly how many photos I have: 12,847. I counted them last week—not to delete, but to *know*.
I’m not uploading them to iCloud. Not trusting Google Photos’ auto-tagging of my toddler’s face as “man” (it happened). And definitely not letting Apple decide which memories deserve “Memories” slideshows while burying the grocery list scribbled on a napkin beside my latte.
This isn’t about deleting. It’s about keeping everything you care about—on your terms, on your hardware, with zero corporate intermediaries.
A local-only workflow that actually works
I run this on a $299 Synology DS220+ NAS—two bays, 8TB total (4TB per drive, RAID 1). It lives under my desk, humming softly like a well-fed cat. No monthly fee. No login prompts. No “optimize storage” tricks. Just folders, timestamps, and intention.
The core idea: don’t move photos after import; don’t rename by hand; don’t tag one-by-one. Instead:
- Import directly to NAS via USB-C cable—no Photos.app, no iCloud sync enabled, no “optimize Mac storage.” Just raw HEIC/HEIF/JPEG copied to
/photos/raw/. - Auto-organize using EXIF date—not import date. I use ExifTool in a simple script:
exiftool '-Directory
This creates folders like/2022/2022-05-14/—not/Imported_2024-03-01/. My daughter’s first birthday photo lands where it belongs: May 12, 2022—not when I finally remembered to plug in the phone. - Syncthing keeps everything synced across devices, locally only. My MacBook, iPad, and NAS all share the same
/photos/folder tree—no cloud relay, no encryption keys stored remotely. Syncthing uses TLS, verifies checksums, and shows real-time sync status. If my Wi-Fi drops? Sync pauses. No data vanishes into the void.
Tagging without surrendering your face
PhotoPrism (self-hosted, open-source) runs in a Docker container on the same NAS. It scans my /photos/ directory, reads EXIF, and—crucially—runs facial recognition offline. No faces leave the house. I trained it on 200 manually confirmed photos over two evenings. Now it tags my parents, my niece, even our old golden retriever—by name, not “person #7.”
But here’s where most systems fail: generic keywords. “Vacation,” “Family,” “Outdoor.” Useless at scale.
So I batch-tag using PhotoPrism’s bulk editor—but only with specific, contextual descriptors:
- Not “beach”—but “Cape Cod 2022-08-17 blue towel red umbrella”
- Not “dinner”—but “Dad’s 70th birthday Italian restaurant yellow tablecloth”
- Not “workshop”—but “SmallBiz Summit Portland 2023-10-05 stage left mic stand broken”
These aren’t poetic. They’re forensic. And they’re searchable in PhotoPrism’s UI or via ExifTool CLI later: exiftool -keywords="Portland" /volume1/photos/.
The quarterly rhythm: keep, delete, annotate
Every three months—first Saturday of January, April, July, October—I sit with coffee and open four windows:
- PhotoPrism’s “uncategorized” view (shows untagged, low-confidence faces, missing keywords)
- A spreadsheet tracking duplicates (found via
fdupes -r /volume1/photos/ | grep -v "202[0-9]") - A physical notebook titled “Photo Log Q2 2024”
- The actual photos—full-screen, no thumbnails
I spend 90 minutes. Not more. Not less.
Three decisions only:
- Keep: Already tagged, dated, contextually clear. Gets a green highlight in my notebook.
- Delete: Blurry duplicates, accidental triggers (that 47 shots of the same parking meter), screenshots of texts I’ve already saved elsewhere. Goes straight to
/photos/trash/—which I empty only after 30 days. - Annotate: Add one sentence in PhotoPrism’s description field. Not “Mom smiling.” But “Mom holding her first grandchild, 3:12 p.m., living room couch, light from north window.” That sentence becomes metadata. Later, it’s searchable. Later still, it’s memory.
That notebook? It stays on my shelf. No cloud backup. Just paper, ink, and the quiet certainty that my photos are mine—not a dataset, not a subscription, not a feature someone might sunset next year.
“I don’t want fewer photos. I want fewer guesses about what they mean.”
This isn’t minimalism. It’s stewardship—with wires, folders, and patience.