On Saturday, we had nothing to do. This doesn’t happen…ever in our family. Normally there is at least something to clean/organize. But this time, nothing.

“Let’s go to the zoo!”

There’s not much to say about the zoo, but I did take lots of pics, so enjoy this little video.

This visit did make me wish I had a better camera- especially with a zoom. Do you have a camera? If so, what kind? There are some great options, and people who do photography seem to have a lot of fun with it.

The cloud

What do you do with all of your videos/photos that you acquire, year after year? The library of media only gets bigger each year, as phones with better cameras take increasingly larger sized images for each shot.

The options are either:

1. Store them in the cloud.
2. Keep them on a file in your house (locally)
3. Not bother; delete them when you get a new phone.

Before deciding what option is best, I think it’s important to figure out what you want to do, because there is no one-size fits all solution. My goals are:

• Keep all photos
• Record 4k videos, as my camera has that option (most cameras do now)
• Be able to watch those videos in 4k on our tv
• Have a good app to look up photos by time/location/person
• Keep videos, but all videos don’t need to be available at all times.
• Save money.
• Automatically sync my media, as well as Taylor’s

option 1: the cloud

This is the best option, and the most expensive. There are three major options out there, and each seems as good as the other, in my opinion. I am not going to go deep into the details on these, but here are the three major options, and reasons why they may be the best fit. Some prices are listed, all for the size of the library we currently have at our house, which is about 2 terabytes

• Google photos. Has an app on the phone. $10/month. Best if you have google chrome cast.
• Amazon Photos. Has an app on your phone. Photos are free for prime members. The app is great: sort by person, location, time, etc. $12/month. Best if you have fire TV.
• Apple iCloud+. Just buy extra storage. The app is also great. $10/month. Apple TV supports this to play things on the tv.

Whatever you use to stream your tv with will have the best way to show your photos/movies. Also, month after month, year after year, this can get expensive. And uploading terabytes of data to the cloud will take a long time, depending on the upload speeds of your internet. Once the initial upload is past, you are pretty much good to go.

Option 2: local storage

One of my goals is to avoid the monthly fee each month, so I went with this option. This is a NAS: Network Attached Storage. It is one of the cheaper ones, but a good way to get started.

It plugs into your router, not your computer, and is a one-time expense, and should last a couple years before we max out the storage capacity.

Pros:

• one time expense
• Automatically uploads all media from Taylor and Is phones.
• The app is good, but limited.
• Don’t have to worry about file size, or 4k videos.

Cons:

• Western Digital is a storage company, so their priority isn’t to make the best app. We got spoiled with the amazon photos app (others act the same way) where location, person, even things are searchable).
• App cannot search by location, person, etc
• Playback on a tv.

This brings up an important point about metadata. Each time you take a picture, besides the name of the photo (the file name), all sorts of other information is recorded in the photo.

At this point, we have all of our photos (Taylor and I) backing up to Amazon Photos automatically. This is a great app, and again, free for prime members. We have been using this for years, and love it.

We have all of our videos being backed up to our local storage device, a wd mycloud 4 terabyte device next to our router. Here is a link to learn more about that, if you are interested: https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd/my-cloud-home

But we still don’t have a great way to watch these videos on our amazon firetv stick.

For each photo/video that gets created, there is a ton of metadata included. Your phone keeps a local database of every image, who is in the picture, what else it thinks is in the picture, the location, time of day, the camera settings, and a whole lot more. Here is a screenshot of what I got when writing some software to get the metadata for a video I wanted to see:

The reason this is important is because we have a way to play these videos on our tv, but each tv/software has certain limitations: videos have to be in the right format to be played, including resolution, file extension, bitrate, size, and there has be enough bandwidth to stream the file to the tv without any interruptions, so you better have good wifi.

There is a free, local media server option that can do a lot of this for you. It was created as a server to keep all of your movies and music (think back to when people had VHS tapes). However, it has been tweaked to be able to show home videos that are stored as well: https://www.plex.tv

It is the recommended way to interact with your videos on our wd-mycloud, so I set it up. We got spoiled with our other ways to view photos and videos (the google photos app, iPhone photos, or in our case, amazon), so this interface seemed terrible:

But, it is free, and allows us to view home videos.

But there is one last problem, and this is where that metadata became important: Plex only plays videos in the proper (landscape) format. This means that every video recorded in portrait mode (up and down), doesn’t play properly on the tv.

After combining all of our videos into a single file, I wrote a bash script to go through and get the metadata for each video. In our case, we wanted to get the orientation of the file: 0 degrees, 90, or 270. If the video was 0 degrees, we are fine: it is landscape, no further action is needed.

If it was a 90 or 270 degrees, it is portrait. We would need to:

1. Move the original file to a new folder.
2. Format the video by adding black bars on the sides, so it will play on the tv.

Here is the code for that:

Now, we can view our videos, even the portrait mode, on our tv, through the janky plex interface.

That is a lot of work, for a video interface that is pretty bad. What if there was another way?

At this point, we have almost everything we wanted:

• Photos backed up to amazon photos
• photos AND videos are backed up locally to our WD Mycloud
• Videos can be played on the phone through the app.
• Videos can be played through the Plex app, but the interface is terrible. We can do better.

If you have a TV that can do Airplay, you can stop here; just stream the video (stored on WD Cloud), to your tv. This is a great option. But I want more.

What we need is an app that can make use of all of the metadata from a photo/video. The job of the Plex media server is to make sure your videos can be played, and if not, format them to the right format. Running some computer code to get the job done isn’t ideal.

Is there something else that can work with the files we have (not in the cloud) that can show them on the tv, without having to use Plex or running computer code?

Just yesterday I bought an Apple TV 4K to give this a try. If it works, I can sell the WD Mycloud on eBay for about the price of the Apple TV; if it doesn’t work, I can return it. Here is what I have so far:

• It can show photos AND videos from an external drive, connected to a MAC, through the PHOTOS app. No need for the Plex server. To do this, you need to enable media sharing on your Mac.
• This external photos library needs to be the System Photo Library, or, the main library used by the photos app on the computer.
• The Apple TV need to be signed into the same Apple account/userID as the Mac.

The Pros of this approach:

• My files are still saved locally; no monthly cloud fees
• Fairly easy to set up.
• No more Plex server for watching videos on TV
• Can see 4k as it was filmed.
• We have iPhones, so the same apple ecosystem makes it nice.

The cons I have found (so far):

• Had to buy an Apple TV. I can sell the WD MyCould for about the same price though?
• The interface on AppleTv for photos isn’t as great. Cannot search by location/year/person.
• Photos on the local external drive can only be viewed through the “Computers” part. Again, not the best UI for searching for videos from a place, or featuring a person.
• Syncing photos. This approach doesn’t automatically sync photos/videos from Taylor and I’s phones. There may be a way around this by syncing to iCloud+ with a shared photo library, and then importing that to our local drive every month or so. This is something I am going to look into.

One of the takeaways is that the premium you pay with storing your photos and videos in the cloud is that they have stellar apps that can make use of the metadata in your media, and create versions of your videos to play on any device, at any time. If you steer away from that and still want the same niceties, you will have to put in some work to get there.

I have 2 weeks to return my AppleTV. In that time, I am going to see if there is a solution to the syncing issue, while still showing videos saved on our 4 terabyte external drive, connected to the Mac. Stay tuned.