Month: January 2018

Five years ago I went all-in and migrated my ancient iPhoto library to generic files and folders on disk inside of Dropbox. I wanted something I could access from anywhere, and – perhaps more importantly – was future-proof. I liked this solution so much I started writing a book about it and even made an iPhone app to help me view my library on the go.

My library’s structure worked like this…

/Photos/
    /_Albums/
        /2017-12 Aaron's 4th Birthday Party/
        /2017-12 Christmas in Chattanooga/
        /2017-11 Thanksgiving in Nashville/
        etc...
    /2018-01/
        /2018-01-01 12:45:02.jpg
        /2018-01-02 02:38:15.jpg
        etc...
    /2017-12/
    /2017-11/
    /2017-10/
    etc...

That worked great. It allowed me to keep album-worthy photos separate from all of those one-off day-in-the-life photos we take. It also let me quickly find any photo just by knowing the album or month it was taken in.

The problem was that – especially with all of my home videos now in 4k/60fps – I was running out of disk space. My library was over 300GB. I had plenty of storage space left in my 1TB Dropbox paid account, but not on my hard drive.

I was facing the decision of not keeping all of my files locally or running Dropbox off a larger external drive. Neither option made me very happy.

But then came Google Photos.

If you know me then you might think I’ve gone crazy. I migrated ten years worth of Gmail to FastMail three years ago and never looked back. I wanted to be in control of my own data and domain name.

That said, I really did love Gmail for the ten years I used it. Most importantly, I trusted it. Many times I found myself referencing emails from a decade ago only to find them safely stored, not forgotten, just waiting to be read again. I’ve never lost a byte of data with any of Google’s product offerings – I trusted Photos would offer the same reliability. And sweetening the deal further, with my massive library I would be a paying customer. Google would have reason to keep my data safe versus my free Gmail account which came with no promises.

So I installed Google’s Mac uploader app on my Mac, pointed it at my Dropbox photo library, and waited. Three days later all of my photos and videos were in Google’s cloud. The only problem? I had no albums. Just a giant stream of 50,000 photos sorted (thankfully) by date.

So over the next few weeks I picked a couple albums each day from my old Dropbox library and recreated them in Photos. It was boring, monotonous, and not entirely pleasant work. But in the end it was worth the effort.

To keep things organized and easily searchable, each album follows the same naming convention as it did in Dropbox. “Year-Month Short Description” (2018-01 Aaron's Birthday Party). Here’s a screenshot.

All the rest of my day-in-the-life photos are sorted individually by date under the “Photos” tab.

The Google Photos iPhone app is installed on my phone and takes care of backing everything up to their cloud. It’s also installed on my wife’s phone (and signed-in under my Google account) so it slurps her’s up as well.

Further, any SD camera cards we plug into my Mac are ingested by the Photos Mac app.

Every Monday, as part of my GTD weekly review, I do a search on the Photo’s website for “last 7 days”. That, predictably, shows the lasts seven days worth of photos, which I then go through and sort into albums and delete any pictures that aren’t worth keeping.

So that all takes care of getting my media into Google Photos, but once it’s all in there, then what?

Well, quite a lot actually.

You can search and filter by people. Here’s everyone in my library…

Tapping on my wife’s grandmother filters down to only photos containing her…

But Google’s AI is much smarter than just facial recognition. Watch what happens when I search for “Thelma Roberts bridge”…

Amazing, right? But how clever is the AI, really? Well…

Search for “Inside House”….

And then search for “Outside House”…

It’s truly astounding to be able to search, slice, and dice your photos this way. I can’t wait to see what features Google adds next.

I think it was David Allen who said you can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want. It’s ironic how an attempt to do everything will actually keep you from doing anything. —Shawn Blanc

A few weeks ago, I tweeted that I had reached “OmniFocus Zero”. I pulled up my available tasks one morning only to find that I had nothing to do. That’s not to say that there were no more tasks waiting for me in OmniFocus, it’s just that my Available perspective was empty. I had nothing due that day and no tasks that weren’t blocked or waiting on someone else.

A few of my GTD-doing friends expressed disbelief. How could everything be done? The simple answer is that I’m ruthless. I’m ruthless when it comes to delegating, deleting, and deferring until later.

I do my weekly review every Monday morning. One of my favorite things is when I come across a task that is no longer relevant to my life. That means I can delete it. Not only from my task manager, but, more importantly, from my brain. It’s one less open loop flying around my mind.

But it wasn’t always like this. I used to be a task hoarder. I’d write down absolutely everything, and never get rid of anything. I’d just keep kicking the can down the road foolishly and naively thinking I’d get to all of those tasks someday.

The trick I finally learned was to give yourself permission to forget. You have to make a ruthless decision and give yourself permission to admit that you’re never going to get around to that task and just delete it. If you have an item on your task list that is causing you anxiety because you just can’t get around to doing it – then maybe it’s not really something you’re committed to doing at all. Get rid of it.

You have to come to the realization that you can’t do everything. Sometimes, one concrete action is all you need to keep moving forward.

I’ve always been fascinated with geo technologies and location based services. When I worked for Yahoo!, I was always bugging Tom Coates and Gary Gale about all things geo – including the sadly ahead of its time FireEagle web service.

Anyway, for the last two years I’ve been tinkering off and on with an idea of my own – geohooks. They’re webhooks that are triggered based on the location of you, another person, or a combination of multiple people.

I’m really happy to announce that https://geohooks.io is now available for people to beta test. You can sign-up for free here: https://app.geohooks.io/beta.php You’ll also need our iPhone app. You can get in on the test flight magic by @’ing me here or on Twitter or by email.

So what can GeoHooks do? Well…

• Call a webhook when you enter or leave a specific geofenced area
• Send an SMS to your spouse when you leave work and you’re on your way home
• Send an SMS to your spouse when you leave work that also inculdes Google’s traffic estimate
• Turn off the lights in your smarthome when both of you leave the house
• Keep track of how long you’re at work each day
• View a live map of where all of your account members currently are
• Trigger any service on IFTTT
• Securely share your current location to 3rd party web services with a level of accuracy you control (pour one out for FireEagle)

And much, much more.

Anythign you can trigger with a URL, you can now control with your location. GeoHooks is location-based webhooks for hackers, with a focus on privacy.

I’d love your feedback.