My (new) photo workflow

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Absence is the goal Link to heading

I take a lot of photos and I intend to keep them for the rest of my life, which is longer than any application I use today¹. So the goal of my photo workflow isn’t a feature, it’s an absence: no lock-in. In practice that means five things:

The files are the source of truth. Ordinary JPEG, HEIC and video files in ordinary folders named after the event. Anything can open them.
The metadata lives in the files. Tags, places and ratings are written into the files (or XMP sidecars next to them) by digiKam, not stored in an application’s database. They follow the photo when I move it and they are standard².
Every application is replaceable. Many tools may read the archive, exactly one may write it.
The glue is open. OIDC for the login, a plain HTTP API, files on a network share.
Backups restore with generic tools. A zip and a database dump, nothing proprietary. Complicate at your will/pace (remote object storage, encryption, 3-2-1, you name it).

The test I apply to every piece is simple: if this program disappeared tomorrow, how long until I’m browsing my photos again? For the archive the honest answer is “a minute”: point another program at the same folders. I know because I did it. For a while I ran two photo managers side by side³ on the same read-only archive to choose between them, and it only worked because the files belonged to neither.

New Ways to Waste Time on READY.

My (new) photo workflow

Absence is the goal Link to heading