Photos (Windows 10) – huge resource sucker & cure

My photos go off my camera, quick look detect the majority save the good ones to Google photos, Flickr, skydive and mega.

If I have some real nice ones I’ll back them up with the raw files to an hdd and pen drive . I don’t keep any pictures on my pc’s. Google photos is by far the best/simplest way to organise and share. Plus you always have access to your pics if your at a relatives.

I cba messing in windows to order my photos etc. Back in the day I’d use picasa which was great. Not sure that still exists, but no real need for it myself anymore.

Why do so many apps insist on trying to be Media managers these days ?

I first noticed this annoying trend about 15 years ago when I finally replaced Adobe Photo Deluxe Pro with Photoshop Elements and it wanted to catalogue my “Media Collection” before it would let me do any editing.

Sometimes I just want a program to do what it says it does as quickly as possible. I used to use the picassa photo viewer to quickly look at my pictures but now Google has dropped support for that in favour of an even more bloated than before Google Drive.

I’ve found XNView to be a reasonable alternative to Picasa, as I was disappointed when that disappered – partly because the built in quick image editor for explorer was great and much better than the Windows 10 in built photo previewer.

I’ve looked into Apple’s Photo app for my Mac, but I’m loathe to pay for the increase in iCloud storage that putting all my photos in it would entail and XNView also seems to cover some of the uses that I would need.

I don’t mind the media managers to much, it’s when they make it difficult to find the actual files themselves and therefore allowing me to backup nicely. I use Calibre for my eBooks and Zotero for my academic papers and technical standards and they organise items for me in their own way – initially this was a bit of a pain, but I’m sold on it for these, as I can log in and find the files in Explorer if needed easily enough. However, Photos for the Mac hides all the images in various sub folders etc. All nicely backed up using Time Machine, but I believe it uses hard links and soft links, which means that I can’t sync it nicely using my Synology.

However, the Synology Photo Station is quite good as well – I should play with that a bit more as well.

That sound entirely reasonable and could account for the watch hell freeze over time it takes.

I hate the really stupid way that the file browser miss-operates. You open it up, try to find what you want on the ‘X;’ drive and the stupid thing send you back to where you don’t want to be, forcing you to scroll down a second time. The time lost while it goes nowhere is a really stupid farce. I saw an account of the reactivation project for the old file manager, it cannot be worse than the failure in Windows 10, but it was not clear how easy it would be to compile it to a working executable. I have not compiled anything for a good many years probably back in the late 1980s or very early 90s.

I do not want hopelessly slow and totally pointless libraries, I want files, and preferably the right file(s).

As I understand it the Microsoft programing guide lines now state that all Universal apps, like those in the Windows app store, should use the library as the default save location. Not that I use any apps from the app store but MS seem serious about forcing Windows libraries into greater use.

Its all linked in with windows search too im afraid which is actually the replacement for the old indexing service .

Anyone feeling brave can follow the link but its heavy going.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa965362(v=vs.85).aspx