timeliner VS PowerToys

Heya! I'm the author of PhotoStructure, and my Google Photos account (before I started working on PhotoStructure) is about that size, too.

I wrote up some tips here: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/

This is what I did:

1. First try to fetch all your Google Photos via Takeout in one archive. If it fails (like it did for me), try different-sized .tgz archives. I had to use the 10 Gb option (using 50gb caused an internal-to-google error).

If that fails to work, the last resort is to manually create by-year albums, shove all photos from that year into that album, and do a takeout of just that album. Repeat as necessary for every year.

2. Install an app on your phone to *directly* upload the original photos and videos from your phone to your NAS/home server. I have several recommended apps here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...

At this point, you can still use Google Photos (for viewing and as a last-ditch backup), but your originals are safe (without all the Google Photo downsampling and metadata shenanigans), and you're free to use whatever self-hosted software you want (like PhotoStructure, but there are a ton of alternatives, as well).

FWIW, I also tried this software: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner -- it does what it can, but the files you get via the API has a bunch of metadata stripped from it. I even had captured-at times get mangled with older photos.

This is why I'm building Timelinize [1]. It's a follow-up to my open source Timeliner project [2], which has the potential to download all your digital life onto your own computer locally, and projects it all onto a single timeline, across all data sources (text messages, social media sites, photos, location history, and more).

It's a little different from "self hosting" but it does have a similar effect of bringing all your data home and putting it in your control.

The backend and underlying processing engine is all functional and working very well; now I'm just getting the UI put together, so I hope to have something to share later this year.

[1]: https://twitter.com/timelinize (website coming eventually)

[2]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner

Not a "big project/service" but a Go project that uses Sqlite is one of my own, Timeliner[1] and its successor, Timelinize[2] (still in development). Yeah the cgo dependency kinda sucks but you don't feel it in code, just compilation. And it easily manages Timeline databases of a million and more entries just fine.

[1]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner

[2]: https://twitter.com/timelinize

This looks promising but might be a bit complicated for you: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner

I made Timeliner to download my Google Photos: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner -- requires some tech prowess for now, though.

Yeah think its a ClearType issue[0] specifically then

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

It's active again, they've open sourced and reinvested in it with new utilities.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

You can download the latest version of PowerToys from the official GitHub repository. Alternatively, my brother wrote a helpful guide on how to download and install the PowerToys tool on your Windows 11 PC.

Research on Trending GitHub Repository As this is my first blog post on dev.to, so I did some research on a trending Git Hub repository, and provide insights into its usefulness and features. I chose to explore Microsoft's PowerToys repository, which has gained significant traction in the developer community.

+1 for power toys

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

also, Cygwin if you need it

Obligatory FancyZones/PowerToys links:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys?tab=readme-ov-file

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

FancyZones is a Microsoft tiling window management utility from their PowerToys collection.

> If you're on Windows you should try the powertools OCR tool.

Which is open source (MIT-licensed), the source code is here: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/main/src/modules...

It is written in C#, and uses the Windows.Media.Ocr UWP API to do the actual OCR part: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr?... – so if your app runs on Windows it can potentially call the same API and get OCR for free

Apple provides OCR through VisionKit ImageAnalyzer API – https://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionkit/imageana... – albeit that is only officially supported to call from Swift (although apparently you can expose it to Objective C if your write a "proxy Swift framework"–a custom Swift framework that wraps the original and adds @objc everywhere). There is also the older VNRecognizeTextRequest API which is supported by Objective C, but its OCR quality is inferior.

I'm not sure what the best answer for Linux or Android is. I guess https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract ?

Microsoft PowerToys

Windows PowerToys GitHub Repo