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The Google Picasa OSX app is pretty nice like that, it doesn't interfere with your folder layout, so you can store your .jpegs just the way you want them, and it will index them and let you browse them nicely. You can throw out the Picasa app and not lose much, your folders are still there with real actual files visible to Finder and the terminal.

The only downside is that it looks very unmaintained these days. They haven't even added support for Retina graphics (in a photo viewing app!!!)

That behaviour backfires very often. I've heard more than one story about somebody 'deleting an album from Picasa' and ending up losing a bunch of family pictures forever. My wife did the same a couple weeks ago, thankfully there were other copies.

>Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient.

What a pity there isn't some sort of operating system that can be used to present your media/content NAS to you, from anywhere in the world, with whatever front-end you desire .. seems like any OS vendor worth their salt could produce such a thing.

I guess what we need is for things like ipfs.io to take off, and get wrapped up in some ZeroConf'ism with a pretty GUI. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'd just use an SSH tunnel to connect to my server at home. That's fast and secure (but obviously too complicated for most users).

"Home server compatible" routers would be nice. Devices could request opening a port, and you verify the action on the router GUI. Then some dynamic DNS server assigns you a nice name.

Apple could build all this into an OSX-local service that is just a push-button away from being easy to use. Plug in an external hard drive, Log in with a special pre-configured user account, assign the drive to that user, and leave your computer running - from that point on, you can access everything that user has ever submitted, with their iDevice, over the 'net, etc.

I think the desire is definitely not there to make things this easy to use - precisely because of the Cloud-Zeitgeist that we're all involved in ..

Hopefully this trend will pass at some time.

I wouldn't save my photos on a platform that changes every few months (Google Photos/Plus/Drive), might be gone in two or three years, analyses images, builds face databases, and keeps your pictures ready for the NSA to access, for any purpose other than sharing images with other people.

> "Home server compatible" routers would be nice.

ASUS RT-N56U. Got one at home. It can update dynamic DNS for you (most unbranded routers can), but then goes on to add a USB port and a few "apps." One of them is a file storage host, and even file syncing (DropBox-like) app that runs from your own home.

Learn to say no to the equipment that your ISP offers you, the reason it's "free" is because it's trash.

> "free"

I'd suggest an OpenWrt compatible router. It's actually free (open source) :)

Great support for dynamic DNS too (obviously, it's just Linux): http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/ddns.client

And it turned out the thing I was describing (easy port forwarding for home servers) exists and is also supported by OpenWrt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol

Yeah I made that mistake with the N56U, because you can't put OpenWrt on it. I won't make it again, but, really, anything is better than the junk that ISPs hand out.

>What a pity there isn't some sort of operating system that can be used to present your media/content NAS to you, from anywhere in the world, with whatever front-end you desire

It's not "whatever front-end you desire", but Plex can do movies, TV, and music over the web in a mostly automagical manner. Install server app, install client app (on Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/etc), make account, log in with account on both, and it'll automatically connect the two and even do stuff like transcode on the fly on the server to make streaming work better.

I finally released all my photos from iPhoto purgatory & handle them with lightroom. Full quality & I can throw it on an external without having to hunt around for it.

Any tips for how you went about this? My Lightroom photos are nicely organized into folders but my iPhoto sets are less-so.

I followed this

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/import-iphoto.html

Basically - you have to go into iPhoto, find a bunch of hidden folders that contain the original photos and then copy them out & let lightroom import / organize them according to any rules you set.

Pretty simple - longest part was copying all the files since I had a decent number (200GB) of photos.

Great. Thank you for the information. I'll give it a try.

> store my photos in a closed-source program.

In this case it's a walled garden, there are closed source programs that are interoperable. Google and Microsoft are often good about not locking you in and when it comes to media Adobe works 100% with standards (e.g. EXIF).

> holding me back from installing Linux on a MBP and wiping Mac OS.

What about your music locked away in iTunes?

What music is locked away in iTunes, besides FairPlay tracks from like 2008 that you can pay to upgrade.

I had all my meta-data in one database, but it got corrupted and I lost it all.

I now prefer adobe bridge / adobe lightroom.

They update the metadata in the photo file itself. Not sure what they offer in terms of client programs.

If you have plenty of RAM and a well spec'ed SSD, you might be able to run Yosemite in VMWare on Linux with decent performance.

Don't the OS X TOS only permit running OS X VMs on an OS X host?

I'm sure it does, and it is a slippery slope, but he/she mentioned wanting to to run Linux on a Macbook Pro.

So in a roundabout way, he/she would still be running OSX on Apple hardware.