busybee fluffy rambles

Photo management and home security

Okay so. I have around 1TB of photos, because I used to shoot RAW on my DSLR.

Apple really, really wants me to start using iCloud for a bunch of stuff to work right; Spotlight no longer indexes local libraries stored on external drives, for example, and to get HomeKit security that can do proper facial recognition you need to have an iCloud photo library.

Handling sync between a phone and an offline Photos library has also gotten super stupid.

I currently have the 50GB iCloud plan (which costs $1/month and provides single-camera home security). Mostly I just use the app that works directly with my cameras (since it does local recording and basic event detection) but I also have it set up to work with HomeKit Secure Video, which may or may not actually be doing anything useful. It’s super hard to tell.

Anyway. Back in the day I used Aperture for photo library management, but then was super grumpy when I was forced to switch to iPhoto. For a while I made it suck less by using iPhoto Library Manager by Fat Cat Software, which cost something like $30, but then Photos broke that, and so I just made do with a single gigantic Photos library and kind of stopped caring about categorizing and posting things for the most part.

Recently I learned that Fat Cat has a new bit of software, PowerPhotos, which actually works with Photos and is pretty decent? And it also had decent upgrade pricing from iPLM, so I’ve upgraded there.

Right now my photo management strategy is to take photos on my iPhone and have them sync to iCloud, and then to use PowerPhotos to copy the stuff I care about into my offline library, and just get more aggressive about deleting stuff from iCloud. That seems to be working okay, but I’ve only just started with that so who knows how sustainable that’ll be.

In the meantime, I haven’t had enough stuff happen with my cameras to know if HomeKit Security is actually doing anything useful. It certainly hasn’t been notifying me of the few events that have happened (package deliveries, one visit from Charlie, etc.) and I’m just like. Super confused about how it’s supposed to work.

Music

I like, but don’t love, Apple’s Music.app (née iTunes, not to be confused with Apple Music, the streaming service). I have a rather large library of music that I own (not rent), and I like to listen to stuff in the mode of:

1. Choose a random album
2. Play it all the way through
3. Repeat

This is easy to do in Music.app, and I also use a smart playlist to avoid playing albums I’ve heard recently (although that happens so rarely now due to the enormity of my collection), as well as a few things that I’m usually not in the mood for. I also appreciate that I can migrate what I’m listening to anywhere in my house since I have AirPlay-enabled devices everywhere, and I can even simulcast if I want.

I used to use a smart playlist to also sync a subset of this over to my iPhone for listening on the go, but that’s gotten super obnoxious to manage for a bunch of reasons. I tried using iTunes Match for this but it never worked reliably, either. It’s also super annoying to get my playcounts synchronized over to Last.fm.

I do keep a backup of my music library on my Plex server, and recently I started using PlexAmp and its “album radio” function. Which is Fine. But it kind of sucks for the in-home experience, because of a few things:

• If something interrupts the music or you want to temporarily play something else there’s no way to go back where you were before
• It has no native AirPlay support, and using external AirPlay with it is kind of a mess
• The UI is fine for phones, terrible for desktops

But what I’ve settled on for now is using PlexAmp for shuffling my music when I’m driving or on the bus or whatever, and using good ol' Music.app at home. It seems Fine™.