I don’t know if it’s my age or storage obsession or what, but I am becoming increasingly anxious about personal photo and video management. In Photos, I’ve got 38k photos and 2800 iphone videos in my primary library residing in 626GB worth of space on an external SSD (backed up with TM, CCC, and Backblaze). I’ve got many, many more home videos (mostly recorded with digital videocams and older phones) stored in the old nested folder technique on their own dedicated external drive.
I’ve gotten quite accustomed to using iPhoto / Photos for photo library management over the years, and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future. The rest of my non-commercial videos are more difficult to review, search, etc. due to the way they are stored. Although I have been spending a lot of time lately sorting this drive out, deleting duplicates, bulk renaming files to date/event (Renamer app FTW), it still is not as well-managed as the photos are. This particular video library is about 1TB, but that includes a lot of duplicates that will be weeded out.
So I’m wondering, what if I create a separate library using Photos strictly for these videos? Many of them already have the original created date, and Edit Time.app works fine for changing the date for videos that need it, so Photos sorting could work well for that. Of course, the primary Photos library is the only one that can be used to sync with other devices via iCloud, but I think I can live with that. I’ve survived thus far without being able to peruse this video library from other devices. My first concern was the size of some of the individual video files as opposed to the smaller photo file size. Has anyone done this before? I’m not sure how I would proceed after this, since nearly all of my video recording now is done with the iphone which of course uploads all photos and videos to the main Photos library. I suppose I could move all those videos from one library to the other.