Moving the photo archive off the cloud

2025-03-08

Twelve years of family photos lived in a consumer cloud folder. Exporting them was the easy part; the hard part was deciding what the new home should look like so that it still works in ten years.

The answer turned out to be boring on purpose: plain folders by year and month, original files only, one copy on the NAS, one on an external disk that leaves the flat, and a checksum list next to each year.

No database, no special viewer. If everything else breaks, a file manager still opens it.