I agree on the need. I have about 200GB of this stuff for my family.
Have you tried to manage a large number of historical, personal image and video files in the Apple ecosystem. Especially those that have been scanned or older than a few years? It's a total nightmare working with folders, iphones, macs and the cloud.
As you get to larger libraries, what syncs, what doesn't, and then how the file quality is changed seems completely beyond the users control. This is way simpler in Windows.
Let me be a little help (if perhaps you don't know some of this already):
- Edit and render it all for Apple tech playback... but KEEP your masters too for future, better codecs. Big HDDs are dirt cheap, so storing masters should be no great burden... ideally at least TWO copies so one can be OFFSITE to protect against fire/flood/theft scenarios.
- Consider tagging home movies as TV shows instead of home movies, so they can sort by "season" (year) and will present that way through AppleTV too. My own "show" tag is "Home Movies" and several decades of "seasons" sorts hundreds of home movies under that one "show." Going this way, if you want to watch Christmas 2013, you don't have to try to deduce which of the many videos that might all be called Christmas is that one. The one you seek is in the 2013 "season."
- Use Episode ID tags to even put home movies within a season into date order... thus JAN home videos will appear in a list before FEB videos... which will appears before MAR video, etc. My episode IDs are simply the day/date like 1109 for one today and 1119 for one shot 10 days from now. Episode Number tag is key to sequential ordering but episode ID helps remember exactly WHEN this video was shot.
I wish the "home videos" tag worked as well at allowing such groupings. But until then, using the TV Show tag provides a great way to organize the ever-growing collection so that anything is easily found... FAST!
For Photos, you can do some of the same stuff with Albums... and make efforts to assign "dates" to old scanned photos with perhaps some "best guess" help from relatives who were THERE at the time. If you can get rough dates assigned to photos shot before date, time & location data was auto-tagged, your photos library can sort into date order.
And photo albums- like videos tagged as TV Shows- can organize events or collections by events and/or by year. This can make it much easier to find the ones you want to review vs. the endless scroll & hunt approaches when it's just one gigantic library of photos.
Yes, it's some work to curate and tag it all, but get it done and it's all very nicely presented for the rest of your life.
As to presentation, I suggest using AppleTVs and the Computers app (instead of the AppleTV app, library), which does an outstanding job of presenting all of one's
owned media, minus all the relentless pitches to buy or rent other content. If it's all tagged, it's easy to find what you want to see, watch, hear, etc. Computers is the second-most used app in the household. AppleTV+ app almost never even gets run.
