As the saying goes: That you’re paranoid does not mean they’re not out to get you … 😃

I have those battle scars too. :(

Tags, tags, tags.

My photos are stored by date (“yyyy/mm/dd - Main description”, e.g. “2018/04/19 - Lofoten holiday”), but that is by far not enough to find anything meaningful at any time.

Meticulous tagging with a well-structured taxonomy is the only real choice here, in my book. AI tools, like are integrated into immich and other tools, help building that library. But for what I do with photos, how I think about photo gategories, AI can only go so far.

Tagging appropriate subject matter (family, friends, still lives, architecture), surroundings (location, as in “Lofoten”, but also location, as in “at the beach”; indoor/outdoor; nature; event; …), theme (light painting, black-and-white, nighttime, high fashion, random funny snapshot, …) and even species (I photograph a lot in zoos) is necessary.

With that kind of thing you then can find “that funny photo of Uncle Roger at the beach, when he slipped on the stray dog toy!” in the 4TiB of photos.

And that’s, unfortunately, work.

(Also, I am harsh in culling my RAW files. Ofc precious memories stay even if the photo isn’t perfect, but if I go out on photo walks, anything that is blurry/unsharp or badly exposed has the original RAW deleted as well. Or selecting the best candidate from chimping, I don’t need the other ones anymore. But that, too, is a workflow problem.)

For tl;dr, definitely take the FullHD one.

In slightly longer, it also depends on the physical size of the screen. If it’s the size of a playing card, 1280x800 will do. If it is larger than a phone I’d say you will certainly notice the difference between the two; if your picture frame is the size of an iPad mini or above, you absolutely will notice the difference.

If the price difference is huge, that’s obviously a tradeoff, but if the price difference isn’t too big a kick in the wallet it’s worth the higher quality.

(For what this is worth, phone photos have greatly exceeded that resolution for a long, long time. Modern iPhones shoot quite amazing photos; can certainly see why you want to showcase them. 😃)