Tools for Archiving Digital Media

[CasaAtardecer 27]

If you’re the family photo bug and chronicler, you’ve amassed a great library of home movies and photos, perhaps even archived them digitally. If you’re like me, you’ve shunned cloud storage services and opted to assemble your own NAS to serve your digital media content to family and friends through web browser, mobile, and/or smart TV streaming apps. As you might already know, a significant, organizational component of home video and photo media is metadata, and you might have spent years annotating and archiving your digital files with metadata for the dates, people, places, events, etc. portrayed in your media. I know I have.

If you’re new to the digital archiving and metadata world, here are some of the tools I have found most useful in my approach to archiving home movies and photos. You can accomplish a lot using powershell, command prompt, and ffmpeg, but sometimes it is much easier and more intuitive to use a GUI:

For audio file editing and metadata, I use Audacity. (https://www.audacityteam.org/download/)

For audio file metadata, I use Mp3tag. (https://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html)

For video file metadata, I use MetaX. (https://www.danhinsley.com/metax/~tm1D21.html)

For image file metadata, I use jExifToolGUI. (https://github.com/hvdwolf/jExifToolGUI/releases)

For image file editing, I use Paint.NET. (https://www.getpaint.net/download.html)

For bringing all these media types together into a short mini-movie, I use Pinnacle Studio. (https://www.pinnaclesys.com/en/)

For mini-movie encoding, cropping, etc., I use HandBrake. (https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php)

For superior video compression, I use HitPaw. (https://www.hitpaw.com/download-center/)

And for library content streaming, I use the ever-improving, metadata-friendly Emby UI for web, mobile, and Roku devices.

And very soon, Emby’s Roku UI will be getting a major upgrade. I cannot wait! Ta.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, I use paint.net as well. Thanks for sharing.