Welcome to TekHeads

So... I'm not very good a remembering when things happened in my life. We're also just back from our fourteenth group holiday we do annually with old uni friends. For both of these reason (and implemented separately) I thought it would be nice/useful to have a sort of digital timeline. A date, a splattering of text, a photo of two, maybe a dot on a map.

Then I got to thinking how would be best to create this so it can still be read / updated in twenty years?

This rules out any online service. Google photos is nice and all for the odd reminiscence but not something for long term (and they're evil). The Libre office equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation maybe? Or just HTLM? With the latter I'd guess just keep the markup as light as possible and don't go down any JavaScript rabbit holes. Zip to backup, open anywhere to view, dump on a host to share. Seems like the best option, no?

Anyone else have similar thoughts about useful and very filtered digital archiving? I'm struggling to face sorting through various backups of phone / camera dumps to backup and archive, and newer stuff there's just endless quantities of it with a reasonable camera on hand 24/7.

Or should I just order some prints and write notes on the back?

I'd be surprised if there weren't some software available about that, but don't know of any. Some genealgy software has functions of that sort, but more as an aid to genealogy than an objective in it's own right.

Personally, if I was to use software to do that kind of thing, I'd want it entirely local in nature, and on a "buy a licence" basis, not a subscription that, pretty much inevitably, will be jacked up. Be careful on that point, because companies are increasingly wanting the latter, and are not always above-board about how they go about it.

THere is a certain simplicity to having prints, and even a diary in a notebook. It seems daft in this computerised day and age but ....

Yeah, prints would make sense for the one just for me but not something you can share easily.

I also don't want to be left having to keep antiquated hardware running a decade out of support os and some software which has long since been abandoned. Even going down the open source route could leave you stuck unless you go for something 'mainstream' (hence the Libre office thought).

Although maybe this is an online service I should be providing... Annual subscription, difficult to export sensibly so people can't leave, long term engagement and natural sharing to spread the word. A bit like how Facebook timeline used to be before it got buried under a world of enshitification.

"Meta data" would be another solution I guess, but there's only so much to play with. Currently got a folder per year, folder inside per trip plus the random folder with odds and ends. I'm guessing you could add a chunk of meta data to the photos but not the folders? That leaves having to have a readme effectively at each level. All the information would be there but the browsing experience wouldn't be great... I mentioned readmes as I was basically thinking a git repo and using one of the servers to take care of rendering the markdown. I can't imagine that's going to go out of fashion anytime soon.

Choices, choices...