How to Back Up Your Mac Photos to Amazon S3

Your family photos are probably among the most important files on your computer. They cannot be recreated if your computer or files are lost, stolen, or damaged. In this post I’ll show how I do my personal photo backup every month.

You should already be backing up your photos (and all your other files) with Apple iCloud, Backblaze, Carbonite, or another service. If you don't already do that this article isn't for you. Go and get that done first. If you’re like me and already have a primary backup, but you’ll be most comfortable with another separate copy of your photos, then read on.

Note: as of October 2021, the MacOS Photos app on MacOS Catalina still doesn't allow exporting HEIF photos with all added metadata (keywords, etc) intact. If your backup must include keywords, adjusted dates/times/locations, and other data that you've added to various photos using the Photos app, don’t use the "unmodified original" option to export those photos for backup. You will be backing up JPEG files, not HEIF, but at least your metadata will be saved. If like me, you care more about backing up the original-quality HEIF photos more than any tags, you can use the "unmodified original" option. Hopefully the Photos app will soon (in MacOS Big Sur?) allow for backing photos up in original HEIF format with their metadata.

October 2021 revision: Added another smart album and export step to export edited live photos' with "Export Unmodified Original ...".

Writing A Static Site Generator

I wanted a clean, simple site. Blog-like. Not powered by some bloated overwrought monstrosity of a blogging platform with security vulnerabilities and updates to install and plugins to manage. Just a few web pages, not a Javascript web app. I wanted scripts, written from scratch by myself, to generate the static site pages. I didn't want to wrestle any sprawling web frameworks. I wanted to stay away from making things complicated. And you're reading the result.

New Site

Here we go.

This will be fun. I'll write about projects I'm working on. Maybe I'll publish informative content here, or maybe just pictures of my dog. Probably both. Anyway. Maybe it'll be helpful to someone. But it's my new home on the web and it's not owned by some corporation. I'm publishing it myself. And who am I? I've thrown up a page dancing around that subject here.

The next post will go into detail about generating this site's pages.