Ffmpeg

This is the map. If you’ve followed the series, this ties the pieces together. If you’re starting here, this is the whole system in one view — how my daughter’s photos and videos get from two phones to my eighty-seven-year-old mother’s tablet, sorted by month, for nothing per month. The Whole Pipeline [Dad's phone] [Mom's phone] | | Synology Drive auto-backup (over the internet) | | v v [ Home NAS: two backup folders ] <- never edited | hourly check copies NEW files (skips anything already handled) v [ Working folder: the "cutting board" ] | I open a browser gallery and pick the keepers v [ One "Import" button ] - convert videos to H.264 720p (ffmpeg) - resize photos - file into Year / Month by the file's date v [ Growth archive on the NAS ] | served over a free Cloudflare tunnel v [ Kids Player app -> "My Records" tab ] - tap a month - videos play continuously - photos drift by, gently zooming v [ Grandmother's tablet. Daughter's tablet. ] Every arrow except one is automatic. The single human step is “pick the keepers,” and it takes about a minute a day. ...

By this point in the pipeline, the boring parts are done. New files have been copied to the cutting board. I’ve picked out the ones that are my daughter. What’s left is the step that turns “a pile of selected files” into “a browsable month in her archive.” That’s one button. By now the picker has already moved my chosen files into a hand-off folder. In the app’s My Records tab, there’s a count of what’s waiting in that folder, and next to it a button that says, in effect, bring these in. I press it, and the rest happens on its own. ...

The photos were easy. The videos nearly stopped the whole project. A video of my daughter would back up to the NAS perfectly, and then, when I tried to play it in the browser, I’d get sound but no picture. Or a black rectangle. Or, for the big ones, an endless spinner while it buffered. The file was fine. It just wouldn’t play. Two separate problems were hiding here, and it took me a while to see they were separate. ...

Everything else in this pipeline runs by itself. This is the one part that needs me: looking at the day’s new files and choosing which ones are actually my daughter, worth keeping in her archive. For that I built a small browser gallery. It shows the files waiting on the cutting board, I tap the keepers, and press a button. That’s the whole job. But a few small choices made it pleasant enough to actually use every day. ...

My wife takes a photo of our daughter at lunch. That evening, my eighty-seven-year-old mother taps 2026 → July on her tablet, and there it is. No one uploaded anything. No one shared a link. The photo just traveled, on its own, from a phone to a grandmother’s screen. This post walks the whole path and tells you honestly how long each step takes. The Path, Stage by Stage Here’s the trip a single photo makes: ...

This is the post the whole series turns on. Everything before it is the problem; everything after it is possible because of the idea here. For two years I couldn’t sort my daughter’s photos. Not because there were too many — because I was trying to do it in the wrong place: inside the backup folder itself. Why Sorting Inside a Backup Is a Trap My phone auto-backs up to a folder on my NAS. My wife’s phone backs up to another. Those folders are my only copies of my daughter’s baby years. Naturally, I wanted to open them and pick out her best moments. ...

My daughter is three. My phone takes about 6,000 photos and videos a year — maybe more. I don’t have 6,000 interesting shots. Most of it is accidental taps, blurry motion, seventeen near-identical photos of the same bread I was about to eat. But somewhere in that pile are the clips I actually care about: her first steps, her laughing at something she found hilarious at the time, moments my wife and I know we’ll want to see again when she’s older. ...

My three-year-old daughter has a favorite show. Baby Shark. She could watch it every day, and often does. Last week, I showed her something new. Fifteen short videos of herself as a baby — the first year of her life, played one after another. She sat still for one hour. Smiling, then laughing out loud, then quiet and focused. She didn’t ask for Baby Shark once. My wife was watching from across the room. She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to. ...