Video

A perfectly sorted archive is worthless if the people it’s for can’t watch it. My two viewers are an eighty-seven-year-old and a two-year-old. Between them, they can’t manage menus, can’t type, and won’t tap through a playlist. So the watching part had to be as close to zero-effort as I could make it. The rule I designed to was simple: pick a month, then sit back. Everything after that first tap should happen 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. ...