Uploading and organizing your library
What an upload actually does
When you add a photograph or a video, your device encrypts it and writes the encrypted bytes straight to object storage. PhotoLog then generates the smaller versions it needs to show you a grid and a preview, and each of those is a separate encrypted object with its own key derived from the original’s. How encryption works sets out the key hierarchy.
Two practical consequences follow from that, and they explain most of what people notice.
The original is what is stored. The previews are derived from it and exist to be quick. Nothing replaces the file you uploaded with a smaller one, so the quality of what you get back later is decided entirely at upload time — by what you chose to upload.
A large first upload is bounded by your own device. Encryption happens where you are, so the limit is your machine and your connection rather than a queue somewhere else. Leave a big first import running on a wired connection and a machine that will not sleep.
Getting an existing library in
The mistake worth avoiding is the one that cannot be undone afterwards: uploading photographs that have lost their dates.
If your library is coming out of another service as an export, capture dates and album membership are frequently written into sidecar files beside the images rather than into the images themselves. Upload the pictures alone and every photograph in the set arrives dated to the day you uploaded it. Moving a photo library out of another cloud covers how to check that before you commit to it.
If your library is coming off your own disks, it usually still carries its capture dates, and the useful preparation is different:
- Upload in batches that mean something — a year, a trip, a client — rather than one enormous selection. A batch that fails is then a batch you can identify.
- Do the deletions first. Duplicates, blurred frames and screenshots are cheaper to remove before they are uploaded than after.
- Check one batch end to end before starting the rest. Confirm that a photograph opens at full size and that a video plays through to its end.
Video, and what “HD” is deciding
Video is where quality questions actually bite, because a video file’s apparent resolution and its real quality are not the same number. A heavily compressed 1080p clip can hold less detail than a lightly compressed 720p one; resolution counts pixels, and compression decides how much of the original detail survives inside them.
Since PhotoLog stores what you upload, the decision that matters is made before the upload: export from your camera or editor at the quality you want to keep, rather than at the smallest size that still looks acceptable on the screen you are checking it on. A file re-encoded down for messaging cannot be restored later by storing it somewhere better.
Organizing what arrives
Albums are how you group things; vaults are how you separate them. The distinction is worth using deliberately, because a vault is also the unit of sharing and of key rotation — removing someone from a vault rotates its keys, and what you added afterwards is protected by keys they never held.
So: put things in the same vault when the same people should be able to see them, and use albums inside it for arrangement. Splitting by subject when you meant to split by audience is the reorganisation people end up doing twice.
Reaching it from elsewhere
Your library is reachable from any device you are signed in on, which is the practical difference between an archive on a drive at home and one in storage. The same recovery rules apply wherever you are signed in from — see backing up your library, which explains why a second copy you control is still worth having.