Camiel Schoonens

MDiT for 20260304

5 March 2026 · Leave a Comment

My Day in Three for today:

🛫 Porto Alegre – São Paulo 🛬
I’m halfway through my business trip to Brazil. The week has been intense, and there are a lot of lessons and experiences I need to process. As a result, I’m not sleeping too well. I woke up today around 4 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep because my brain immediately went to work. After today there is one more day to go before I head back home to the Netherlands.
For my final night here, the local leadership team took me to a restaurant called Loup. We had a great dinner, some lovely wine, and a great time together. As always during my travels I’m grateful for the opportunities I get.

MDiT for 20260303

4 March 2026 · Leave a Comment

My Day in Three for today:

Today was a long day, and I’m pretty exhausted by the time I’m writing this. By the time I finish my third bullet of this ‘My Day in Three’ post, I’m going to bed. But before I forget, I must say that I’m really enjoying the summer weather here. It’s very comfortable to be outside in 30+ degrees Celsius, but my body is actually still used to cold winter temperatures.
I had a wonderful day here with my Brazilian colleagues. The people are so friendly and engaged with work that it’s really fun to talk to them about their product journeys, client engagements, and personal career developments. I’m amazed by the amount of innovation the teams here bring to our company.
I took the team out for dinner tonight. The team got to choose the restaurant, so they took me out to a steak restaurant, since that is what the region here in the south is known for. Early tomorrow morning, I’ll be flying back to São Paulo for another two days with the team in that office.

MDiT for 20260302

3 March 2026 · Leave a Comment

My Day in Three for today:

🛫 São Paulo – Porto Alegre 🛬. This was a short flight, about an hour. The whole airport experience this morning was, at least, ‘interesting’. Let’s say the airport efficiency I’m used to is a little different here.
I arrived in our Porto Alegre office just after lunch. The afternoon was filled with meeting people in person whom I had only seen online, and with product meetings where our local product managers showed me their products and shared their ambitions. The Porto Alegre office is our internal product and technology ‘labs’ environment. I like their entrepreneurial spirit a lot.
Tonight I didn’t have any formal dinner plans, so I went outside the hotel for a quick dinner in the neighborhood with two of my team members from Europe who are joining me on this visit. The area I’m staying in is considered safe, so it was actually nice to get some fresh air after being inside all day.

MDiT for 20260301

1 March 2026 · Leave a Comment

My Day in Three for today:

🛫 Amsterdam – São Paulo 🛬.
Today’s flight was a long and bumpy one, and we had to buckle up a few times. I managed to get some sleep midday and read a little over 200 pages in my current book. I used the remaining flight time to watch Springflöden on my iPad. Springflöden is a Swedish series from a couple of years back. The series was made from a book I read a few months ago. Someone in the Fediverse tipped me about it. I’m four episodes in, and it’s fun to watch, but I did like the book more (which is often the case when books get filmed).
I arrived around 7 PM local time in São Paulo and was taken to the hotel by the driver who was waiting for me. As I’m tired, I’m now going to bed after a quick shower, I have a taxi pickup planned for 8 AM tomorrow for the second leg of my trip: São Paulo – Porto Alegre.

I have 25 folders (filled with many subfolders) filled with photos from 2001 to 2026. All the folders are stored on my NAS. When I import new photos from my DSLR into Lightroom, I automatically back up the photos to my NAS drive. For pictures taken on the four iPhones in our household, I back up the images from iCloud to my NAS, usually once a year. The result of this process? There are thousands of JPEG files in these folders, and since 2023 (the year my youngest turned 12), the number of pictures we take has increased exponentially.

I’ve long wanted to clean up this digital mess by removing duplicate photos and selecting one photo from a series of photos (often from the children). The purpose of all this isn’t to save disk space; it’s to create physical photo albums for the years since we have children and are a family.

Yesterday morning, I said to myself, “At least figure out how you are going to approach this as a first step.” Spoiler: I think I did, and I’m documenting my thoughts here for future reference and for others who may deal with the same challenges.

I’ve made use of the following two MacOS apps: PhotoSweeper and ExifRenamer, and tried out this workflow on two annual folders with a combined total of a little over 3000 photos. This is my approach:

Create a ‘year’ zip file of every single year folder available for backup purposes. I’ve uploaded these individual zip files to my Backblaze, my off-site S3 backup solution.
Copy a single folder with all subfolders from my NAS to my desktop computer, mainly for performance reasons while processing, but also to create a ‘working folder’ without touching the files on my NAS.
Have PhotoSweeper analyze the contents of the year folder and subfolders on my desktop. My desktop computer is an M4 Mac Mini, and PhotoSweeper is incredibly fast at this.
Manually go through three types of compares PhotoSweeper does on the folder and its subfolders: 1. Filename and exif comparison, 2. Series comparison for images taken within one minute of each other, and 3. Having the app’s algorithm handle image comparison on my behalf by ‘looking’ at the images.
Mark all the images I want to delete based on the analysis, following PhotoSweeper’s advice about which one to delete 9 out of 10 times.
As I’m working on my desktop, on the copied versions of the photos, I’m letting PhotoSweeper delete all the marked photos for me.
I’m now left with a cleaned-up annual folder and still lots of subfolders, but no more duplicate photos or series of photos that I need.
The final processing step is to have ExifRenamer go through the folders and all the subfolders and move the individual jpeg images to a new folder, still on my desktop. While ExifRenamer moves the files, it updates the filenames based on the Exif data it reads. I name the files with the following syntax: yyyymmdd hhmmss – (Camera Name).jpg.
As a result, I end up with a cleansed annual archive of images that are sorted from A-Z in the file system. As a bonus, the filename gives me a hint at the image’s quality based on the camera name. I suspect this will come in handy once I start selecting the pictures for my printed photo album.