Why I Built videre

The story of videre began with a problem that had been quietly growing across my external drives for years.

I started collecting photos and videos with my iPhone 3GS. iCloud was not part of the picture yet, so backing up my media meant copying iPhoto libraries and folders onto external drives. When iCloud arrived, it offered a much easier experience, but storing a large library meant an ongoing subscription. I preferred to keep my media locally, where I remained in control of it.

Over time, those local backups became increasingly difficult to manage.

When backups become the problem

I eventually accumulated four or five large iPhoto backups, each around 200 GB. Because I had copied files between computers, libraries, and drives, the same media appeared in multiple places.

Some files were duplicated three or four times. Their dates were not always reliable either. Copying them from one location to another had sometimes changed their filesystem timestamps.

Altogether, I had roughly one terabyte of data and 70,000 files. It was a mixture of photos, videos, and various image formats spread across five different backups.

Keeping everything felt responsible. Understanding what I actually had felt impossible.

Looking for a better answer

I wanted to combine these backups into a media library I could trust. Before doing that, I needed to answer some basic questions:

• Which files were genuine duplicates?
• Which version should I keep?
• When was each photo or video really created?
• How could I organize everything without giving up control of my files?

iPhoto could not reliably identify the duplicates in this collection, so I decided to solve the problem myself.

The first application I built was called dedupe. Its purpose was simple: find duplicate files and help eliminate them safely.

From dedupe to videre

Duplicate detection solved only one part of the problem.

Once I could identify repeated files, I wanted to inspect metadata, recover meaningful dates, browse the library, search its contents, and understand the collection as a whole. Each new need became another feature. Each feature revealed the next piece that was missing.

Over time, dedupe grew beyond its original purpose. Feature by feature, and brick by brick, it became videre.

Today, videre is a powerful command-line tool backed by a web gallery. It can scan a folder, build an index, uncover duplicates, and make a large local media collection easier to explore.

A media library you can enjoy again

videre is not perfect, and there is still plenty I want to improve. But it has already transformed the way I interact with my own media library.

What used to feel like an unmanageable pile of backups now feels accessible again. I can explore it, understand it, and continue improving it without handing ownership of my files to someone else.

Building videre made working with my media library fun and joyful again. At least, it did for me.

I hope it does the same for you.