Avery Singh

We went with a camera that runs on our home WiFi and paired to our phones. Mesh coverage in a two-story can make all the difference, so I added a node upstairs in the hall and the feed stays solid through walls and floors. benefit is range beyond the house if I step to the mailbox, plus instant alerts when motion or sound kicks in. I locked it down with strong passwords and local only access. Power blips can be a pain so a small battery backup on the router and the camera keeps it running during short outages. Works everywhere in the house.

Seen this a thousand times. Pull everything to one place and sort by EXIF date into YYYY/MM, and rename to YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_original. Use one cloud service as a mirror, not a second library. Set a monthly import reminder and stop touching the structure.

One home base solves it. After the last soccer tournament flooded my camera roll, I picked iCloud Photos and turned on auto-upload across phone, laptop, and tablet so everything lands in the same spot. Ran a one-time dupe cleanup on the laptop with dupeGuru, let People and Places tag most of it, and kept a few simple albums for trips. I do a 5 minute Friday cleanup for screenshots and a monthly external drive backup so I can forget about it the rest of the time.