Also, I don't think that the image files themselves are stored in the SQLite DB file; likely just their indices and metadata.
My timeline is much longer than 20 years. I have family photos going back to the Civil War.
Besides, Wordstar and Wordperfect files used to be ubiquitous. Good luck with those today.
I switched my mail from Outlook to Thunderbird because the former stores the email in some undocumented unreadable binary format. TB stores the mail as text, so I can recover the mail without needing TB. I have mail going back 25 years now. Some of my earlier mail is now lost because, surprise surprise, the mail program no longer works and the data is stored in a proprietary format.
I unzipped all my old file archives a few years back out of concern that some of the old DOS archive software would disappear.
Here's a Hacker News story from 10 days ago about an update to Wordperfect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24959090
I haven't tried it myself.
Now what happens if it was a slightly less popular word processor, like PC-Write? (PC-Write rose to fame by being the first shareware program.)
What storage format do you use then? Are you concerned about Hard drives format becoming obsolete? Are you using Mac or Windows? What if tomorow Apple or Microsoft decide to stop support for their formats? What would you consider as a reliable Storage format? Do you trust linux formats ext3 ext4? What would be your ideal choice looking from your perspective which I really share. It's really a big question for me how reliably store things for long periods of time.
My files have survived magtapes, DECtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip drives, CDs, DVDs, blurays, 6 Mb hard disks (yes, 6 megabytes!), many no-longer-readable hard drives, and that about covers it.
Just keep copying them forward, and rotate among more than one drive.
My experience is that every media device and every media format becomes unreadable after a few years.
I learned programming on punch cards. I wish I'd kept my punch card decks, but they'd be unreadable by now. Unreadable by machine, that is, I could decode them by hand.
notes.txt will work just fine, then, even for several thousand photos. I don't see a need for a database until you've got far more than that. The tree file system works tolerably well as a "database".
As for searching, I know how to use "grep" and "locate".
Folders are a limiting api and we shouldn't limit ourselves to strictly hierarchical organizational structures for non hierarchal data.
It'd take me far more time to set up a proper tag database than I'd save looking things up.
It's still infinitely better than a random shoebox with random snapshots in it.
