the_cosmos

Yeah, I did mistake what you were trying to say. We’re just coming at this from two different sides... physics does have the convention that absolute zero potential is defined at infinity. I was looking at it strictly from a practical circuit perspective, where 'zero' is just wherever we stick the ground probe, and we only ever calculate for the relative deltas. And we generally don't have wires that can make it to the interplanetary medium or the edge of the infinite ground plane :)

Voltage is _always_ relative; you only ever measure differences between two points. Voltmeters have two probes. Ground is just a convenient reference, not a universal zero. And while Earth can act as a reference or return path in some systems, it’s not perfectly neutral or fixed...it’s just large enough to approximate that in practice. (The interplanetary medium aka aether doesn't exist)

Objects don’t repel because they’re at the same potential. Electrostatic force comes from electric fields due to charge. If two objects truly have zero potential difference and no field between them, there’s no force.

You’re correct that circuits care about voltage differences. After all, all work requires a force gradient of some kind.

There is a community-supported CLI program called immich-go that directly supports reading in iCloud and Google takeout archives, as well as local directories. It works great, and has gobs of import options to set up albums and tags. [ https://github.com/simulot/immich-go ]