My wife would also be using it and she isn’t the most tech savvy. So something that is easy to use after initial setup would be ideal.
TIA
https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos
It has mobile apps that back up photos automatically. My wife and I each have the iOS apps running and photos just upload magically to the NAS. Viewing photos is a good experience too. I also use another Synology app to back up my photos from my NAS to AWS Glacier.
Super happy I moved them from Shutterfly.
If you're going down the "self-hosted" path, Synology will be the answer a lot of the time. All your music and videos, etc. There's even a Google Docs-like office suite.
I'm have kiwix on mine via docker and have self-hosted Wikipedia.
I use FileBrowser to autosync the photos off my phone, and family can easily access them because they already know how to use Plex. The fact that there is a client for every device I have ever used is icing on the cake.
If you have a plex server, obviously a very big if, worth investigating just turning it on for a folder of files since it doesnt write to the images itself by default.
https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
Personally I use Photoprism installed inside TrueNAS Scale. They don't have a good mobile app that syncs with the NAS. So might try Immich in future.
Custom file naming is clutch.
Edit: I've reached out to the Monument team as well.
Step 2: Download this free image organizer from https://www.files.gallery -- When you click on download it will download a single file called "index.php".
Step 3: Copy the index.php file you just downloaded to the images folder you created. -- Navigate in your browser to http://localhost/images/index.php (or replace images with whatever you named the images folder)
ENJOY!
- Either use something simple and user friendly, like Synology with it's marketplace apps - Or use virtualisation host OS that allows you to install multiple containers/virtual machines, each for your own application, like Proxmox - Add containers via some container manager like Portainer or CapRover
Maybe these options seem like a bit more complicated first, but you will be very thankful for the invested time.
Also, not all services are best suited for containers. JSWiki doesn't like to share the host, and wants its own subdomain. NextCloud from Container is a painful experience when it comes to add-ons from its built-in store. Installing it directly to OS is 1000x smoother.
The biggest exception is GitLab. When you install the OmniBus package, you can only use the server for GitLab, however, with that resource usage, you won't want to share it with another service, anyway.
When you give half the effort required to install a couple of services to bare metal, things work more efficiently, without any downtime, and any problems actually.
Any half-decent distro has the relevant packages in recent versions, good security support and constant updates. There's no reason to not install a Debian stable box with auto-updates enabled and servers downloaded from official repos.
I managed to run 5 services on an OrangePi Zero with 512MB RAM with no downtime and performance problems. It's possible and enjoyable.
Know that there's a very active community of PhotoStructure users on Discord: https://photostructure.com/go/discord/ -- although I opened it as just another support channel, it's evolved to include discussions about future feature work, self-hosting, digital archival, privacy news, hardware, and photography, too.
I self-host https://forum.photostructure.com/ that uses Discourse, but it has 10-20x fewer posts on it than Discord.
OP: Make sure you get backups in place (and one offline) before trying any of the software suggested here--it reduces your risk from "oh-no-what-have-I-done" and "what-in-the-actual-heck-is-this-app-doing-and-where-did-all-my-files-go" to zero.
Stuff I like:
- The mobile app is quite friendly
- It supports "automatic upload" (after opening the app)
- It supports deleting pictures from the device after uploading (to save space... much needed on the wife's old iphone)
- The pictures are stored hierarchically on the filesystem
- Very lightweight (the whole docker setup uses less than 128MB of RAM)
Stuff I'm not a fan of: - The web interface is "okay". It could use some modernizing.
- When there's no more space on the device, the app fails to upload new pictures, but gives no error message.
All in all, Piwigo is a solid 7.5/10 for me, but I'm watching and testing some other active software such as https://immich.app/digikam is a bit hard to grasp at the beginning. this video helps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCKInEFF_AE (configure digikam > collections is where you want to be)
Granted I suspect 90% of my tag usage is grand parents finding all the grand kid photos. It works really well with piwigo mentioned on another thread.
I didn't try option to write to metadata for compatibility.
Will have a look at piwigo.
- https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...
Personally I am looking into immich right now: https://immich.app
I tried some of the fancy alternatives here suggested, but they insist in doing it their way. PiGallery just displays your folder structure as Albums, simple as that, whereas others like Photoprism keep ruminating in the background doing their AI, which I personally don't need.
Pair that with a good backup strategy with e.g. restic and you're ready to fly.
I'm currently using Synology Moments/Photos which comes for free with a Synology NAS.
I've recently been on a trip with random strangers sailing on a boat and I could easily request the others' photos, import them in an album and share it with the rest of the group.
I'm struggling to find a better alternative that is workable and is almost set-and-forget.
It can be a bit of a pain to setup but once it’s up and running you can run all synology apps, including photos and even their nvr software, backup your home pcs to it, etc. If you pass through pci sata controllers you can bypass any disk virtualization layer and let synology manage raw disks exactly like a metal install in one of their nas machines would do. You could even swap the disks into an official nas later on if you wanted. The synology apps are highly polished and worth the setup imo.
There’s also a docker image that makes it all trivial, but it’s too many layers of abstraction for my tastes[2]
0. https://github.com/pocopico/tinycore-redpill
1. https://www.wundertech.net/how-to-install-xpenology-on-proxm...
1. Find all the photos (and ideally videos) in multiple, nested directories.
2. Copy the found files over to a single new directory, ignoring any duplicates.
3. Rename the photos in a standard way, ideally using the creation time.
One tool that was recommended was PhotoStructure, but I wasn't able to make it do what I wanted. :/Does anyone have any recommendations?
PhotoStructure does exactly what you're asking: https://photostructure.com/getting-started/automatic-library...
Note that this is a paid feature, but I give free trials (without giving a credit card!), and discounts to a ton of people--including equalization for living in a country with less buying power, open source developers, and "making the world a better place." Details are here: https://photostructure.com/about/pricing/
If you can't make it work for your situation, please post to the support forum https://forum.photostructure.com/ or hop into the discord channel https://photostructure.com/go/discord : we'll try our best to get you set up.
https://github.com/kpeeters/shotweb/
It allows me to stick to shotwell for the actual collection management, while still letting me share events or the entire collection to friends and family.
UI is good. Sharing is good. no real problems.
If they keep focused on it - should definitely be a top contender
I did not like Nextcloud but have not tried the rewrite in Go
I'll be interested to see what else turns up here.
Backup is I have my photos is svn and back that up via restic.
Photoprism looks close but no OCR.
Google Photos replacement - Immich
Just share some gallery that you have on a NAS with friends - PiGallery
It will be very easy for the wife to use since all she has to do is put the photo files in folders using the normal operating system GUI. This is something everyone knows how to do.
What you want from a photo specific software is things like thumbnails, exif info, powerful search, maybe indexing the content of the pictures (Searching for "dog") etc.
I guess you want the gallery generation to be automagic though. Might be some work but you could whip up a cron shell script to see if any sub-dir in ~/www/photos/ has files and doesn't have an index.html and have it autogenerate them.
As I write this I do realize it's starting to get pretty complex. Almost like you'd wish for an all-in-one solution like you'd asked. But I still think this method would be better long term though.