I'm looking for suggestions for programs to help manage an archive of family photos and video clips. I have a large family and a few photographers can pump out a lot of photos at family events. I've sorta become the unofficial archivist of the family as I have a lot of photos and videos myself and I've become responsible for my parent's collection as well as they are not very tech savvy.

I'm kinda distrustful of cloud storage in general so I'm kinda looking to avoid using something like Google photos or even Proton Drive. I'd also like to try and stick to open source if I can. At this point I don't think my ideal program exists but I'm going to describe it and see how close we could get. Sorry if the following sounds too much like fantasy.

Ideally I'd like a program that could synchronize a media collection across the internet to 3 or 4 different households. For one thing so that there is redundancy if something bad like a fire happens so nothing is lost, and for another thing so that those households have local access to the archive. I'm hoping I wouldn't be needing any crazy hardware for this. Something like a raspberry pie with an attached spindle Drive would be acceptable, both for low power use and small physical footprint in the houses of family members I would be asking to host these.

Ideally some program could be used to interact with the archive locally and do things like add new media, edit metadata of media that's already in the archive or just view things.

That's it, Lemmy know what you guys think!

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[–] tiny@midwest.social 16 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Immich is the best photo solution I have used and has been really easy to setup. Nextcloud apps are usually ok but usually have a more specialized alternative

[–] Amaterasu@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

what about Ente? It has E2EE encryption that immich doesn't have and can be self hostable like immich. Never used both so I'm just asking

[–] chris@im.allmendenetz.de 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@Arondeus
Here is an other on: have a look at hubzilla https://hubzilla.org

it runs on a raspi
has a good working cloud
can sync accounts
and you can share photos and all kind of other things to your fedi contacts

Hubzilla is not a specialist for photos but it has all the basic you need... the point is that you could also use the installation for more as for sharing photos

[–] Arondeus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

Interesting. Sounds promising. Will definitely check this out. Thanks for the link!

[–] Arondeus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

Another one I haven't heard of. I'll look into it. Thanks for the suggestion!

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Another vote for immich.

I trialled several before finding immich. It is by far the best that I've found.

[–] maniel@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 month ago

yum, immich all the way, the ai face/object recognition is awesome

[–] Arondeus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

I'll check it out. Thanks!

[–] phanto@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The two things that popped into my head are Immich and Nextcloud. I think Nextcloud is generally more useful, but Immich is more specifically targeted at Photos. As for how to synchronize it... Syncthing? Personally, I hate setting up Syncthing and so I don't really use it myself anymore, but once it's set up, it really does take care of itself. Poke the computer once a month to make sure it's still alive, and you're set.

You could probably host Nextcloud at one site and just have a client computer at the next site set to auto sync everything.

Been running NextCloud for a while, not for photos, but for just general Google Drive replacement.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 1 month ago

You can sync with immich also.

It literally is as simple as choosing which folders to include with the backups. You can set backing up just like google photos.

Otherwise you have to deal with their external library mechanics which has ballooned my 5k photos to a 1.3million in the database which broke immich.

[–] earth_walker@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

There's a lot to address here as you're talking about hardware and possibly multiple levels of software.

Yes, you can do this with raspberry pi or any SBC or mini PC. Even an old desktop PC if space isn't an issue.

In terms of photo management software, I really like Photoprism. Immich seems to be popular as well.

In order to get your photos synced to multiple computers over the internet (a good idea for resilience), you could look at syncthing. Alternatively, you could have one central server and one or two backups in different locations using borg backup or similar. In my experience, backups are easier to manage and make it easier to recover from data loss than replicating the current state of your data in multiple places. You can do both, though.

It's a very worthwhile project, but may be pretty difficult unless you are already comfortable with server technology or are enthusiastic about learning.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've used photoprism for years now, and its solid. Pretty performant, and even has an unofficial android app.

[–] Arondeus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

looks interesting. I'll check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It would help if you gave some numbers. How much data, within a factor of 1000 say? A few megabytes? A few gigabytes? A few terabytes? A few petabytes? The approach you need will change depending on the level. What is your budget?

What bothers you about cloud storage? Are any of the photos edgy?

Anyway it sounds to me like you would be fine with a decent web hosting plan and a basic photo gallery app.

[–] Arondeus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think the collection is between 500Gigs and a TB at this point but could easily grow quickly if I manage to get other family members to use whatever solution I come up with.

There's no edgy photos in the collection but as of right now I don't trust any cloud storage provider not to use my photos or videos for something like training AI, which I'm apprehensive about considering many of the photos are of my nieces and nephews and other family members. I don't want to make a choice that compromises someone elses privacy. I might be a little crazy. /shrug.

I know proton drive is encrypted such that even they can't see what's stored there but I can't play video back from there easily and I want the collection to be used and viewed easily. Otherwise what's the point?

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think if your photos are on any kind of public website, AI idiots will scrape them regardless of the provider. So at minimum you have to password protect them. That said, I'd feel ok using this:

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

It basically runs NextCloud. You'd configure it so that only logged-in users can view the pictures, and give accounts to your friends and family. I don't think Hetzner is likely to train AI with it, though you could check through their privacy policy. Part of the issue with eg. Google Drive is that everyone wants stuff for free, so Google recovers some of its costs by advertising, AI training, etc. Hetzner charges enough to actually make a profit, while still being IMHO affordable at the level we're discussing. That means they don't have to do crap with advertising etc. I have 5TB in their Storage Box product and am happy with it.

If you want to be more hardcore, you could set up a dedicated server with an encrypted HDD, but now you have to deal with the hassles of self hosting, including backups. It still wouldn't be end to end encryption, which would require your users to run some kind of special client, or maybe use some awful javascript client.