I have spent quite a lot of time trying to find the best photo management solution for my use case, and i think i have finally got a solution in mind. Please follow me and help me understanding what could be improved.
The use case: I took, over the decades, thousand of pictures with manual, film based SLR, digital DSLR and many other devices. Today i mostly only take pictures with my phone and occasionally (like 1-5 rolls per year) B/W film photos. I like to have all the pictures neatly organized per album. Albums are events, trips, occasion or just a collection of photos for any good reason together. I have always organized albums my folders and stored metadata either in the photo or in sidecar files. Over the decades i changed many management tools (the longest has been Digikam) but they all faded away for one reason or the other. I do not want to change organization since it proved solid over decades. I do not trust putting all eggs in a database or a proprietary tool format.
The needs: backup photos from family phones. Organize photos in albums (format as stated above), share & show pictures with family (maybe broader public too), archive for long term availability. Possibly small edits like rotation. Face recognition is a good plus, geographical mapping and reverse geotagging is a great plus. General object recognition could be useful but not a noticeable plus. Also i need multi-user support for family members both on backup and gallery-like browsing. My galleries need to be all shared (or better one big gallery, plus individual backups for users)
What i don’t need: complex editing / elaboration (would be done offline with darktable)
Non-negotiable needs: storing photos in album-based subfolders structure with all metadata inside photos or sidecar files. No other solution will ever stand the test of time.
I tried many tools and none fits the bill. Here are my experiences:
My solution: more of the idea of how i want to proceed from here on…
Backup: keep the great Immich for phone backups. Limitations: requiring emails as user logins breaks my home server authentication scheme but i can live with it. The impossibility to organize photos in folders is a deal breaker but luckily, you can define “logical” albums and download them.
Organization: good old filesystem stuff, i don’t need any specific tools. Existing photos are already sorted in subfolders, new albums can be created from Immich, downloaded, and stored on new subfolders on the server. Non-phone albums (DSLR, film cameras…) can just be added as well directly on filesystem
Viewing: PiGallery2 pointed at the subfolders, blazing fast viewing online for all family members.
Global workflow: take photos from phones, upload automatically to immich, then manually go sort them in albums, download albums and create appropriate subfolders on the server (if needed to save space, delete downloaded photos from immich). Upload/unzip and enjoy from PiGallery2. – OR – take photos with other cameras, scan/process on PC (darktable), create appropriate subfolders on the server, upload and enjoy from PiGallery2.
All in all what pisses me off of all this is:
Of course, the best course would be to have Immich support folders (not external libraries, but actually folder based albums which is totally different approach) and it being able to move photos to folders, but hey, it wouldn’t be fun in that case :)
Amy thoughts?
UPDATE: Immich storage templates seems to be the missing link. Using that properly would cut out the manual download/reupload approach. Need to experiment a bit, but looks promising.
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I don’t have your requirements, but nextcloud with Memories works well enough for me. Nextcloud does the file things, including auto upload from phones. Memories then displays those photos.
I moved away from nextcloud after many years, it was time to explore new stuff I guess.
I never used memories before anyway