I had a child and both of our parents were in another country so wanted to keep them updated with photos and videos but refused to use social media. I have been using Back Then which, to be fair, has worked pretty well. I pay a subscription and can give access to anybody I want through their email. They then have to download an app and sign in to see. It updates them if there’s new photos and shows them in a nice chronological order by age. There are other features (likes and comments) but tbh, no-one really uses them and I don’t care about that. For me, it’s just the privacy and access control I’m after
Now I have built my home server and got to the point where it’s reliable (enough), plus I’m happy with my security/SSO setup, does anybody recommend a self hosted photo sharing tool?
Immich is probably not great for this because its massively updated with breaking changes every few versions. I am going to assume OPs family will not be OK to keep installing the latest mobile app for access.
If they are the average user they want to install it once and that’s it. But maybe I am wrong and they are tech savy, then it would be a nice solution.
My low-tech and not photo-specific solution for this: I’ve created accounts for my parents on my matrix server, and we have a “family room” to share photos of the kids. The element client let’s you browse all media upload to a room, so you sort of get the “chronological order” display.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
Immich could be an option ( has an app and user mgmt ).
Photoprism can work too, but that only had a web/PWA version IIRC.
Immich is probably not great for this because its massively updated with breaking changes every few versions. I am going to assume OPs family will not be OK to keep installing the latest mobile app for access. If they are the average user they want to install it once and that’s it. But maybe I am wrong and they are tech savy, then it would be a nice solution.
They’re probably going to install it through Google Play tho (if it’s available there) so it’d be pretty easy, and probably automatic, to update it
My low-tech and not photo-specific solution for this: I’ve created accounts for my parents on my matrix server, and we have a “family room” to share photos of the kids. The element client let’s you browse all media upload to a room, so you sort of get the “chronological order” display.