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!

  • phanto
    102·
    6 days ago

    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·
      6 days 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.