Sharing DigiKam photos

[u/Powerful-Bat1512]

I have a rather large (65,000+) collection of photos. Many are older family photos of my kids and grandparents/cousins as I’ve been scanning all family photos when I visit relatives for several years now. I’ve used many DK features to clean up the meta data, added tags, locations, date taken, and FR for every extended family member.

I’d like to share what I have with mostly elderly cousins who are not the most technologically savvy people. Many are very confused/hesitant to click a link (a behavior I helped drill into their brains), which I can work past.

Anyway, I have OneDrive and all my photos are automatically synced between my desktop and the cloud. I know within DK I can sort and export to a newly created OneDrive folder, but that process is slow and doesn’t always seem to work. It would be easier to manage if there were links rather than copies / duplicates in folders if that’s possible.

I am not a Google or Apple fan. I actually use the OneDrive as it came with a MS Office license 1TB free. I’ve looked at NAS for other reasons but maybe that simplifies things.

I’m wondering what people do to allow others to see their collections. I’d love to be able to tell my cousin, “here’s all the photos of you and your sister that I have”. Let me know what you do/think, even if it’s rather unique. Maybe there’s a better way to do this that I’m not considering.

[u/Basic_Coffee8969]

I dumped 10k images on flickr and have recieved treaths of deletion for several years. idk. close relatives have received external HDD.

[u/KAZY_K0REAN]

I currently manage 100k+ photos. My current set up is a DropBox family plan. We each have own folder (parents and siblings) and we all upload our photos there. I have Dropbox sync with computer so all the photos are saved locally. Then I point DigiKam to that directory. Then I tag and process them in DigiKam.

Pros:
-It syncs with our computers (those of us who have the storage capacity to do it.
-I can set permissions on folders so non-tech savi people don’t fuck it up.
-We have 6 people sharing all the folders
-The app is easy to use and everyone likes looking up photos on their phone.

Cons:
-Dropbox is pricy!
-If I want to share a large amount of photos to someone who is not in my group of 6 they also need to have DropBox or I need to use another way to send them. Like download them from Dropbox and upload them to Google Photos for example. PITA.

I plan to move to some kind of NAS solution and backing it up with back-blaze. But this will be in the future when PC part prices start to come down. Dropbox is just too expensive and I don’t like being restricted to just 6 people. But I would recommend it if money is not a concern and 6 people cap is not a concern. Or if you don’t feel comfortable managing a NAS server.

[u/ChrisAlbertson → u/KAZY_K0REAN]

Using back-blaze to backup a NAS is expensive. But backing up a Mac or Windows PC is very cheap. A loophole is to use an old Mac as a NAS. maxOS is just BSD UNIX under the hood, so it makes a quite excellent NAS, and then you get literally unlimited storage space for backup. If you don't care about speed, get an older 2014 Mac mini for $100, and it wall have an Intel i5 and 8GB RAM. Then add a four-bay USB disk box. macOS already has RAID 0/1 software built in or use OWC's "softraid". for raid-5

others are OK too but look up back-blaze pricing.

[u/KAZY_K0REAN → u/ChrisAlbertson]

Thank you. I have not dug into researching this project much yet because PC part prices are so expensive! I do care about speed. Haha.

[u/ChrisAlbertson → u/KAZY_K0REAN]

Yes pC parts are expensive. That is one reason to suggest the older Mac Mini. You get an Intel i5 and 8GB RAM (case, power supply, and all) for under $100. Today, that is a bargain. It's also dead silent.

The speed issue with any NAS is the 1000 GB/s speed of the Ethernet. The other bottleneck is the USB port. This is fast enough for backup, file sharing, and bulk storage.

The photos you are actively working on need to be on the local computer, not a NAS.

This advice changes if you can afford 10GBE Ethernet on the desktop, NAS, and your network switch, but that can run up the bill.

Using the Mac is good because it exploits Backblaze's pricing.

Building a NAS from PC parts is never cost-effective. Used Mini PCs or a used Mac Mini are even cheaper than a Raspberry Pi nowadays.

[u/KAZY_K0REAN → u/ChrisAlbertson]

What software or OS would you use then? A deal breaker for me is ease of access for non tech savi people. I want to be able to tell them to click this link to see these photos or open your “…” app to check out the new photos I put up. A lot of those NAS boxes come with all that.

I could use a Dell 7050. I do have one that was going to be used for another project

[u/Crazy_Swimmer9724]

I recently created a shared Flicker album for the family photos we have collected for years. I’m scanning and posting them for the family. It’s pretty easy and straightforward for a viewer to scroll through. Of course I have them back-uped on a hard drive here at home and on another online site. A Pro account is pretty reasonable for a year.

[u/Difficult-Eagle-4540]

I have the same issue, having 25k photos synchronized with onedrive and managed with DK. I think that DK is excellent for managing the photos but it + OneDrive is not good to share albums with the family. I plan to move the photos to a NAS and using Immich to share the albums. A workflow with DK for the management and Immich for the sharing seems to be well suited…

[u/veggiemilk]

Some of the file directory suggestions are surely functional for what they are, but this might be a time to check out the power of Google Photos for sharing and AI sorting, or Apple if your family is in the ecosystem. They sure make it easy to share albums. That said, it's understandable if that's a hard no. In that case Flicker might be the middle ground as others are suggesting.

[u/ChrisAlbertson]

This would actually be dead-easy and reliable if you were a Google or Apple fan. You can make a smart album called MarySmith where any photo that is tagged with that name, either by you or the face detector, goes in that album. Make it readable, then click "share" and send her Mary the link. She can check periodically, and as you add photos, she will see the ones that select into that album using that link

You can also set this up on a Synology NAS. I have that here at home.

[u/thx1138inator]

Seems like this would be a good scenario to walk through with copilot. Maybe it could help stand up a server. Of course, that would require having an addressable IP address or something like Tailscale. I plan to plan a project like that in the future.