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I am looking for photo management software that will work in the following environment:

  • Photos all stored in a central location on the NAS
  • Supports both Mac and Windows clients
  • Syncs changes made (i.e. my wife creates an album and edits photos on her Mac and it will show up next time I open the photo manager on my windows laptop)
  • I am okay with it being a single user environment (i.e. we both can't be in the photo manager making changes at the same time)

Picasa doesn't seem to support this setup and I'm having a hard time finding a solution to what I thought would be a common software need.

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Are you looking for free only? Because Photoshop Lightroom is exactly what you're looking for, but comes at 300$. – slhck Aug 8 '11 at 18:13
Thanks for the suggestion, I will check that one out. Free would be preferable, but I would be willing to pay for a good solution. $300 seems quite expensive for just managing family photos. – Daws Aug 8 '11 at 18:21
Just for managing, it's a bit of an overhead, right. It's more than managing though, it would allow you to edit photos using a really great engine, and the workflow is the fastest I've ever seen. I'm curious though if someone finds a cheaper alternative :) – slhck Aug 8 '11 at 18:27
@shlck: Lightroom isn't exactly it. Catalogs can't be stored on the network, unless that's been changed recently. – afrazier Oct 10 '11 at 17:41
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2 Answers

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I was thinking the same thing. A middle ground between Picasa/Live Gallery and CS5 . . .

The closest answer I've found is digiKam. It's Linux only though, but is QUITE powerful. I've made good use of the thumbnail generator for my videos.

Just fire it up in a VM. . .

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This may be overkill, but if your NAS solution allows you to install software and is either Windows or Linux based, you might want to install a web server with PHP (i.e. XAMPP or LighttpD) and use Gallery, which is a free and open-source package for managing and creating photo galleries online.

You can set your newly-installed web server up so that it's only accessible from within your own network, so there's no need to worry about anybody but people on your network seeing your photos. You, your family, and friends could look at any pictures within your network from within any modern web browser on any platform.

This option would take a bit of work to setup, but Gallery is very flexible and would do what you want all from a web browser.

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