Our family has about 300 GB of JPEG photos in total, spread across various hard drives in various countries. We'd like to have a solution to share and tag photos with the following features:
- Photos are stored on a central location.
- Each family member can manage which photos are stored on his/her computer.
- Each family member can add photos and tag photos conveniently.
- The solution works on Linux. (If it doesn't, I'm still interested, for educational purposes.)
We have a server running Debian GNU/Linux in a datacenter, which has enough free space to store all the photos. But we don't have the software for quick, convenient and safe collaboration.
Solution ideas I've considered:
- If the family lived together in a single house, I'd run F-Spot for managing the photos, and store the JPEG files on a NAS, and ask the family members not to modify the tag database at the same time.
- If I had lots of money, I'd pay for a Flickr and/or Picasa account, and store everything there. But even then it would not be convenient to add tags to a photo somebody else has uploaded -- the web UI is just not powerful enough to manage thousands of photos.
- Pay for 1 flickr account ($25 per year, quite cheap for unlimited photos), and use flickrfs or gnickr (old, from 2005) for collaboration. The problem here is that there is no F-Spot (or other tool) integration I know of, and also we have to trust flickr on our photos -- we would be more confident with a server we manage.
- picurl -- it may actually work, except that it is not possible to change tags or propagate tag changes with picurl.
- Store the images on the server running Gallery2 or Camera Life, and write a GUI client which speaks the Gallery Remote Protocol. Unfortunately, the protocol is not expressive enough for searching or modifying tags.
A list of some relevant software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_gallery_software
