Photo Management

Software
1

Hey @matthew919 ,

A while back you were hot on photo management. Where did you end up on that?

I’d like to improve the massive messive i have on my nas.

I’m hoping that there is something that works like Obsidian in that everything it does is stored in the files themselves or in their locations. Lots of them have their own database, and if the front end and the database goes away, your mess is still there.

Did you end up taking charge of your photos?

2

At the moment I have 2 solutions

Solution 1 - Manually manage

Here I am using PiGallery2 (PG2) which sits on top of a folder structure I manually maintain using ACDSEE. It was great to organise everything, add keywords sorting into folders.
One of the features I love about ACDSEE is you can create a hierarchy of keywords based on the folder structure, then run a process to assign all these keywords to the image. In my folder structure below, this lets me separate photos across multiple directories, but be able to search across them with software that can handle searching keywords.
Once in folders, this is where PG2 works great, showing the folder structure in the current folder, sub folders at the top and display images in current folder. You can also see the location on a map of all images like a heat map. Plenty of other config too that I haven’t played with.

Tried uploading an image here and I can never seem to, always get the “processing image” which never disappear… :frowning:

The folder structure works like below:

| Photographer A (Me)
   | Year
      | Album / Event A
      | Album / Event B
| Photographer B (Wife)
   | Year
      | Album / Event A
      | Album / Event B
| Drone Photos
   | Year
      | Location A
      | Location B
| Special albums
   | Wedding
   | Europe Trip

The issue with this is it’s very manual and needs to be maintained before photos are visible here. That’s where solution 2 comes in

Solution 2 - Self Hosted Photo Library

I have tried many, many, MANY different photo libraries and they often fall short on many features. I guess I have always wanted to default back to manually managing them. So PG2 has become my “archive”, showing older data (no newer than a year ago) while solution 2 just stores everything else in Immich. It’s essentially the self hosted copy of google photos. It’s very much in active development, so i don’t entirely trust it just yet. But for uploading all my photos from my phone, being able to search and see on a map all photos taken, mobile access, its working great.
I implemented Immich a few months ago, and the plan is to each year get that years worth of photos and sort into folders to be visible with PG2.

3

I think Pigallery2 sounds like a good fit for me thanks mate.

I had a feeling that you’d have an answer for me!

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