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Photo Solution Suggestions Needed (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think the collection is between 500Gigs and a TB at this point but could easily grow quickly if I manage to get other family members to use whatever solution I come up with.

There's no edgy photos in the collection but as of right now I don't trust any cloud storage provider not to use my photos or videos for something like training AI, which I'm apprehensive about considering many of the photos are of my nieces and nephews and other family members. I don't want to make a choice that compromises someone elses privacy. I might be a little crazy. /shrug.

I know proton drive is encrypted such that even they can't see what's stored there but I can't play video back from there easily and I want the collection to be used and viewed easily. Otherwise what's the point?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think if your photos are on any kind of public website, AI idiots will scrape them regardless of the provider. So at minimum you have to password protect them. That said, I'd feel ok using this:

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

It basically runs NextCloud. You'd configure it so that only logged-in users can view the pictures, and give accounts to your friends and family. I don't think Hetzner is likely to train AI with it, though you could check through their privacy policy. Part of the issue with eg. Google Drive is that everyone wants stuff for free, so Google recovers some of its costs by advertising, AI training, etc. Hetzner charges enough to actually make a profit, while still being IMHO affordable at the level we're discussing. That means they don't have to do crap with advertising etc. I have 5TB in their Storage Box product and am happy with it.

If you want to be more hardcore, you could set up a dedicated server with an encrypted HDD, but now you have to deal with the hassles of self hosting, including backups. It still wouldn't be end to end encryption, which would require your users to run some kind of special client, or maybe use some awful javascript client.