Hey all, I have a question for software/website recommendations!
I have a couple thousand family photos, plus a whole bunch of videos, that I’ve been spending my winter break digitizing, uploading to my computer, and tagging with the people/holidays/year/etc relevant to each one. Right now, we have most of these things on DVD and also my computer.
I’d like to upload them to some sort of cloud service with a way to easily share links with family members who cannot/will not come to my parent’s house to look at old DVDs, but I’d like to avoid Google Photos/OneDrive/iCloud/etc. I’ve been looking at Ente but want to know if anyone has any suggestions otherwise before I start a new subscription service lmao.
The requirements for my purposes are as follows:
Easy way to create + share links to specific photos/videos even if the person I’m sharing with does not have an account
Cross-platform functionality. The simpler the better. Most of my family is elderly at this point.
Support for metadata tags so I can like, search “Jay” and have all the photos with me in them pop up.
Cannot be self-hosted - I don’t have the infrastructure, money, or time atm to do that - but I’d like to switch to self-hosted in the future, so a service that supports both would be great.
Bonus but not required: it’d be nice if it was possible for people other than me to upload photos/videos without making an account or anything.
Does a service like this exist?? Ente feels like my best bet but I’m wondering if there’s a service I’m missing in my search. Does anyone have experience with Ente?
The last time I needed to share media with my in-laws, I just put it on a high-capacity USB flash drive and mailed it to Australia since they had relatively modern smart TVs with USB input and knew how to view photos and videos on a USB stick using their TVs.
Unfortunately, such a thing would get lost way way way too quickly in my family </3 I’m already missing VHS tapes I looked at just last year, but in the span of a year they’ve gone missing. I have just about everything backed up on DVDs, I’d like to use a cloud service for sharing.
I’d like to go the self-hosted route as a compliment to the family history website I’ve been building, though I appreciate I might be naive about just how costly and complex such an endeavour would be. I’m already exploring Digital Ocean Spaces for the media for that site so will see if it works out.
I’m still open to trying other services if they fit my needs (very similar to yours, though I would like the ability to have accounts or customise links to provide certain views of the service)
I’ve been messing with immich and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s self-hosted, so closer to what @straydogstrut is looking for, but it’s distributed as a docker app so it’s pretty straightforward to put it on a publicly-accessible server. You can have multiple accounts, create shared albums, share links (with or without password protection). There are iPhone and Android apps. It’s pretty light on resources. I’m running it on an N150-based single-board computer.
I’m using it as a self-hosted curated library of the pictures I actually want to keep. I’m still in the “curating” stage, but I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and so far so good.
good to hear more good things about immich.. i was looking into it but im not sure yet. could do it on some sort of vps i guess, since im unable to actually get a little computer purely for that purpose yet (one semester left at college, lots of moving around, very little money).
since you have some immich experience, could you perhaps answer this question:
is is possible to have an immich instance not show things by date/not show the date prominently with each photo/video??? all of the services im finding now do that, and i cant turn it off.. which, because so many photos/videos are scans, facebook downloads, etc, the dates are absolutely useless and i have no way of knowing the original.
i have my files all organized into folders based on year but thats sort of all i got. i just want something that lets me view photos/videos in a ‘file explorer’ type of thing where it doesnt try to get quirky and sort into dates lol.
I have another suggestion! I use immich, but to me that is more of a photo backup/library alternative. Its very similar to Google Photos or Apple Photos. For sharing photos publicly and privately I have been using Lychee. You can make user accounts and lock certain albums to certain users, or share the album publicly
I love how lychee looks and all the album features it has!! my only problem is it looks like there’s no app, and a lot of my extended family (who will be using it to just look at photos, not upload) only do things on their phones I’ve been testing out Piwigo the past couple of days and while it’s a bit clunky (and expensive, when my free trial runs out) it seems to have everything I need and an extremely simple-to-use app.
I’ve been testing out Piwigo the past couple of days and while it’s a bit clunky (and expensive, when my free trial runs out) it seems to have everything I need and an extremely simple-to-use app.