Any Photo Album software for family pictures?

ianp5a

ianp5a

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Ian
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I'm looking to share family photos digitally where I add pictures, and the family can browse them easily by date and place or other keyword too. We want the option to see more than one picture at a time, and have captions. But otherwise no other frills needed.

It needs to be browsable on PCs and phones. The pictures should be stored in an open format, not some weird special format or dependent on some evil corporation's website.

Any help appreciated. Thanks
 
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I find Flickr serves this purpose well. You can split your photos into albums too. I do it for my family photos and as a cloud backup. I bought the pro version, specifically for this.
 
RichardH said:
I find Flickr serves this purpose well. You can split your photos into albums too. I do it for my family photos and as a cloud backup. I bought the pro version, specifically for this.
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This is what I'd look at to begin with. A private group on Flickr.
Controls over privacy, unlimited albums and galleries within your account, comments on photos (if you make the photos private, only family members will be able to see them), and even a discussion area (if it's a private group, then that's private too).
Others can upload to the group allowing more than just one contributor.
You wouldn't even need the pro version as you could just set up a second account to post to it once your first account hits it's limit.
Easy upload from phone or desktop, easy viewing on the Flickr app.
 
Thanks bit the Flikr albums don't seem to have date and place capability. Just fixed albums. And their usual crazy layout where "vertical pictures are always smaller" and terrible navigation where you can't view the next album, you need to go back out first, find the next one, and go back into that one. This is typical of these big corporation offerings, as they never care when they reach a certain size.
 
ianp5a said:
Thanks bit the Flikr albums don't seem to have date and place capability. Just fixed albums. And their usual crazy layout where "vertical pictures are always smaller" and terrible navigation where you can't view the next album, you need to go back out first, find the next one, and go back into that one. This is typical of these big corporation offerings, as they never care when they reach a certain size.
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If you classify SmugMug/Flickr as a “big corporation” (or “evil corporation” as earlier) I don’t what sort you would approve of. The FamilyAlbum recommended earlier is owned by a corporation with many ‘brands’ too. I expect they will all be stored on Amazon or MS servers anyway :(.
 
If you have your own hosting space Piwigo may be useful, its open source and free or you can pay them to host the images.

You can tag and keyword images on upload and search via them.

Demo https://demo1.piwigo.com/
 
sphexx said:
If you classify SmugMug/Flickr as a “big corporation” (or “evil corporation” as earlier) I don’t what sort you would approve of. The FamilyAlbum recommended earlier is owned by a corporation with many ‘brands’ too. I expect they will all be stored on Amazon or MS servers anyway :(.
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Yes. But I just need to share the pictures. So not necessarily hosted online.

Although if I do choose an online solution it doesn't have to be on some companies service where they run it as they please. I'd happily use Nextcloud or similar, which would be set up how I like it. A big difference.

The problem with evil corp is, as I mentioned the lack of care at the user interaction level. Often catering for the lowest common denominator only. Flikr, for example, hasn't fixed it's problems it's had for many, many years. The servers they use won't affect it much.
 
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ianp5a said:
Yes. But I just need to share the pictures. So not necessarily hosted online.

Although if I do choose an online solution it doesn't have to be on some companies service where they run it as they please. I'd happily use Nextcloud or similar, which would be set up how I like it. A big difference.

The problem with evil corp is, as I mentioned the lack of care at the user interaction level. Often catering for the lowest common denominator only. Flikr, for example, hasn't fixed it's problems it's had for many, many years. The servers they use won't affect it much.
Click to expand...

Yes, I feel your pain I guess the only way is some sort of DIY solution — if you make one you could market it and become an evil corporation yourself. :lol:

I really know nothing about this except as an end user but wouldn’t you own website with a password to access fit the bill? There seem to be plenty of templates for that sort of thing.
 
I was going to suggest Lightroom has this functionality. You can share albums to the web where they can be accessed by anyone with the link (which you control). I'm guessing this fails the "evil corporation" test though :rolleyes:
 
sphexx said:
Yes, I feel your pain I guess the only way is some sort of DIY solution — if you make one you could market it and become an evil corporation yourself. :LOL:

I really know nothing about this except as an end user but wouldn’t you own website with a password to access fit the bill? There seem to be plenty of templates for that sort of thing.
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Right. Interesting idea. I'll look into those template sites. Might be made to be easy enough.
RichardC27 said:
I was going to suggest Lightroom has this functionality. You can share albums to the web where they can be accessed by anyone with the link (which you control). I'm guessing this fails the "evil corporation" test though :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I'm avoiding evil corps because they don't work so well, because why should they bother if they dominate the market? Which is in fact the case with Lightroom. They can't be bothered to make a version run on my PC. So they exclude themselves.
Also I suspect their albums would not be sortable by year or location? Also Lightroom is a super expensive solution just for that.
 
ianp5a said:
Right. Interesting idea. I'll look into those template sites. Might be made to be easy enough.
Click to expand...
I was thinking of those who do commercial (inc weddings) photography who I think have various galleries that various clients can access and they must have naming/tagging/titling of some sort?
 
learningtofly said:
OP, if I take the trouble to respond to your post, wouldn’t it be a simple courtesy to acknowledge that within the myriad of your replies?
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Yes. Sorry for the delay. I did write a reply but unluckily didn't press send, as other replies came in just then. Anyway thanks. But it looks like it's mobile only, and an app is required.
 
I'm looking for a solution myself, so here's some of my thoughts on options:
1) You could go down the complete DIY route, buy a NAS to connect to your home broadband, install a webserver on it and configure it so that external users can connect to it. That way all the files and the web server are in your house in your control.
2) The next option is to pay for hosting and install a photo gallery/content management system and upload your photos there. I had been doing this for quite a while for family stuff, using Dreamhost for the hosting and a system called (imaginatively) "Gallery" http://gallery.menalto.com/ but it's not been updated in ages and is rather clunky. I could change my gallery system, but it would mean having to migrate the data.
3) Pay for a full solution. Use something like Squarespace with it's user galleries, or Smugmug. Both of which will work nicely with mobile browsers. Smugmug own Flickr, but it's a different solution developed for a different purpose.
4) Go for the full corporate evil and use Google Photos.

The problem is that you can't get something for nothing on the internet now. Google, Amazon and MS own larger chunks of the services available. You end up needing to pay for a service somewhere along the line, but then it's a case of how long till that service is bought up by a bigger corporation. Flickr was independent, then owned by Yahoo, then one of the big US networks, now Smugmug.
I gave up my Flickr Pro account because it wasn't worth paying for for me.
Option 3 is still looking like the least-worst option.

I looked at that Family Album linked above and it's an option, but it is geared for phones. Unless you pay for the premium version when you can upload from a PC. It also looks like they are trying to push their print products too.

The other issue with these services is that they all require every family member to create an account in order to see the photos and sometimes that's a barrier in itself, particularly if you want to share with less technical older folk. "I don't know how to do that, so I won't bother".

I'm not sure that there's an ideal solution.
Personally I want:
To bulk upload from a computer (not a phone),
I don't want to have to install special software.
I want to group photos in albums organised sensibly by year and event
I want to be able to label images
I want to be able to share a direct link to an album, so I can send a link to the latest holiday snaps but I want them to be able to browse the rest of the gallery
I'd like an unfussy user interface with no adverts.
I don't want to have to find another solution in 5 years time.

Not asking much :p

If anyone has any ideas, I'm interested too.
 
ABTog said:
I'm looking for a solution myself, so here's some of my thoughts on options:
1) You could go down the complete DIY route, buy a NAS to connect to your home broadband, install a webserver on it and configure it so that external users can connect to it. That way all the files and the web server are in your house in your control.
2) The next option is to pay for hosting and install a photo gallery/content management system and upload your photos there. I had been doing this for quite a while for family stuff, using Dreamhost for the hosting and a system called (imaginatively) "Gallery" http://gallery.menalto.com/ but it's not been updated in ages and is rather clunky. I could change my gallery system, but it would mean having to migrate the data.
3) Pay for a full solution. Use something like Squarespace with it's user galleries, or Smugmug. Both of which will work nicely with mobile browsers. Smugmug own Flickr, but it's a different solution developed for a different purpose.
4) Go for the full corporate evil and use Google Photos.

The problem is that you can't get something for nothing on the internet now. Google, Amazon and MS own larger chunks of the services available. You end up needing to pay for a service somewhere along the line, but then it's a case of how long till that service is bought up by a bigger corporation. Flickr was independent, then owned by Yahoo, then one of the big US networks, now Smugmug.
I gave up my Flickr Pro account because it wasn't worth paying for for me.
Option 3 is still looking like the least-worst option.

I looked at that Family Album linked above and it's an option, but it is geared for phones. Unless you pay for the premium version when you can upload from a PC. It also looks like they are trying to push their print products too.

The other issue with these services is that they all require every family member to create an account in order to see the photos and sometimes that's a barrier in itself, particularly if you want to share with less technical older folk. "I don't know how to do that, so I won't bother".

I'm not sure that there's an ideal solution.
Personally I want:
To bulk upload from a computer (not a phone),
I don't want to have to install special software.
I want to group photos in albums organised sensibly by year and event
I want to be able to label images
I want to be able to share a direct link to an album, so I can send a link to the latest holiday snaps but I want them to be able to browse the rest of the gallery
I'd like an unfussy user interface with no adverts.
I don't want to have to find another solution in 5 years time.

Not asking much :p

If anyone has any ideas, I'm interested too.
Click to expand...
Thanks. Google Photos doesn't seem to allow sorting by date or keyword either. But yes, my requirements are similar to yours. I definitely accept no login for family members.
 
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