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by superkuh 1038 days ago
Install nginx. Put the photos in folders in your ~/www dir. Enable indexing. It's incredibly secure and has pretty much zero maintainence. Just link people to the http://yourIPhere/photos/ dir.

It will be very easy for the wife to use since all she has to do is put the photo files in folders using the normal operating system GUI. This is something everyone knows how to do.
1 comments
dewey 1038 days ago
That's not really "photo organizing / sharing", that's just a directory listing.

What you want from a photo specific software is things like thumbnails, exif info, powerful search, maybe indexing the content of the pictures (Searching for "dog") etc.

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superkuh 1037 days ago
Ah, in that case after the wife has looked at photos, named their file names accordingly and put them in the dir she can run http://xome.net/projects/jigl/ or any other .html photo gallery generator. It'll show thumbnails, exif info, and she can press ctrl-f to search in the browser.

I guess you want the gallery generation to be automagic though. Might be some work but you could whip up a cron shell script to see if any sub-dir in ~/www/photos/ has files and doesn't have an index.html and have it autogenerate them.

As I write this I do realize it's starting to get pretty complex. Almost like you'd wish for an all-in-one solution like you'd asked. But I still think this method would be better long term though.

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Sakos 1038 days ago
I feel like this is the kind of thing where an amalgation of Linux tools hacked together and based on this would offer a significantly better solution than most self-hosted media serving software I've seen.
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dewey 1038 days ago
If I'd have to choose I'd take a kinda-good off the shelf solution over a "Linux tools hacked together" solution any day.

Especially because I don't want to maintain something important like a photo collection forever. Having other people in the family being able to use it by just installing some mobile app off the app store is also a big plus.

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Sakos 1037 days ago
Of course, so would I. But I haven't found any kinda-good off the shelf solution. They're all sorta bad in their own way. Plex and Jellyfin constantly frustrate me with the bizarre unfixable issues I encounter.
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