[yoble]

My mom is an avid traveler who takes a ton of photos and puts them on albums she then shares with the family, and a while ago she was asking if I had a solution so she could have a website where all her albums are listed. She wanted to not have to share a new link each time, and have people easily look up older ones.

I didn't have any easy solution and this looks promising, congrats!

A few dealbreaker things I can share:

- she has lots of albums already on gphoto. She'd need to easily import them.

- she makes heavy use of the map and text blocks you can add in gphoto albums, which makes each album a kind of travel diary. I don't get the sense these are supported in your product yet, these would be required for her.

- she doesn't have a ton of videos but sometimes she does have a few.

- I'd have some concerns about the longevity of your product - if she invests time into it she wants to be able to look back at the albums in 10-20 years time. Having a convenient way to export the albums would be reassuring to me.

- I think she has a few 1000s photos in those albums, so your highest tier would be too low for her, if there was a way to buy storage that might suit her usage better (though she has a hobbyist budget).

It might be technically difficult and you rejected that path already, but I'm thinking an ideal way for her would be to keep editing her albums in gphotos and sync them to your site, which would take care of the longevity concerns and allow her to keep using the interface she knows (if you linked directly to the pics/vids on google server that would eliminate the cost of storing pictures for you, but I assume that's impossible or prohibited by google's tos).

Anyway, just sharing my use case in case that's useful but congrats on launching and on the good looking product!

[orlevco]

First of all, your mom sounds awesome.

Second, thanks for the detailed thoughts!

Easy import of existing albums - We have that! find the album on GPhotos, select all and import. Check out how quick it is here: https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=Wk1wtDoPO5_DYWEV

Map and text blocks - These are currently not supported, but we're still considering different use cases and will add features to match the ones we focus on soon.

Videos - These are currently not supported but might be added soon. They pose some storage and pricing issues but we'll try to solve that. Again depending on the use case we end up pursuing

Longevity - This is a legitimate concern. Obviously we're hoping that this product keeps growing and plan to maintain it. Regardless - The north star of this product is to be fast and easy to set up. So we hope that the time investment won't be that big anyhow.

Pricing and Storage - We've just launched so the pricing plans will definitely change over time. We'll take that into account.

Syncing albums - Seamlessly syncing albums to online galleries was our dream. Unfortunately Google's API doesn't support that (for obvious security and privacy concerns).

We'd love for your mom to give our product a try and will be happy to give her a generous period of free usage of the premium plan for some of her feedback. If you're interested, please reach out at [e-mail].

Thanks again!

Or

[wisehacker]

Is it 1000 photos per album? Or is it max 1000 photos regardless of number of albums? If it is so, how does unlimited albums work in such case?

[orlevco]

It's currently 1000 photos total that you can divide between as many albums you like.

But honestly we've just launched, so pricing and tiers might very well change as we discover what users want and are willing to pay for.

[tyrust]

> she could have a website where all her albums are listed. She wanted to not have to share a new link each time, and have people easily look up older ones.

Would a static site with a list of links to Google Photos albums work? I've done this with my family.

If so, there are ample static website providers out there.

[scrollaway]

I have a different use case in a similar situation.

My girlfriend runs an art studio that does art workshops. She uses Google workspace. She and her other teachers use Google workspace and have Google photos. They create albums of each workshop.

They want to have all the albums in one place so the social media person can easily find and use them.

Ideally there should be a way to make a Google photos account shared with the rest of the team. Unfortunately Google photos is not officially part of Workspace so it’s not treated as a b2b product.

[solardev]

Can you make a shared album and invite the same account to all of them?

[scrollaway]

I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's multiple accounts to invite. Do you mean a shared group?

I actually just tested creating a google group now, but indeed you cannot invite a group to a shared photo album.

Creating multiple shared albums, and sharing each album individually, manually, every single time, is super cumbersome. Plus I don't think the other users see the list of shared albums anywhere.

A huge shame given how great of a photo gallery app Google Photos is.

[solardev]

> Creating multiple shared albums, and sharing each album individually, manually, every single time, is super cumbersome.

Yes, this, sorry. I meant just having a "[e-mail]" account, and sharing all the shared albums to that one user. The social media person always logs in with that account and they can see all the shared albums. But yeah, you do have to share all the albums with them individually (unless they're always of the same people/pets, in which case you can use the "partner sharing" AI stuff too which works maybe 80% of the time).

[scrollaway]

Yes, I've actually used partner sharing as a workaround like you mention but it's not ideal and clearly not built for this use case.

Ah well, I don't think there's a clean solution to this right now. A shame. Maybe someone will make one.

[dawnerd]

Been looking for something like this myself and surprisingly not that many options out there especially self hosted. All of the new ones are trying to chase after AI. Older ones don’t support object storage.

Using Google for my photos is a no go though so hopefully OP will come up with a solution for that.

[orlevco]

Cool. Can you elaborate a bit on your issue with Google?

[mikehotel]

Most likely they are trying to degoogle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeGoogle

[dawnerd]

I don't want Google using my data to train their models among other things.