This question has already been around couple of times, but I haven’t found an option which would allow multiple users and multiple OS’s (Linux and Windows mostly, mobile, both android and ios, support would be nice at least for viewing) to conviniently share the same storage.
This has been an issue on my network for quite some time and now when I rebuilt my home server I installed TrueNAS on a VM and I’m currently organizing my collections over there with Shotwell so the question became acute again.
Digikam seems to be promising for the rest than organizing the actual files (which I can live with, either shotwell or a shell script to sort them by exif-dates), but I haven’t tried that yet with windows and my kubuntu desktop seems to only have snap-package of that without support for external SQL.
On “editing” part it would be pretty much sufficient to tag photos/folders to contain different events, locations and stuff like that, but it would be nice to have access to actual file in case some actual editing needs to be done, but I suppose SMB-share on truenas will accomplish that close enough.
Other need-to-have feature is to manage RAW and JPG versions of the same image at least somehow. Even removing JPGs and leaving only RAW images would be sufficient.
And finally, I really like to have the actual files laying around on a network share (or somewhere) so that they’re easy to back up, copy to external nextcloud for sharing and in general have more flexibility in the future in case something better comes up or my environment changes.
I’ve heard about it, but haven’t tried it myself. If I’ve understoord correctly it requires that photos are stored on it’s own storage format instead of flat files on a network share, so it doesn’t really fit the bill. If I could run that as a front end for existing storage I would already tried it out, but for the reasons mentioned I really like to have the actual files available and Immich doesn’t really fit the bill on that part. Interesting project anyways and it absolutely could to the trick I’m after, but I don’t think I’ll spend another terabyte of storage just for that (yes, there’s quite a few photos, wife and me have been taking photos with dslr as a hobby over 15 years and we have kids and dogs).
When you import your define a directory structure of your choosing. All the files are accessible in their regular format.
If you’re talking about the ability to index another directory they are experimenting with a read only import (as opposed to upload) now.
Good to know, thanks. I need to put that to a test.