Hi. Sorry for the vague title. Nowadays I’m using multiple computers and get to need files and such from other machines pretty often. My music and photos library has also increased and it’s getting much harder to maintain with it being scattered across many machines. Basically I’m trying to have a photo library and plain files(documents, music, etc) shared across computers.

For plain files I’m thinking nfs+samba would be the best approach, but there are problems. They have speed issues, but as I can’t afford large space for all my machines I can’t keep a full rsync’d local copies everywhere too.

The photos are my bigger concern, as I’m looking for a tagging feature. A plain directory structure would be easy to sync but those tags would differ by programs… desktop programs like digikam or xnview(sadly proprietary) would work well if I didn’t need syncing, but I’m not sure if they’d work reliably with all their configs/files stored over nfs. Plus, these programs would have incompatibilities by platform and not work at all on android.

Web based solutions like Immich or NextCloud Photos appear to be pretty famous nowadays, but I’m not sure about them as well. They seem to be overkill for my purpose, and those mostly tend to be very new & i’m not too sure about their future, as they store tags and such on their own formats.

Edit: Oops, forgot to say. I have multiple servers right now, one offsite running FreeBSD, another running Devuan, and one at home running FreeBSD.

I’d love to hear how others are maintaining their system. Thanks for reading.

  • AdaEnglish
    3•4 months ago

    I use digikam with sidecar files on my main photo editing PC.

    We sync this directory with a media server on the local network that enables all of the local devices to access the photos and tags. In theory, it means we could run digikam on another device as well, and sync data between them via updates to the sidecar files, but in practice, we don’t do this and the media server is effectively read only.

    Then, we sync the media server images with a photoprism instance that we have running on external hosting. Photoprism recognises the keywords and sidecar data from digikam, which lets me search and access the images from anywhere.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•4 months ago

      That’s great, I never knew Photoprism can detect and work with digikam’s sidecar files. Thanks for sharing.