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February 1, 2008

Sharing Access to Digital Photos

Dawnise has a Windows box, and uses an app called ACDSee as her image viewer of choice.

I have a Linux box, and use f-spot to access and organize our photo collection.

The pictures themselves live on our network attached storage, easily accessible from both her machine and mine, as well as our notebooks on the wireless network.

You can probably already guess this doesn't have a happy ending...

The problem is, both these apps assume they'll manage the full life-cycle of your photos - from the moment you copy them from your digital camera. They both have a database in which they store metadata about the photo which facilitates handy behaviors like browsing by date.

What's particularly annoying about this is that neither application offers "watch folders" - i.e. the ability to notice new files appearing in a certain place and offer to import them into your collection.

Since only one of us does the actual copying of pictures from the camera, that forces the other one of us to always re-scan the entire collection - sitting now around 11k files (15GB) - to update the database for our application of choice.

This takes forever (order of hours). This really sucks.

Anyone have any wisdom to share on how they've solved this problem in their particular environment?

Posted by dberger at February 1, 2008 2:36 PM

Comments

I don't know of a good solution. Most software either assumes that there is a single user and all data is stored on the local machine, or doesn't provide much value in terms of unifying viewing the entire data set. iView Media, (for the Mac), can store metadata close to the pictures, but doesn't make it easy to see all pictures everywhere. iPhoto behaves like you describe (each person owns his own metadata--and you can't easily even share the photos between users).
I've been hoping to write my own solution sometime, but for now, I just store all photos (close to 500GB now) on a share, and give family and friends SFTP access to it all, which is a pretty awful user experience.

Posted by: Claes-Fredrik Mannby at February 1, 2008 5:05 PM