I'm looking for suggestions for programs to help manage an archive of family photos and video clips. I have a large family and a few photographers can pump out a lot of photos at family events. I've sorta become the unofficial archivist of the family as I have a lot of photos and videos myself and I've become responsible for my parent's collection as well as they are not very tech savvy.

I'm kinda distrustful of cloud storage in general so I'm kinda looking to avoid using something like Google photos or even Proton Drive. I'd also like to try and stick to open source if I can. At this point I don't think my ideal program exists but I'm going to describe it and see how close we could get. Sorry if the following sounds too much like fantasy.

Ideally I'd like a program that could synchronize a media collection across the internet to 3 or 4 different households. For one thing so that there is redundancy if something bad like a fire happens so nothing is lost, and for another thing so that those households have local access to the archive. I'm hoping I wouldn't be needing any crazy hardware for this. Something like a raspberry pie with an attached spindle Drive would be acceptable, both for low power use and small physical footprint in the houses of family members I would be asking to host these.

Ideally some program could be used to interact with the archive locally and do things like add new media, edit metadata of media that's already in the archive or just view things.

That's it, Lemmy know what you guys think!

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[–] earth_walker@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

There's a lot to address here as you're talking about hardware and possibly multiple levels of software.

Yes, you can do this with raspberry pi or any SBC or mini PC. Even an old desktop PC if space isn't an issue.

In terms of photo management software, I really like Photoprism. Immich seems to be popular as well.

In order to get your photos synced to multiple computers over the internet (a good idea for resilience), you could look at syncthing. Alternatively, you could have one central server and one or two backups in different locations using borg backup or similar. In my experience, backups are easier to manage and make it easier to recover from data loss than replicating the current state of your data in multiple places. You can do both, though.

It's a very worthwhile project, but may be pretty difficult unless you are already comfortable with server technology or are enthusiastic about learning.