As written previously, I have a new PC. And I am still looking for a way to get technology to make my life easier and retain ownership of my data. Because I already have a workflow that works nicely.
Up to now Adobe Lightroom has been making my photography life easy
- All my images are thoroughly catalogued (that’s my own effort, Adobe just provides the tooling)
- Yes, almost all 98.000+ of them (it’s about 700GB)
- When my friends ask about a party 10 years ago where so-and-so did something, I can produce the images within 5 minutes on my mobile (it’s a real use-case and getting more so the older we get)
- It’s my visual memory of everything
- My mobile images are automatically added to my online library
- I have an automated local backup and all the images in the Adobe cloud.
- I can easily share albums with friends and family, I get asked for images quite often, because just for one family I have over 500 images of the four of them for this year.
- I can access my photo collection on all my devices
This technology has made my life easier for a price that I am more than willing to pay. It’s really good value to me.
BUT.
Adobe is one of those companies that loves their walled garden and does not want me to have my data. The raw images: sure. But they are trying very hard to keep my cataloging data for themselves and that’s almost half of what makes my collection so valuable to me.
And I am beginning to be less willing to accept that.
I have also freed my data from Adobe
- tagged all the photos inside lightroom with album and face recognition information manually
- exported all images “Original with settings” to our NAS → in that case and only that Lightroom exports the information into exif data of jps or xmp sidecars for raw images
- imported images into Digikam
- imported images into Darktable
What I lack now and am looking for are the missing links in the workflow:
- how do I create a backup, ideally cloud-based
- how do I enable access from my mobile
- how do I enable sharing images with friends quickly
- how do I auto-import my mobile images?
I have considered my Nextcloud installation but I would need to add lots and lots of space. But I would need to find a way to add cheap online storage to the server.
Nextcloud has working photo import from mobile
It is accessible on all my devices.
It can display photos
It allows me to share stuff
So how do I add 1 TB of space for it for under 200€ a year?
edit: Ha. I probably know how to do it: Hetzner (my hosting provider) offers cheap enough Object storage which is very likely exactly what I am looking for.)