I had a child and both of our parents were in another country so wanted to keep them updated with photos and videos but refused to use social media. I have been using Back Then which, to be fair, has worked pretty well. I pay a subscription and can give access to anybody I want through their email. They then have to download an app and sign in to see. It updates them if there’s new photos and shows them in a nice chronological order by age. There are other features (likes and comments) but tbh, no-one really uses them and I don’t care about that. For me, it’s just the privacy and access control I’m after
Now I have built my home server and got to the point where it’s reliable (enough), plus I’m happy with my security/SSO setup, does anybody recommend a self hosted photo sharing tool?
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If you think something similar to Instagram could solve your problem, check this: https://docs.pixelfed.org/running-pixelfed/installation/
Also, it should be trivial to expand it to the rest of the family
I’ve been using Lychee for photo sharing with family for the past few months. Works really quickly, simply, plus it looks good.
Ente Photos is now open source end to end, both server and app.
Training parents in another country is extremely difficult. I am stuck with iCloud Shared Albums for years. Unable to find a selfhosted alternative.
Immich could be an option ( has an app and user mgmt ).
Photoprism can work too, but that only had a web/PWA version IIRC.
Also - If you’re looking for Auto-Sync features for the photos ( automatic upload when you take the pics ) there isn’t a free option on Android for photoprism ( I think ). There’s photo-sync, which will cost you about 3 euros or something.
If they want to upload pictures manually then there’s no issue.
Immich is probably not great for this because its massively updated with breaking changes every few versions. I am going to assume OPs family will not be OK to keep installing the latest mobile app for access. If they are the average user they want to install it once and that’s it. But maybe I am wrong and they are tech savy, then it would be a nice solution.
Fair Point! I’m running photoprism myself which is stable, even though the PWA works well, it’d be nice to have a native app that can do the syncing rather than having to buy/rely on a 3rd party tool.
I ended up on Piwigo. It’s pretty fully featured and allows you to set up access controls for groups. Also has client apps.
My low-tech and not photo-specific solution for this: I’ve created accounts for my parents on my matrix server, and we have a “family room” to share photos of the kids. The element client let’s you browse all media upload to a room, so you sort of get the “chronological order” display.
