Cloud-based image library recommendations

I'll stick this here in the hope that the photographic community can give some advice.

I would like to create an online photo library for images I use in "Bluebell Times". This is because I receive a lot of photos, more than I use, and it would be useful to store them in a searchable way for later reuse.

The requirements would be:

• Private, but shareable with invited collaborators - preferably with a Microsoft or Facebook account
• Able to tag photos with a structured tagging scheme (because a photo may be sent because it illustrates one thing, but actually be later useable for some other purpose. For example, I might need to tag a photo as "S15", "847", "Goods train", "Freshfield Bank" etc. because it might have been sent as "here's a photo of the S15" but later I need to find a photo of a goods train, or a train on Freshfield Bank.
• Able to store and download the original image as sent (i.e. not processed into a degraded form, as Facebook does)
• Likely to be online stable for a long period
• Free

I was using my Microsoft One Drive, which met most of those criteria, but recently MS seem to have removed the tagging feature for photos in OneDrive, which has set back the work I was doing.

I've got a Flickr account - I assume I can mark photos as private - what sort of account does someone need to be able to be invited to share? I guess I can put a photo in multiple albums and use that as a tagging scheme? I'm also a bit worried that Flickr may cease to exist at some point.

I've got an Apple iCloud Drive, but have never really explored it for photos. Would a collaborator also need an Apple account in order to share?

Any recommendations out there?

Tom

 

With regards Flickr, you can set the photos to public, friends, family, friends & family, and private. I believe, though I might quite possibly be wrong, that if the photo is set to friends, etc, then only people you have marked as friends, etc, can see the photos. If that makes sense!

What about Box or Dropbox? I've used both, and Box seems easier to use. I'm not sure about tagging, but you can certainly change the file name to include whatever info you need.

 

Thanks.

Are "friends" in Flickr defined by a Flickr account - i.e. do you need to sign up to Flickr to become someone's friend on there?

Answered my own question - looks like to be a friend, someone needs their own Flickr account.

Someone else I know uses Dropbox for sharing stuff, but I've never found it very intuitive. Really I'd like a Microsoft solution as that is what we use elsewhere, but they removed photo tagging and I don't think I can manage all the information and search I want to just using filenames.

Tom

 

You might want to investigate Piwigo https://piwigo.org/ . PM me if you want more info.

 

It appears you can use guest passes for non-Flickr users.
https://help.flickr.com/en_us/create-or-delete-temporary-guest-passes-in-flickr-Bygpmj1Q

I can't add much in the way of advice apart from bearing in mind the lessons of Fotopic and not having the web host as your only copy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotopic.net

 

I guess sharepoint/365 would be out of budget?

 

The problem seems to be that Microsoft removed the option for tags: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb...-retired-77851bd5-6d5e-42fe-9bf6-d7c17eeb771f

I had the beginnings of a tagged photo library to do what I wanted, and then they all disappeared!

Yes, hence my slight worry as well about Flickr. I can keep the photos backed up, but I don't want to lose the tags.

Thanks - I guess that gets me into hosting my own gallery though?

Tom

 

That seems to be the economical way to do it. Perhaps the Bluebell will let you use one of their domains? My experience is as a user but it does give you the opportunity to put multiple tags on images and then search by a tag. Like all IT-isation, there is a fair bit of work to set it up before you would see the benefits.

 

I do have my own web hosting domain, I need to check whether it has a database within the price.

It does look attractive. Of the “free” hosts, Flickr looked promising from a tagging point of view, but the free version is very limited in storage relative to how it might grow, and the sharing options aren’t brilliant. Amazon photos (who knew?) is free with prime, but doesn’t seem to support custom tags. Google photos looks like it is going paid. iCloud shared albums doesn’t let you share with someone who doesn’t themselves have an iCloud account except, as far as I can see, by creating a public web view and sharing the link - which is security by obscurity, so not ideal.

Tom