Photos (and videos!) are something very important in our everyday's life. They collect our memories and can bring back the emotions that we all experiences just by reviewing the pictures and videos taken back in time.

Photography has greatly changed over the years. For example i have thousands of photos in the last 20+ years with many different cameras and technologies: film SLRs, DSLRs, phones, disppsable cameras… Also the digital management tools have changed greatly.

Today the good old paper albums are just collecting dust in the bookshelves, and tomorrow those will be a faded memory of the past. Today photos are shared over instant messaging apps and given for free to big corps like Google and Apple.

This is how i have changes this for, at least, my family.

the goal is to have the family photos neatly organized, sorted and easily accessible by family members, even (specially) the non tech-savvy ones.

There are three steps to the process:

• Collecting pictures and videos from the devices (cameras, phones…)
• Organizing them into albums and collections, adding tags if/when possible
• Display them all for easy fruition, possibly with Machine Learning for face detection and such

Let's be clear: there no tool that let you do that all-in-one, and i have tested almost all of them.

First of all, i discarded all local tools, as i want this done on the server and not on my local laptop. Ideally, every family member should be able to to it's part without my intervention. (back in the past i used the great Digikam which still rocks, but it's local-only).

On the web tools the landscape is a little bit better than for the Note Taking category, but not that much. There are quite a few tools indeed, but each one has it's pros and cons, and none fits the bill perfectly.

I have tried (for each one, details in the associated page):

• Immich is the most promising, but a few design decisions they took hinders the usage of it only.