Building up Google Photos replacement using your hardware

If you think long enough, you'll figure that there are number of components you'll need. 

But before we go into all these details further, I need to share my view of what I think should be the best way of organizing our media library. The most important thing is, it should be using EXIF tags as a primary source of metadata for organization. 

Why EXIF tags? 

Simply because they could be or already are written inside of your media files - both photos and videos. So you won't be depending on some specific media library application, which is storing all your organization entities (what files belong to what events / dates / folders) somewhere deep inside of its own proprietary database. We want a flexibility as we don't want to be trapped into vendor-locked-in situation, so we need to ensure we will be able to migrate from one app to another. In future, when the time comes. 

Speaking of EXIF tags here, I'm not a big fan of getting deep inside of things like ISO, exposure, saturation, all that camera-technical shit. I'm not that kind of crazy photographer person, I don't care about all that. But what I do need is to be able to mark a bunch of photos with some human-readable descriptive tag like "2022.09 - Going far east". So I can later see, what tags do I have in my library and look only on photos having that tag.

We can, for sure, organize our own library using good old folders approach. Like to store together  photos/videos belonging to the same event. But that approach alone lacks flexibility, if we want the same photo/video to appear in more than just a single "folder". Or if we want to find all photos/videos made in a particular place. Or if we want to find all photos, we tagged as "retro cars" or "skiing in mountains". So folders might be nice for physical storage organization, but not as a way to access your media library.

Mobile app to view / modify media

First of all we need a photo gallery application on our mobile phone, as the most shots we're doing using it. We need to navigate through our photos/videos and modify them as needed. 

Requirements:

- modify dates of photos / videos
- modify GPS locations for photos / videos
- assign/modify custom EXIF tags for photos / videos
- recognize faces and objects in  photos and assign tags for them automatically
- explore your media library on your phone, utilizing all the above - dates, GPS location, custom text tags
- built-in map, so we could use it for navigation
- bulk editing features (to assign GPS, date and text tags to a bunch of items)
- built-in video player
- showing thumbnails for video

The best app I found is an open-source Aves. It's almost perfect, just missing support for modifying dates / tags for videos, but developer is there, he's super responsive and claiming this feature is already planned. I raised couple of small bugs and features requests and they were all processed. I do admire that guy. And he is among the minority (unfortunately) who really understand it, how to make proper user-friendly UI.

The next best thing might have been a proprietary app called Piktures, but it has an idiotic bug they don't recognize. And it's a proprietary shit. And it's missing half of features Aves have.

There's also a proprietary Android app called "F-Stop" but it's buggy as hell and UI is made for goblins. And the free version cannot do much.

So really, there's not many alternatives to Aves, so we stick to it. Thibault Deckers, mate, you're the best!

A way to sync our media across  devices

Google Photo mobile app does that for you, it's uploading photos from the device' internal storage to their own servers. So we need a way to do the same ourselves, as we're building a Google Photo replacement. 

Ideally you want to have all your devices to be synced with each other, like if you shoot a new photo on your phone, it should appear on your PC and on your tablet. If you modified that photo later on your PC, like you set proper GPS coordinates your phone "forgot" to set, this photo should be synced back to your phone and tablet. And all of that should work over the internet securely, as you might be away from home WiFi. This is called two-way sync.

In my previous post I explained how this can be achieved by using Tor and apps like FolderSync. Tor we need here just to bypass NAT, if our home PC is running behind ISP cgNAT and our own router's NAT. If you have a white IP address at home (or IPv6), you might not need it.

But there's also an open source app called SyncThing. You can also build a two-way synchronization with it and developers are claiming it doesn't require anything specific to bypass NAT, if you want to sync over internet. If you're windows user, give it a shot with SyncTrayzor, which is nice GUI wrapper for SyncThing. The setup is quick and easy, so you can share any folders from your Android to be permanently in sync with folders on your PC.

Desktop app to view / modify your media library

This is something, that Google Photo doesn't have. Google is only offering you a Web application. But we want to be able to browse our photo library (which is kept synced to our PC and all other devices as explained in the previous section) on a PC the very same convenient way how we do that on our phone with using Aves. 

Requirements for this app are the same as for the phone app I listed above.

Given we're on Linux we can benefit from a variety of open source apps. I tested lot of them and the only I can suggest is DigiKam, so we take it.

Web application to access your photos from remote PC and share then

This is the last piece in puzzle. And it's also optional and might be needed:

- if you're planning to share your photos by giving readonly access to specific albums to your friends & family (by just giving them some URL)

- if you're planning to view your whole media library while being away from your home network

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