Photo album ideas? Possibly using Ghost? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- XTREEMMAK · 2023-12-19 17:01 Alright so let me explain, I've tried and used Synology Photos, Photoprism, Nextcloud Memories, and currently trying out Immich. Both have their pros and cons but overall, Immich is the most complete/useful to me as far as its overal feature set right now handling both my photos AND video needs (its the only one with video hw transcoding that handles playback smoothly. Memories does this, but playback often stops with sound while playback, and you still cant do custom album covers). It handles my needs with the exception of one thing. Right now, the only thing that is really holding me back from fully utilizing Immich as my gallery and photo sharing app of choice is its Album organization aka, it only sorts from newest pictures to oldest within album view. The reason this is important is because I like my albums to tell a story from start to finish. Having to scroll all the way down just to tell that story is a bit inconvenient. While I'm sure this will be fixed later, it seems that this has been requested since 2022 with no movement as of yet. So I figured, the only thing I really need is an album view for general view and consumption for now till that feature is rolled out, thus thinking about maybe using a blog platform for those albums aka Wordpress or Ghost. I do like Ghost more though. My only question though is using my current photo store. Do you think I would be able to mount my image storage to access my images that way on Ghost directly, or would I have to upload everything again just for Ghost to use them? Or maybe, would it make sense to just host those images on Immich, and include an embed link to those images/videos (is possible) from Immich to Ghost? I'm also not sure how transcoding would work this way either for videos... I guess the same question could be asked if I tried using Wordpress instead, but I'm sure I'd have to upload to Wordpress directly which would be way more work than its worth. Any thoughts? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lespasapp · 2023-12-20 07:22 Have you tried [Les Pas](https://github.com/scubajeff/lespas#readme)? It uses Nextcloud as backend for storage and sharing. Can play video without problem. Album cover can be customized. Album can be sorted by date and filename, in both ascending and descending order. Auto slideshow with background music supported too. But Android only though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Silencer306 · 2023-12-20 09:39 Do you use this along with Immich or as a standalone? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lespasapp · 2023-12-20 14:33 Built for Nextcloud. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Silencer306 · 2023-12-21 01:29 Ok my question is if it is a complete setup and forget backup solution for my photos on phone? Or is it only to create and share albums from photos that are already on your machine? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lespasapp · 2023-12-21 10:11 It has Gallery function, featuring pictures auto backup, auto deletion policy for different folders on phone, options to sync deletion on phone to server, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- XTREEMMAK · 2023-12-26 19:18 UPDATE:Alright so an update on this issue. So since my main issue was that I wanted to fix the album frontend on...pretty much all the software I've tried, I ended up doing what I said I would; spun up an instance of Ghost, essentially making our family album a family blog of sorts which honestly I like much better than relying on said platforms and their share album view. There's more work involved, but it paid off in my opinion. What I did was use the the free Ghost theme "Liebling", customized it with some route edits, some HTML edits here and there, injected some CSS rules to keep dark mode on by default (you can do a google search for the code. Wasn't hard), commented out some code that I didn't need, and changed some of the handlebars queries to get what I need in certain areas (for example, hiding specific tag listings on the front page). All this sounds worse than it actually is, I can assure you. Yes, I do a little web dev on the side, but honestly nothing I said above hints at complicated as long as you can read the basics of HTML and read about some features in the Ghost manual aka Handelbars. You can spin up a test instance and build the theme from code if you want to, but honestly all the edits I did were edits to the template files themselves and not that CSS or Js files directly. IMO, I much prefer Ghost over Wordpress due to it being more modern and much more performant with minimal cost to get it to a performant and secure state (I don't need security plugin here, CMS plugin there, etc.). Ghost doesn't have any and everything like Wordpress does and I understand there are limitations to using Ghost this way. For example, Ghost does give you memberships, but you don't (yet) have a multi-tier system that is not locked behind a paywall. This means that if you wanted to segment your content behind specific membership types, the other types HAVE to be paid based. Pretty sure this situation is pretty easily avoidable with Wordpress stock. That said, my other issue was with taking my exiting library that is on my NAS in its own folder structure, and getting that translated on platform of choice aka either Wordpress or Ghost. From what I was able to tell, the only way to get the library on both would be to upload everything so there is a database entry for everything on either platform....umm....no. So since my library is already backed by Nextcloud, it was was WAAAY easier and much less of a headache, to create a blog entry in Ghost with a few highlighted images (the Gallery feature in Ghost only limits you to 9 images anyway), a small written blurb of what's going on in this album (which is a nice extra touch), and using the \[button\]\[/button\] feature to make a button that takes a link from a shared library in Nextcloud Memories. Yes the interface will look different once you enter Nextcloud Memories, but you are also accessing that album directly from the blog frontend anyway. I don't think for a family album, anyone is going to really care that the interface changes from how the blog looks to how Nextcloud looks. The other advantage to doing it this way is that now if I want to lock an album to specific people or via password, I can do that on the Nextcloud side instead. Also, if I want to REALLY lock down the album, I can member lock it on the Ghost side as well and set the blog to "Invite Only" with me being the primary/only member that can access that entry. The last big advantage to this I think is also the search capabilities. Now I have tags for the albums that I can search and sort by, and if I can remember words from the album, it comes up. This is something I find it hard to do in Nextcloud Memories which searches your entire Nextcloud for the entry instead. Naturally for something like this, I also made sure that Google isn't crawling the blog either so edited the theme's robot entry as well. I honestly wasn't expecting this to go as well as it did. But if you're looking for something that is performant with sorting, album covers, and a great lockdown features, then spin up a Ghost instance on a webserver, and back it by Nextcloud Memories OR Immich for library management and as entry point from frontend (bonus points for also backing either by HW Acceleration for videos). One thing to note though is that my connection speeds have recently increased making Memories for me useful again (went from ATT 900up/900down when I started, to 1200/40 when we moved, to now 1200/200 since xFinity upgraded their network in my area....I still hate them...). While I miss fiber, the 200up now makes using Memories useful again, but if you are more bandwidth limited, Immich is highly efficient I will say and performs very well even on content that traditionally on Memories was very hard to stream down due to high bitrate requirements etc. As a note, this is considering albums with mixed content aka photos and videos. Give either Memories or Immich a try. Each have their pros and cons. Coming up, I might add a manifest to the theme to give the site PWA capabilities. Not sure if there would really be an advantage to doing this, but something to think about. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- XTREEMMAK · 2023-12-26 19:22 This might be nice for me personally, but for my other family members, some that aren't that computer literate, with split platforms, I'm not sure how well this would work. I'll check it out though. What I might be able to use it for is if I have some Android tablets, use it as a photo frame frontend. I've been looking for something like that that can be backed by a NAS or Nextcloud instead of an SD card for a while. Sans that, I think a blog site like described above would work best for these users since they don't have to install anything. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lespasapp · 2023-12-27 00:39 Les Pas support building and sharing photo blog from album, user can browse your works with browser only. As an admin, you have to install app 'cms_pico' on your Nextcloud instance for blogging to work.