Collective photo management

[Peterrrjr]

Hi everyone. I am working on the process to scan thousands of family pictures, some dating back the 1930's. We currently use lightroom to keep everything sorted, with 3 copies, one in a server that keeps backing up to the cloud (I am from Brazil, 50Kb/s upload speed... maybe before year 3000 the backup will finish), 1 on the production machine and the other in a set of usb hard drives.

The problem is: only one person can work with the pictures at a time. We want something to be able to us to speed up the process of tagging, renaming, sorting and them we can edit.

I saw that Digikam has support for Mysql and Mariadb. Well, I wish to know if anyone have tried it in a lan enviroment with multiple user access. If this is achievable, my family members will be able to enjoy the pleasure effort that is to sort the family history

Ps: it would be awesome something able to do that, because every picture that i move from an album on the pc, I also move on the phisical copies. So if I need to rescan a file, I know where it is.

The workflow is as follows:
1) Scan/import from sd card;
2) Rename in lightroom;
3) Fire up goodsync to update the changes;
4) Connect the Usb hard drive (every 2 weeks);
5) tag, geotag, facial recognition, edit, sort in album - folder;
6) reflect the moving on the phisical files;

All done by me and occasionaly a relative.

 

[KmH]

The problem is: only one person can work with the pictures at a time.

A major shortcoming of Lr.

Phase One Media Pro. They have a free trial.

 

[mdruziak]

Here are a couple things to try:

Save the catalog file in a Dropbox folder. This will ensure everyone is working off the same catalog file, but I don't think two people can have the file open at the same time.

Have each person do the cataloging and keywording on their own computer using their own copy of Lightroom. Then every month/week/day they export their work as a catalog (File>Export as Catalog). You would then need to import the updated photos to the master catalog (File>Import from another catalog). Don't forget that you need to export the images out of Lightroom to have the keywords/metadata actually written to the image file.

The other thing you could try is OnOne Browse. It supports network shares, but I'm not sure how it would manage any conflicts caused by two people having an image file open at the same time.