Do you feel like you are drowning in digital photos? It feels like the phone itself fills up with your selfies and shots, but choosing the best shots and organizing photos never happens without your intervention. Organizing the memories you create takes time, but structured photo albums are such a pleasure to work with. Your phone's operating system probably has a service for storing and sorting photos, but there's a fair amount of privacy concerns around knowingly giving copies of photos of your life, friends, kids, and vacations to corporations (and for free, too). Luckily, there are a wide range of open source alternatives where you choose who can view your photos, as well as open source tools to help you find and enhance the very best of your favorite photos.
Nextcloud
is more than a photo posting app, it stands out for its photo management thanks to phone apps that you can use to sync opt-in. Instead of sending your photos to Google Photos or Apple's cloud storage, you can send them to your personal Nextcloud installation.
Nextcloud is amazingly easy to set up, and with strict control, you can choose who on the web has access to your albums. You can also purchase Nextclould hosting - it may seem to you that it is no different from Google or Apple, but the difference is significant: Nextcloud storage is clearly encrypted, the source code is proof of that.
piwigo
is an open source photo gallery program written in PHP with a large community of users and developers, featuring a number of customizable features, themes and an embeddable interface. Piwigo has been on the market for over 17 years, which is not the case with the relatively new cloud storage used by default on phones. There is also a mobile app so you can sync everything.
Viewing images
Storing photos is only half the battle. Giving them meaning is quite another, and for that you need a good set of open source tools. And the best tool largely depends on what you really need. Almost everyone is an amateur photographer, even if they do not perceive themselves as such, and some even make a living from it. There is something for everyone here, and at the very least, you need a nice and efficient way to browse your photo gallery.
Both Nextcloud and Piwigo have great built-in viewers, but some users prefer a dedicated app to a web browser. A well-designed image viewer is great for quickly viewing multiple photos without wasting time downloading them or even having no internet connection.
- - the built-in image viewer with many Linux distributions - does an excellent job of displaying pictures in the most common formats.
- is another open source basic image viewer that wins in terms of speed and simplicity and is a great choice for Windows users.
- is an image viewer for Windows or Linux, written in Qt, designed to be fast and flexible with thumbnail cache, keyboard and mouse combinations, and support for many formats.
Organization of the photo catalog
The main function of Google Photos and similar services is the ability to organize photos by metadata. A flat structure doesn't crop a few hundred photos in your collection; after a few thousand it's just not possible. Of course, using metadata to organize a library isn't always ideal, so having a good organizer is priceless. Below are several open source tools for automatically organizing the catalog, you can also take part and set filters so that the photos are sorted as you wish.
- is an image cataloging program installed by default on many GNOME distributions. It contains basic editing functions - cropping, red-eye reduction and color level adjustment, as well as automatic structuring by date and notes.
- is an image viewer for KDE. With it, you can browse catalogs of photos, sort them, delete unwanted ones and perform basic operations such as resizing, cropping, rotating and reducing red-eye.
- is an image organizing program that is part of the KDE family, supports hundreds of different formats, has several methods for organizing collections, and supports custom plugins to extend functionality. Of all the alternatives listed here, this one will probably be the easiest to run on Windows in addition to its native Linux.
- is a free and open source photo editing and management software. This is a Java application, so it is available on any platform that runs Java (Linux, MacOS, Windows, BSD, and more).
- is a photo studio, digital darkroom and photo manager in one. You can link your camera directly to it, or you can synchronize images, sort them by your favorites, enhance photos with dynamic filters and export the result. Considered a professional app and may not be for the amateur, but if you enjoy thinking about apertures and shutter speeds or debating about Tri-X grain, Darktable is perfect for you.
Tell about yourself? Have you used Google Photos and are you looking for a new way to manage your photos? Or have you already moved on to something newer, and hopefully open source? Of course, we didn't list all the options, so tell us your favorites below in the comments.
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Useful
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , you are welcome.
Do you use Google Photos?
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63,6%Yes14
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9,1%No, I use a proprietary alternative2
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27,3%No, I use an open source alternative6
22 users voted. 10 users abstained.
Source: habr.com