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Neil Bothwick

knows his Cups from his Tuxs, but do you?

Q Sharing photos

I’ve been copying my photos from my phone onto my laptop now for a while. Up until now I’ve been using Shotwell to automatically download and move my photos into the photo store. However, I think I need to start thinking about moving these photos onto a server.

I’d like to make it easy for us to be able to upload photos directly to the server (maybe even directly from the phone) and be able to potentially view them from the phone too. However, I don’t think it’s as simple as lifting and shifting those photos onto some form of NAS because Shotwell has a database with tags, and I’d like to preserve the few tags that I have.

I suppose I’d also need a server of some form. I’d like to pop something into that cupboard under the TV because it would be close to the network. Ideally, I’d need something low power and practically silent, maybe a Raspberry Pi.

Mike Hingley

A The short answer is that you can’t do this reliably. Shotwell is designed to work on a single computer with a local database of tags. Having the database on the server would mean that more than one instance of Shotwell could modify the same file, which will lead to premature hair loss. You could store your photos on a NAS and still keep the local database, although there are reports of Shotwell having problems with this. Even if it now works reliably, it would mean that your file tags would be specific to the computer running Shotwell. Running it on a different computer would lose access to that information.

If you really want a photo album on a server, you need to start looking for some different software to do this. There are a number of photo gallery web applications to choose from, Piwigo (https://piwigo. org/) is one popular choice and there are some demo galleries at https:// piwigo.org/demofor you to try. Despite the name, this was not designed for the Raspberry Pi but it does work well on one. We would recommend a Pi 4 because you’ll need decent USB and network speeds – something that the earlier models struggled with, especially when trying to use both at the same time. The extra horsepower won’t go amiss either.