Online/Network image storage.

[Nick]

I was chasing frogs with my camera today when I though I might get back into the macro Monday thing (Posting macro shots according to a theme to a flicker pool.)

So, to make a short story longer then needed, I was later investigating the said group (there seems to be a G+ one to, but that system seems less useable for the purpose) and I noticed that flickr is now offering 1 FREAKING WHOLE TERABYTE in free space. And also that doubling that space costs the exorbitant amount of $499. 

Where do the people here keep their image backups? Online? Local only? Network store? An old harddrive in the shoebox? Sleek fancy portable drive?

I am personally thinking about abusing google+ and loading all my images to it in reduced size. But with a free terabyte I can store every picture I have ever taken on flickr. I already keep a copy locally and on an external drive. The external drive leaves the house with me most days.

[zourtney]

Wow, that's a ton of space. Even I don't have that many pictures. Right now, my pictures get copied to a desktop HDD, an aging external drive, and my little NAS box. The goal was to set up automated sync between NASman and some external source (like a private share on the Randomland server). I haven't tackled that one yet. I haven't used Flickr to any extent. Does it allow for private photos as well as public ones?

[Nick]

Yup, public and private and you can even share with only some users (friend and family settings).

This seems to be the best instructions I could find on it:
http://www.flickr.com/help/sharing/#168

Edit:
I was looking for open source image hosting systems and found OpenPhoto. It's a young project but looks promising, even if their website feels overloaded with marketing. I am going to go ahead and install it on a subdomain and see how it feels.

[zourtney]

Interesting. All the rhetoric is right, if nothing else. Seems worth a try!

[Nick]

WHARGARBLW!~!@EB

Ok. After 4 hours and a headache I have the stupid thing installed and running (Cranky MySQL TRIGGER requirements (Need special permissions) and the release candidate is broken ATM (PHP array error) )

So here it is:
http://photo.randomland.net

User is webmaster@randomland.net
You can guess the password, and if you cant, you probably are not who this message is directed at.

It's not quite what I was expecting. It's a single user type setup. But it is reasonably slick. For storing all the RL photos, it could be fine. For a semi-private, social photo sharing area... I don't know yet. You can invite people to share with... but everyone has full control. Also you can use name-spacing (virtual servers) to create multiple installations for multiple single users.   

See this for more about multi-user junk https://github.com/photo/frontend/issues/706

Edit:
Ugg. It seems it broke again. Not sure whats up with it. Login timed out, logged back in and nothing works. Submitted a bug report.

[zourtney]

Well I was able to get in, at least. It seems pretty decent. Definitely better than the hard-to-google Gallery2 software we used ages ago. And it provides several different thumbnail sizes with semi-friendly URLs that we could use for forum posts, etc (though I didn't find any UI to configure what sizes are generated).

Speaking of them thumbnails, it doesn't take a hacker to view all those private images from an unauthenticated session. This seems like a huge oversight. Yes, you could prevent directory listings, but that's kinda like shutting the blinds to prevent someone throwing rocks through your window.

[Nick]

I wonder if it's some odd error from me being on the same network. Hmmm.


Turning off directory listings, or putting an index.php that redirects back to the home page (or both) sound reasonable.  But like you said, they should have taken care of that already. If the images are all served via php file stream-things then the image storage directory could even be outside of the subdomain. Stick it in /usr/var/openphoto/photos or something.

The file names for the images seem random enough that no one would guess them. Unless that's just the original filename with an MD5 string attached. I might have to look at the source. One of their selling points is that you can put all your images on a new installation and still have all the same url paths to them.

[zourtney]

Ah, for some reason I was thinking all that junk in the filename was your doing. But I should've know better. It's certainly not bulletproof, but it's somewhat tamper-resistant. Moving the files out of www/ would make the most sense, as long as it'll serve them properly.

So what's your general opinion of it? (I only played with it for 5 minutes)

[Nick]

Aside from installing it, I have not done much more with it. I will have to give it a good playing with until I can decide. Also, it has competition that might work better for out purposes. We will have to see.

[Cody]

You know...I actually don't have a backup of my pictures anywhere. At I don't think I do.

[Nick]

Unless you are planing on having more than a terabyte you should give Flickr a try. Or a second hard disk. :-)

[zourtney]

You know...I actually don't have a backup of my pictures anywhere.

I can store a copy on my mondodrive, if you want. I have at least a few hundred gigs I'd be willing to share

[Nick]

I think I like the openphoto/trovebox software. It does not have everything I could want, but for a free, local solution it is ok. Being open source we can add anything that we want to the interface (easier links to various image sizes for one, and perhaps multiple user accounts, though if its just a communal storage space, having personal albums should be fine enough.)

[zourtney]

How can I create my own login for that? I didn't see any user administration options...is there a superuser account, or something?

[Nick]

There is only the webmaster account. It is  a single user per install type thing. You can add other email that can log in, but I haven't played with that much due to the admin interface bug. 

http://photo.randomland.net/manage/settings <- From there you can add more emails.