Acorn to Oak

Practice makes perfect

You can teach an old dog new tricks, but the dog has to want to learn, and it’s still harder to do. One way to help is practice, practice, practice. That was all the justification needed to add a 2nd Pi to my Pi shop.

With two Pis I had to start thinking about what apps or services would be hosted on which Pi. My choices for some must-have apps were narrowing down.

• Immich as the image backup and album sharing replacement for Google Photos was a slam dunk.
• Jellyfin as the media server for movies, music, home video and pictures was also a slam dunk
• Nextcloud is groupware, software for you & your family to share file, calendars, to do lists, etc. your personal cloud storage

One reason to go down the self-hosted route is to avoid storage fees. After the first 15-20GB you have to pay. I now have TBs of storage at no additional cost. And my images and data won’t be used to train AI.

After that short list trying to select a photo album/gallery software is proving more difficult. There are three main contenders left after the first round.

• Pi Gallery2 — The main thing with this app is that it just uses the subdirectories and images to create the galleries; they call it directory first. This is something important to me. Another nice thing is that it is fast.
• Photoprism — This too uses the directory structure and has a great facial recognition, but it only allows one user, so not a program to use for public viewing, bummer.
• Piwigo — I have yet to install or play with this software to complete the evaluation of which to use

There are a few downsides to online galleries and that’s users. Not the users themselves, managing there accounts; how granular do you need/want to go? A guest account for all to use to see everything, or a per user account so the hoi poli can’t see your family holiday pictures, or some combination of guest & specific users. Either way it means administering accounts.

Now that I have this site, photo gallery services may go by the way side, they’ve been set aside for now. to get the site out. I’ll revisit later.