I thought of this after a recent trip with some friends. We shared the photos when we were still in person. But sometimes we need to share a lot of photos over the internet. In the past, we have used a shared google drive directory for this. But I’d prefer a self-hosted option. There should be some sort of password protection as well (ideally per share, and no need for accounts). One should be able to both access the current files and upload new ones, just like google drive or dropbox.
I currently have FileShelter, which works for 1-to-1 sharing but not for groups. I guess something like ProjectSend would work, but it’s too complex for my usecase. I’d prefer something more lightweight since I’ll maybe use it once every few months. Also, it should be noob-friendly, and accessible using a browser.
Update: I’m very happy with copyparty. It does what I want, and much much more. I even replaced my older webdav server with it since it provides more granular control over share locations and permissions. Kudos to the developer @tripflag@lemmy.world!
I use https://filebrowser.org/ for this.
Nice lightweight filebrowsing/sharing with user management. Users can have their own dedicated directories, or collaborate.
You can also create share links that allow anyone with the link to view/download files. Optionally password protected.
Here’s a demo you can mess with: https://demo.filebrowser.org/ User: demo Pass: demo
Thanks, I took a look. It’s very close to what I want, but it still doesn’t support uploads in shared directories. It seems to be a pretty highly requested feature though. So maybe it’ll happen at some point.
You could setup a user account like the share you’re describing. There’s a setting to prevent the user from changing their password.
Just pass out those credentials to anyone you want to collaborate with; they don’t need their own individual accounts.
That’s a pretty good idea, actually. I’ll try that out. Thanks.
Mind if I suggest my own software, copyparty?
Regarding authentication, someone who has an account (in this case just yourself) can create password-protected shares which other people can browse, or upload, or browse+upload to (configurable when creating the share).
There is WebDAV support, and it should integrate well enough with shares, but I haven’t tested that specifically.
It has photo and video thumbnails, and a basic image-viewer, and with some elbow-grease it can also show exif-tags (gps-coordinates etc).
There is also optional file dedup, so if two people upload the same file, it’ll detect and skip that during the 2nd upload (doesn’t waste any bandwidth) and swap out the new file with a symlink to the existing one. Default disabled to avoid surprising someone with symlinks.
I think the following command would be enough to get you started:
wget https://github.com/9001/copyparty/releases/latest/download/copyparty-sfx.py python3 copyparty-sfx.py -a sintan:yourpassword -v .::A,sintan --shr=/shr -e2dsa -e2tsbut since that’s entirely unreadable, you can do it with a config file instead,
[global] e2dsa # enable filesystem indexing e2ts # enable media indexing (music tags) shr: /shr # enable shares under this url [accounts] sintan: yourpassword [/] # create a volume at this url /srv/share/partypics # the filesystem path to share accs: sintan: A # give sintan read-write-move-delete-adminand use it like this:
python3 copyparty-sfx.py -c the.confHey, that looks awesome. I’ll try it out when I get back from work.
Edit: This is awesome! It satisfies my requirements and goes beyond. Great app!
I use nextcloud for this. It’s a bit much for just simple file share, but it works for me.
Yeah, it’s a bit too much I think.
Too much what exactly? Don’t use the functionality you don’t want.
Storage, RAM, CPU usage. I prefer not to have such a large piece of software running for no reason. It might seem silly, but I hate using resources for no reason. I’ll rather have 5 lightweight apps running instead of a huge one, of which I’ll only use a few parts.
This confuses me a bit, technically nextcloud is just a PHP script that only runs when you actually perform a page request.
If you don’t enable the Cron then it does even less than a normal install.
You still have manage upgrades due security vulns in all the features you are ignoring.
Docker.
Pictures specifically Immich.
But I don’t know how (well) it works without any password and shared albums.https://github.com/bewcloud/bewcloud
Is a new option I recently learned about.
I am currently super happy with https://sftpgo.com/
I just use Syncthing with versioning, and that’s how I manage all my files and their versions.
That alone is a document management and file versioning system without the overkill of Nextcloud (which is debatable).
You’re kind of asking the wrong question.
Are there ways to share stuff with a group of people that are self-hosted? Absolutely.
Can you get security through those means? Not without some unified authentication.
Maybe back up a few steps and figure out specifically how much trouble you’re willing to go through for this. There’s a reason these photo sharing platforms exist with sharing and permissions.
I don’t care too much about security, since I’ll delete everything in a few days after copying them to my gallery. Then, I usually share a link with them to an album on my PhotoPrism instance. So, per share password is fine by me.
Then just start an Immich instance and share them that way. Easiest route if you want to make them browsable first.
Resilio Sync or Syncthing
Ah, just saw the browser requirement.
In nextcloud discussions I’ve heard of Seafile. I’ve never used it, so not sure what it’s capable of.
Seafile is closed source, Chinese made (make of that what you will), and the backend files are obfuscated and unable to be restored in a failure.
