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A Family Collaboration Server?
esobofh asks: "I'm interested in putting together a server for my family that would allow everyone to share & store pictures, movies and music. Whenever we have a family gathering, there are always a ton of digital cameras out and clicking away, so I'd like to have everyone share and submit the pictures and movies they've captured for everyone in the family. I am sure I could roll my own collaboration server, but I'm hoping there is something already put together and pretty. I'd like it to use standard files and directories for storing photos (as opposed to a database), that way the files can easily be moved and manipulated. Is there an application that can handle user accounts, picture submissions (file upload via browser), and other such content?"
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for a Wiki. Just host it yourself or buy a web-hosting service contract (try Dreamhost, note that is a referral link) and then everyone can easily edit and upload and such without having to know tons of technology.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Gallery2 is nice, albeit a bit resource intensive when scaling down pictures to thumbnails using the 'convert' app.
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
Better make sure you're not connected to the greater internet then. The **AAs would sue the pants off you - after all, a central server is easier to find than a distributed P2P network.
You do know that many people have video cameras, right? The **AAs aren't going to sue anybody for posting their own pictures and videos.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
So far we've gotten a recommendation for a Wiki and Gallery2. Both are poor solutions. Wikis are far too complicated to explain to most regular people who are not very technically savvy. Gallery2 is much easier to use but wouldn't qualify as a collboration server in the way the poster describes. Plus, Gallery2 has artifical upload limits preventing large home-made movies from being shared. I think the poster wants something analogous to SharePoint Services but most family oriented, cheaper, and easier to use. I, too, am interested in this.
Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but;
http://f-spot.org/
A really fast picture-collection browser. It sorts everything on date by the meta-data that your digital camera put in the files. You can add 'catagories' and the like yourself. Generate albums and such.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Actually, didn't something like that happen a while back? I seem to recall a /. story about somebody who was hosting video files that they themselves held copyright to, and was sent repeated takedown notices because the MPAA was SURE the files were theirs. They followed up with legal threats when the material wasn't removed, despite repeated requests that the lawyers examine the materials that they were told were MPAA owned.
Not sure if it's exactly relevant here, or if the story was a hoax, but it's certainly plausible enough, what with the companies using webcrawler bots and heavy handed legal tactics.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I use a gallery2 on my server. Check it out here : http://gallery.menalto.com/
I've been pretty pleased with it. Add in a wiki for letting other family members post miscellaneous stories and whatnot. I found it easy to setup, and it does everything I need.
Not sure about existing solutions, but it really shouldn't be that hard to roll your own – for example, if you use PHP, they have a great manual which not only explains everything you need to know, but it also has very useful examples and stuff. I actually learned everything I know about PHP just reading the manual, and copying the occassional tidbit of information – not very hard at all.
Maybe Gallery would work? (Forgot the URL, but it's a popular program, won't help with videos but it looks great for photos, etc.)
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Actually, didn't something like that happen a while back?
They sent a letter to Penn State astronomy department. They have a Professor Usher, who happened to have an mp3 of him and fellow astronomers singing or something. "Usher" and "mp3" were enough to trigger a warning message, but it didn't go all the way to a lawsuit, and the RIAA eventually apologized.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Just as long as you don't film anyone singing any copyrighted works (like Happy Birthday), you're in the clear.
And no copyrighted music is playing in the background.
And no copyrighted videos are playing on the tv.
You know, basic hazards of modern life.
Better password protect that site and cover your ass (legally).
http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/
Features from website
Take an old PC. Stick some fair-sized hard drives in. Install FreeBSD, lighttpd, and proftpd.
Give each of your family members an account on the machine, so they can FTP in and upload pictures to their directory. They can even create their own directory hierarchies, so as to organize their photos as they wish.
Set up lighttpd to allow directory listing, and have it serve up content from the directories your relatives can FTP files to. That way they don't have to create a web page containing their images, or anything like that. Of course, if they want to, they're free to do so.
If they're running Windows, you can easily copy files via FTP using Explorer. It's the same drag-and-drop interface they should be used to using locally.
The best part of setting up a system like that is that it's very simple, of minimal cost, and doesn't involve PHP, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, CGI scripts, or anything else like that. Not only that, but it can take full advantage of the security offered by UNIX-like systems.
The **AAs aren't going to sue anybody for posting their own pictures and videos.
They send a letters an file law suits to anyone they think has content, after all, the world is just filthy pirates.
Allow me to give you a Microsoft based solution (open sourced though!). http://communityserver.org/Default.aspx
Blogs, forums, files, photos, RSS feeds, role based security, etc. I use it to host a site for all my old college friends. The SQL server database is quite happy on both of the free MS SQL offerings, Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) and SQL Express. Only the blog and forum postings and settings are stored in the database. The files and photos are stores in the file system.
iPhoto has sharing builtin to the program, and if you've got a VPN set up Rendezvous will detect your family's computers automatically and take care of all the configuration issues behind the scenes. Contrary to its name, iPhoto handles both still photos and videos, including AVIs, WMVs, DivXs and XviDs in all their greasy glory (with the right QuickTime plugins).
It does use a database on the backend, but since iPhoto makes organization so easy with smart albums and slideshows, really, why is this a problem?
I mean, unless you're a tasteless dweeb, in which case I'm sure many excellent PC-compatible solutions will be written in the coming years, all pilfered from Mac equivalents. YMMV.
Actually, if it were me, I'd be more worried about my (hypothetical) kids putting stuff on there that they shouldn't. It'd be really unfortunate if the guy who posted the article was scrupulous about avoiding copyrighted materials himself, and one of his kids went and put all his pirated MP3s on the server. And the OP, while flamebait, is right about one thing - a central server would draw more attention than a p2p network does.
Either make sure there are no potentially infringing materials at all on the server, or make sure that any such materials can't be found.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
iPhoto with iLife '06 lets other users subscribe to your photo libraries. Might suit your needs.
:ducks:
This too, will end.
Plogger
Duh!
Start a Yahoo Group. That's what my father's family did.
Yes.
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
Try a CMS like Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/), gives you users (including security and roles and allowed actions), photo galleries, video upload, articles, tagging, mailing lists, google maps integration, etc, etc...
I've set one up for my brother to post photo's and videos and news and stuff for his new-born twins, works well, and keeps everyone happy as no-one gets missed from sending out stuff.
John.
Full disclosure: I work for JotSpot. That said, I think JotSpot Family Site is exactly what you're looking for. It's built on JotSpot's wiki platform, so it's a wiki under the hood, but it has an extremely friendly interface built on top. And it's designed specifically for family collaboration: it gives you a calendar, blog, family tree, map, etc, and it's completely free. Sign up and give it a try.
- Abe Fettig (http://fettig.net/), JotSpot (http://jot.com)
... for files and music, and thanks to some helpful slashdotters, it's up and running nicely. We took and old PC, smacked an old copy of XP pro SP 2 on it, threw in an extra couple of old hard drives. We put it on the LAN, unplugged the monitor, keyboard and mouse and ran it via remote desktop. Then we put Hamachi on it, set up shared folders, gave everbody the password and are running the VPN peer-to-peer. Everybody can share files on a LAN, the server is made of spare parts and anyone who can use windows file sharing has access to the files they want. And if my crowd can pull this off, anybody's family can. Best of luck.
Since most of the unwashed masses have Windows, you can use its built-in WebDav stuff. Set up an Apache server with a DAV directory. Then point your friends/family to the URL for the folder, which they merely need add to their "Web Folders." They need not know the underlying protocol to be able to use it. They can then just drag their images and videos onto the folder, and Voila! They are published. It's a no-brainer, and anyone who can drag an icon can use it.
On Linux, Nautilus can do DAV, too. I wouldn't be surprised if KDE had desktop support for it, also. DAV makes a nice small file server, when Samba or NFS won't work.
Perhaps this Ask Slashdot- "Multi-State Family Networking?"-from May 31, 2006 has some replies that will assist you.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
We use it to share Pics and Vids and Music. You just have everyone create a folder on their drive, then give each account permissions. They drop stuff in the folder and eveyone gets a copy via P2P. It's a bit of a pain to setup initally, but a snap to use once it's running.
Buy a NAS.
It's got all the file sharing protocols installed from smb, cifs, afp, ftp, nfs with decent storage size up to 1TB and just let Windows mount the share in a public folder, everyone in the network can see it.
And don't forget to mention Gallery Remote, which is a handy little applet, which allows users to upload and manage images with ease.
Further, you can then extend you site with other features and functions, by integrating Gallery into a CMS, such as Joomla.
Plone from plone.org is good. Like Wiki, but slightly more packaged.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Home version of CC is free and has Gallery, Wiki, Samba, etc all easily setup via your browser. Think of it as a souped up router with optional proxy, etc.
KJ
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
I built a custom web application for this, with wiki, blogging, uploads, gallerys etc. It was fun, but really a hassle because of the two-step process of first identifying the file(s) and then downloading them to your machine if you wanted to work on it. The web GUI was great for browsing files, not so great for directly accessing them (apart from viewing pictures, maybe).
So instead I set up a simple file server with a strict structure (backups, archive, work area, private, pictures, movies, music, incoming etc) and then shared it on the network. Then I installed Hamachi ( dead simple VPN-ish software http://hamachi.cc/ ) on all machines that my extended family has and voila! They get the familiar gui of Explorer and easy copy/paste/edit etc. With some thinking and permissions, it just works with a minimal effort.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/original.php
Coppermine works fine. Easy to setup and change.
http://coppermine-gallery.net/index.php
So what you really want is a warez server for you and your buddies to stash pr0n and mp3s on, right?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Can you say flickr? Browser based, globally accessible, easy to use, controlled access, picture storage, comments, and more. Hosted on a high-speed backbone by professional hosters with backups and all. Oh, by the way, it's free!
The word is FLICKR!!!
Drupal (www.drupal.org) works for me. It provides blogs, images, audio, mmovies, calanders, etc through the use of add-on modules all of which are open source.
FamilyAnywhere was recently released for this very thing.
I was in your boots about 4 months ago and wrote my own system to accomplish exactly what you're looking for, check it out here: http://www.poulsonfamily.org/news.php Any family member can create an account and: -Blog news entries -Upload photo albums -Upload videos/media/downloads -Add to "Links" section It's all very simple and web-based. If you want the source (PHP/MySQL) shoot me an email: matt@farleyfamily.net -Matt PS - on a side note I'm finishing up a system where uploaded videos are transcoded to flash and played in the page directly (a la YouTube / Google Video)
Myfamily.com has some nice features for a quick setup like this. It's not free, but it's quick, easy, and inexpensive and all you do is pick your settings. http://www.myfamily.com/ We're actually using it for a collaboration and scheduling space for a church worship team. (musicians & media creation) jw
Heck, I just use a private TWiki. Authenticated, simple, lots of cool plug-ins. Works for Me and my Family.
Not a web designer.
Call me traditional but i say the simplest solution is best. So go with and ssh server.
Ya I know you said you wanted a web interface but Winscp is looks just like windows explorer. The only really big downside to this is no thumbnails, and that means people will have to name their media files in meaningful ways, I dunno about everyone else but I hate taking the time to do that.
The upside is you could set it up quicker thank you can say "Holy Secure Shell Batman"
Viiv does what you ask for. Just buy a Viiv-based desktop.
No, I will not work for your startup
Runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
PS. The new /. look and feel really, really SUCKS real bad.
Check out Ubuntu Center its a LAMP systems but it should fit your needs https://ubuntucenter.bountysource.com/
It's a bit of a pain for a PHP newb to set up. Now that I've learned some things, it's actually fairly easy. You need a web server, PHP, and a database. It will work with a number of web and db servers. You have your choice of file storage via DAV or via db.
eGroupware
Linux + FTP
http://family.jotspot.com/
I have nothing to do with jotspot, get no money from them, nor them from me. I've never tried their product, IANAL, YMMV, FTC, RTFM,...
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling