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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?"
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.
I tried a wiki.. and what you and I consider easy to use and the masses who aren't really into tech consider easy to use still has a big gap. They said it was too confusing.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
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!
I was thinking the same, however, this would probably rather impractical for uploading videos. Also I've noticed the method for linking to files is somewhat confusing. I'm not sure if thats necessarily the best option.
;-)
But if a wiki were used, here's some info:
MediaWiki would be a good one, however it uses databases. Dokuwiki can be used to upload files of all sorts. It isnt very helpful in terms of creating a gallery of pictures however.
Here is a comparison of wikis: Wiki Comparison Table
A photogallery would be a nice wiki plugin to have
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.
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
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.
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 with iLife '06 lets other users subscribe to your photo libraries. Might suit your needs.
:ducks:
This too, will end.
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.
TikiWiki allows for the creation of image and file galleries. It even allows for one to upload an entire directory at a time. Uses a DB backend though...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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.