Possible solution to church photography team

[tgrachan]

I recently took over leading the photography team for my church and we have been struggling with getting all of the photos in one place efficiently and keeping them organized. We have tried numerous solutions like Google Drive and other similar things but it's a real pain and I'm thinking there has to be a better way. I thought that Adobe LR would be perfect because of the new(ish) cloud features but shared photos are limited in resolution and I was told by an adobe rep that the only way to get the originals would be to give my adobe account ID and password to everyone on the team so that they could log in using my account but that is not going to work for obvious reasons. My only other thought of a possible solution was to set up a NAS at the church that members would be able to upload all photos to. Ideally this would be a one way street where members could upload their photos but would not have the ability to delete or modify anything else on the NAS. I'm not sure if this is possible or if there is a better solution that I'm completely missing but I'm open to anything that doesn't require me to manage everything via tons of emails and using up what little space I have left on my personal PC.

[Radium_Angel]

11 minutes ago, tgrachan said:

I'm not sure if this is possible

It can be made that way, yes. A NAS is certainly an option, and it's better than "the cloud!" for serious work.

What is your budget here?

[Anghammarad]

A NAS with Nextcloud or Owncloud. Every user could get their own login account and user restrictions can be set to the folders/collections. There even are Android Apps for those Clouds. But keep in mind you need either have a permanent IP on the internet connection or use a service like DynDNS so the address to connect the clients to from the outside is always the same. 

 

Aslo keep in mind the safety of the system/network. (firewall, portforwarding, NAT) 

[unijab]

If its just for the church.. just put it on the church wifi.

 

Not on the public internet.

[tgrachan]

33 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

It can be made that way, yes. A NAS is certainly an option, and it's better than "the cloud!" for serious work.

What is your budget here?

I'm not sure of a dollar figure for a budget but since it is for a church, my guess would be  as inexpensive as possible while still getting the job done. It's good to know that it can be done that way. Now I guess my next step would be to find out how to do it and how much it would cost to get everything up and running. I set up an old PC at home using freenas more as a fun project than anything actually useful but I imagine I could do something similar. I'm thinking that a RAID 5 setup with 20TB of usable space should be enough to handle what we need for the time being. I wonder if it would be better to go with an off the shelf solution or build one.

 

13 minutes ago, unijab said:

If its just for the church.. just put it on the church wifi.

 

Not on the public internet.

I definitely don't know enough about networking but, if it is set up just on the church's wifi wouldn't that prevent anyone from uploading things from home? Typically the photographers edit all of their photos at home (or their studio for the "pros") and then submit them to one of our random means of delivery that we currently have.

 

 

[Radium_Angel]

47 minutes ago, tgrachan said:

church

I've worked with Churches before. Go with an off the shelf solution. If anything goes wrong with a homemade setup, you will get the blame.

You will need to find out their budget. Get that first. This will save you a lot of work if their budget turns out to be "you're fucking kidding me?"

49 minutes ago, tgrachan said:

I definitely don't know enough about networking

Then you, or the church, will need to hire a professional to handle this part. Getting that wrong invites hackers to enter into the network. Don't skimp out on this. Do it right or don't do it at all. I speak from experience here, having to clean up a mess because a church was a tightwad and scummed out.

[tgrachan]

2 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I've worked with Churches before. Go with an off the shelf solution. If anything goes wrong with a homemade setup, you will get the blame.

You will need to find out their budget. Get that first. This will save you a lot of work if their budget turns out to be "you're fucking kidding me?"

Then you, or the church, will need to hire a professional to handle this part. Getting that wrong invites hackers to enter into the network. Don't skimp out on this. Do it right or don't do it at all. I speak from experience here, having to clean up a mess because a church was a tightwad and scummed out.

I'm thinking that might be the way to go. I'll get with them and find out what we can afford and whether or not they think it would be worth it. 

 

2 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Then you, or the church, will need to hire a professional to handle this part. Getting that wrong invites hackers to enter into the network. Don't skimp out on this. Do it right or don't do it at all. I speak from experience here, having to clean up a mess because a church was a tightwad and scummed out.

I definitely agree. Much to the same point you made above. If anything goes wrong, I'm to blame and I definitely don't know enough to feel comfortable taking on that responsibility. I'll talk to them and get a rough idea of what kind of a budget we are thinking and then we can possibly go from there.

[paddy-stone]

Don't forget to think about the church's connection to the internet... could be hammered hard if a lot of people are uploading their files to the church's server/NAS at the same time... especially if they don't have a great speed to start with.

[jake9000]

A synology diskstation would be nearly plug n play. It does directory storage but also has a bunch of apps that you can bolt on. 

You can let them upload remotely in the browser with the FileStation module, and have really granular access control. You can let anybody upload to an inbox folder but not view or change existing files. Then your photo team members can sort through the new photos and categorize them in PhotoStation. Once they are done you can make them public and let your web team embed the images on the website or share them out to social media. Want to back it up to cloud? There's an addon for basically any backup service you could want. 

 

They are a little pricey but they are extremely flexible devices even if you don't get into 3rd party addon territory. 

[tgrachan]

13 hours ago, jake9000 said:

A synology diskstation would be nearly plug n play. It does directory storage but also has a bunch of apps that you can bolt on. 

You can let them upload remotely in the browser with the FileStation module, and have really granular access control. You can let anybody upload to an inbox folder but not view or change existing files. Then your photo team members can sort through the new photos and categorize them in PhotoStation. Once they are done you can make them public and let your web team embed the images on the website or share them out to social media. Want to back it up to cloud? There's an addon for basically any backup service you could want. 

 

They are a little pricey but they are extremely flexible devices even if you don't get into 3rd party addon territory. 

I did a lot of research on this and I'm thinking this would be a good solution for us. I actually found a video demonstrating the management software and they set up almost exactly what we would need. Obviously I would need to get the budget for something like that cleared but it would be really nice to have that flexibility. Now to figure out what kind of budget I would have to work with and what that budget would get me. Thank you everyone for your replies on this. Hopefully I'll be able to get this worked out soon.