What's the best solution for sharing a photo library in a home network

I'm looking for the best solution for sharing our family photo library on our home network. I first looked at Lightroom, but it has the problem of not wanting to work over the network.

Basically, I have a 1 TB RAID 1 NAS in the basement and all desktop PCs/Macs are now using hardwired CAT6 networking, so network speed shouldn't be a problem.

So what I need is a cross-platform photo library software that works over the network (storing all the metadata on the network drive as well).

What's the best thing to use?

Thanks

Tobias Timpe

UPDATE: Maybe I should have told you this more clearly in the first hand: I'm looking for a photo management app that supports network drives, something like Lightroom, Aperture or Picasa.

Tobias Timpe

Posted 2013-10-12T20:31:19.770

Reputation: 171

Unfortunately, questions seeking product recommendations are off-topic on SuperUser because they tend to become obsolete quickly. The Q&A format also works best when a question can be answered with a single, authoritative answer (imagine someone has infinite knowledge and ask yourself "can such a person write a single answer to the question I'm asking?"); as it is written, multiple different answers to this question can be equally correct, and what's more, the set of correct answers will likely change with time as vendors develop their respective products.

– a CVn – 2013-10-12T22:18:01.200

Some NAS has their own Photo Library sharing package, have you checked if your NAS can install it? One example was Synology with their Photo Station. I don't know what NAS you have, so that is one option you can try to check. But yes as Michael commented above, this kinda falls under product recommendation which is off-topic. – Darius – 2013-10-12T23:34:56.900

Answers

Picasa is very good. Here's another idea. If you can setup a web server you can use gallery from http://galleryproject.org/ I host over 20,000+ pics and performance if fine. However, because it is web based it is completely OS independent. It also has plugins/extensions to add additional features.

It is also open source so the source code is freely available. If you know how to program you can write your own extensions.

cybernard

Posted 2013-10-12T20:31:19.770

Reputation: 11 200

For desktop is easy, just use Share/Samba, all NAS should support this. Sync files from desktop to NAS with FreeFileSync

For mobile check if you NAS is supporting DNLA. Also some NAS are supporting WebDAV and you can find lots of free Webdav clients for Android and iOS.

Cristi

Posted 2013-10-12T20:31:19.770

Reputation: 101

Why would anyone use SMB/Samba if they have NFS available?? – MaQleod – 2013-10-12T20:41:42.657

1I'm more looking in terms of an actual desktop app. – Tobias Timpe – 2013-10-12T20:51:58.843