I know this has been discussed quite a few times, but I still can’t find what I want. May just be moon on a stick, but you lot seem to specialise in solving the impossible (or at least having “fun” arguing about it)…

Trying to finally get all my photos more organised, and I’m looking for a new service (or services) to use. I think the problem is I’m both an enthusiastic amateur photographer, but also want to integrate phone snaps, and I want storage as well as hosting. This is what I want:

– I want to be able to store high res versions of all my photos in an organised way with a folder structure and tagging, and I want to be able to sync this with my PC.

– I want these to be accessible from a web interface and an app (which ideally would store low res copies locally on my phone).

– Having set this system up, I want to easily be able to share photos or sets of photos, both by pulling code for embedding (e.g. on here) or sending a link to an album.

– I want to automatically add photos taken on my phone (a la Dropbox) – could be done through Dropbox, but I might need to upgrade to a paid Dropbox account, and I’m not sure Dropbox is a complete solution to my needs (fair enough, it’s not meant to be a photo hosting platform).

I’ve used Flickr for years and it does a lot of this. Now they want some money for doing that, which is fair enough, and I’m not averse to paying for something, but it needs to fit with my needs and I’m not sure Flickr does: tagging is well hidden, as is generating code for embedding, and neither of which seem to be possible from the app.

My main photo editing/organisation is done in Darktable (open source Lightroom clone) on my Linux PC. I realise the Lightroom/Creative Cloud package does a lot of what I want, but I don’t really want to pay a tenner a month and change my whole system (inc. OS) to use this.

I don’t need any more editing tools – I do my “serious” photos in Darktable, and occasionally use Snapseed on my phone, so I just want something to organise and host JPEGs.

Any suggestions welcome – either for something that does everything (unlikely) or bits of the problem. Cheers!

Google photos?

Google photos?

Could be part of the solution, but the organisation is a bit crap: no tagging ability, and it insists on trying to organise your photos into themes based on its own (not very) intelligent algorithm. Also no embedding.

It’s a big chunk of space for free though.

Google does it, except for the (easy) hotlinking for forums, etc. This is still doable but is a faff.

I haven’t found a usable all-in-one solution yet – have been looking since Flickr was bought up.

I no longer use Darktable – all my organisation is done manually using a normal folder structure. I only ever really used it for processing anyway and have moved over to Polarr for most of this now.

I do a double cloud backup to both Google Photos and my paid for Flickr (and then also an external drive). My phone backs up those quick snaps to Google automatically. I don’t use tags, but find Google Photos search function is pretty good for most purposes if I need to find images of a certain subject or theme.

I use Flickr to hotlink my own photos (getting a usable link from the mobile app is not THAT faffy), and Imgur for everything else. If it’s for here, I’ll also often use the Instagram embed function to share an image.

@thenorthwind If you find a decent single solution please post it up here!

https://ctrlq.org/google/photos/ to embed google photos in forums such as stw, been a while but worked last time I tried it.

@colournoise
Sounds like we’re looking for similar things.

I use Flickr to hotlink my own photos (getting a usable link from the mobile app is not THAT faffy), and Imgur for everything else. If it’s for here, I’ll also often use the Instagram embed function to share an image.

I can see how to get the URL from the app: that might work here – testing below – but not the BBcode which would be nice (and you can from the website) – though I’m probably more likely to use a PC forum posts.

@thenorthwind If you find a decent single solution please post it up here!

Will do, don’t hold your breath!

@n0b0dy0ftheg0at thanks for that. Could be useful, but it’s a bit faffy for constant use.

To use the Flickr URL to hotlink if you’re not at a PC you need to grab it, then open up a new browser tab and paste the URL into there. From that you can then grab the bbcode using the normal Flickr share button.