13 replies to this topic

[Bjur]

Hi I would really like to be able to share photos over the internet with my WHS 2011. Is there a program that can do that on whs 2011. I can see that whiist is not available for my setup.

I have earlier had an Synology with an excellent app but this is the only thing i'm missing.

Picasa costs money so i dont want that.

Hopefully someone can help.

[cskenney]

It will be interesting to see what others say. It doesn't look like Whiist is an option at all anymore unless you run WHSv1.

Could you explain your comment about Picasa? It is free but it works with cloud storage (Google) that isn't free depending on the space you require. There are other options for making pictures available over the internet so we really should know what you are trying to do and any limitations you may have.

If you really want to host the pictures on your server and serve them as web pages (which I believe is what Whiist was doing) are you looking for something simple or are you willing to do some of your own web development?

[kcormier]

Not sure of your exact needs but my planned solution is Gallery Server Pro.

I had done some research back in the v1 days (did not like Whiist) and while there are more "powerful/sexy" solutions out there, GSP, hit all my tick boxes.
All I really want is a simple/elegant solution to host my own photo galleries and the added ability to host friend/family galleries (if they so desire) is a bonus - how many siblings/relatives do you have that have their photos sitting on a disk somewhere with no backup in place ?

GSP can serve almost any type of content (photos, documents, movies, whatever) so it has the potential to be a general-purpose content server.

I had gotten as far as bringing up GSP on v1 and then the WHS2011 upgrade path snagged me and this project went on the backburner.

My photos are already mastered on my WHS2011 (RAID1 and Cloudberry/Amazon S3 backup) so plopping GSP into the mix (for my own and other hosted galleries) seems a natural fit to me.

Hoping to get to this someday soon...

[ikon]

Not sure of your exact needs but my planned solution is Gallery Server Pro.

I had done some research back in the v1 days (did not like Whiist) and while there are more "powerful/sexy" solutions out there, GSP, hit all my tick boxes.
All I really want is a simple/elegant solution to host my own photo galleries and the added ability to host friend/family galleries (if they so desire) is a bonus - how many siblings/relatives do you have that have their photos sitting on a disk somewhere with no backup in place ?

GSP can serve almost any type of content (photos, documents, movies, whatever) so it has the potential to be a general-purpose content server.

I had gotten as far as bringing up GSP on v1 and then the WHS2011 upgrade path snagged me and this project went on the backburner.

My photos are already mastered on my WHS2011 (RAID1 and Cloudberry/Amazon S3 backup) so plopping GSP into the mix (for my own and other hosted galleries) seems a natural fit to me.

Hoping to get to this someday soon...

Thanks for posting this. I have never heard of GSP. It sounds similar to Menalto Gallery, except for Windows. I may have a look at it. I have one question. Do you know if it offers the ability to customize page background colours and such? Showing photos against a white background is just about the worst way to view them.

[kcormier]

Thanks for posting this. I have never heard of GSP. It sounds similar to Menalto Gallery, except for Windows. I may have a look at it. I have one question. Do you know if it offers the ability to customize page background colours and such? Showing photos against a white background is just about the worst way to view them.

From what I remember and have read the answer is both yes and no

If you look at this thread, virtually every aspect is customizable via stylesheet and, in the extreme, in code - more user-friendly UI management features are apparently in the pipe for v3 release.
So, yes, if you don't mind "digging in" - perhaps not so much if you want a click interface to do all of it (i.e., wait for v3) - depends on what you're comfortable with.

[ikon]

A click interface is preferable, simply for ease of use. I can "dig in" if I have to, but it's not something I'm all that enamoured with any more.

[pcdoc]

Curious about your Picasa comment. How many pictures are your talking about. What about SkyDrive? I will be curious on what the end result is as I might want to consider that as well. Personally I feel safer (security) with online solutions as opposed to local but I am still open to find out the outcome.

[gcoupe]

I've taken the easy way out - I just use SkyDrive. Since I've been using it for a long time, I have 25GB of storage for free. New users of SkyDrive now get 7GB of free storage.

[Bjur]

Hi first of all thanks for the answers and suggestions so far.

Let me elaborate:

Regarding Picasa:
The reason I don't see this as an ideal solution for me is: I have about 30 GB pictures perhaps more, and if I want to use picasa to share them over the web I have to upload them to the cloud correct? I have not experimented with Picasa, but is it possible to make web access to the local Picasa program and use it to share and see the pictures without having all the pictures uploaded to the sky (webserver functionality)?
They have changed their price plan, and if I should upload all the pictures it would cost me $4.99 a month with the new changes, which I don't want..

The skydrive solution seemed okay, as I have a very old hotmail, so I could get a lot of free space, but eventhough I thought I had it activated, I just saw the 25 gb free activation you had to upload a picture before 24 april to get the activation, which I had not, so only 7 GB not:(

One of the things with the Synology Photo Station was that I could easily get it configured and furthermore easily upload pictures to it from my smartphone. It just had a menu in gallery where you could share it easily to photo station. That I would really like to have a similar solution on my WHS 2011 server. There must be Windows/WHS users that would like that functionality. I'm suprised there hasn't been more requests for this or is everybody just using a Synology NAS or paying for online storage Picasa or am I missing something:)?

Edited by Bjur, 29 May 2012 - 02:16 AM.

[jmwills]

Add SharePoint Services (Foundation) to WHS and create an alternate public web site (non-port 80) and give anonymous read access to the site. It's free.

[geek-accountant]

What about something like flickr?

[Cino]

if you dont mind messing around with IIS, PHP and mySQL; give http://coppermine-gallery.net/ a try. Been using it for about 5+ years, been thru about 4 different server/os upgrades... Works fine on whs2011 since all it needs is IIS,PHP,mySQL to run. Folder permissions were alittle tricky since the web app will create thumbnails and allows you to also upload photos directly to the web site.

[eagle63]

@Bjur
Take a look at this thread I recently started: http://homeserversho...ote-web-access/

It sort of evolved into a question about using the remote web access feature as a means of sharing photos with family members. The deal breaker for me is that when you click on a thumbnail in the photo library, it actually downloads it instead of enlarging the photo. For the life of me I still can't figure out who thought that would be a good idea.

It's too bad, because otherwise I think it could be a good means of sharing photos - especially when you have a large photo library.

[gcoupe]

It sort of evolved into a question about using the remote web access feature as a means of sharing photos with family members. The deal breaker for me is that when you click on a thumbnail in the photo library, it actually downloads it instead of enlarging the photo. For the life of me I still can't figure out who thought that would be a good idea.

That's the expected behavior if you access photos via the "Shared Folders" view in Remote Web Access. If you access photos via the "Media" view, then you should see full-size images and slideshows.

But then, as I said elsewhere, the Media view is flaky at the best of times. It falls over with large libraries.