So I run an Active Directory at home for all my purposes (being able just to browse around with Kerberos for a household is been quite a bliss, including Windows Hello for Business and a local CA) and I’m looking to cut my household completely off the iCloud grasp (i.e. self-hosting a photo solution).
I’ve been looking at a photo solution that can run on top of Windows (Docker-ized of course) and I’m quite unsure on what to start working with. I guess my requirements are:
Can handle RAW formats
Geotagging
Has an iOS client (iOS household here, but Android would be nice to in case of departure from this ecosystem)
Can run over Windows
Would you know any self-hosted solution that would work in this scenario? Was looking at Damselfly, but it doesn’t have a phone client from what I can tell. I need the missus to be able herself to “share” photos, so a mobile app is kind of needed.
PS: I actually use Hyper-V’s ability to dynamically scale RAM when not in use, which has made me stick to this platform, so I am not looking to migrate this whole setup as of today.
Edit: Just add - I am not really looking at moving to Linux (Proxmox, TrueNAS and whatnot). While I do know how to use Linux, not really looking to migrate at this time, thanks.
You are really kneecapping yourself running stuff in windows. If you are dedicated to running Windows server then I would spin up a Debian Linux VM, install docker, then use Nextcloud-AIO. The iPhone app is the best you will get for self hosted stuff on iPhone.
There aren’t many options for phone photo share-syncing on the Windows/Windows Server realm unless you plan on building your own plug-in to pull photos off Dropbox, after Microsoft axed Windows Phone its been downhill since. There were a few small developers who released products that included iOS/Android share functions, however the good developers tend to EOL a version or shift into SaS yearly subscription–two music creation apps I loved went SaS for audio export share to Dropbox/OneDrive
WSL is a good option you can roll your own share function.
Maybe going through WSL2 is needed in this case. I run everything on WS2022, so I need to figure out a way for WSL to start up on boot and never go to sleep (which it does).
I did spend sometime to have all my software suite on Windows (to my detriment perhaps…) for movies I own, music and books. So I am not against going down this route either; was looking at Piwigo too, but honestly I’m running out of patience with Windows, and WSL2 is becoming more attractive with each passing day.
I guess the challenge I have with WSL2 is the networking quirks it has - I typically publish docker containers towards a physical network rather than consolidate them within a single host… and I know that WSL2 tends keep networking local to itself (NAT) without doing some jerryrigging… I guess I have to figure that out
I was thinking on running XAMP with Piwigo in a Container too, as it has mobile apps too, but the more I’m looking into this, the more I realize that I may actually bite the bullet and figure out how to expose WSL2 as a separate system to the network, maybe this is what I need to do to finally be able to host both Windows and Docker containers in my environment
I do have Linux servers, but I treat them as playground; as someone that has done pentesting for a good chunk of my career I hated Linux with a passion because you always had to “recompile the Kernel” if you wanted to do something (come on, even Linus Torvalds said that it’s an awful thing to “break user space” if you need to do something)… so my appetite on running Linux barebones is quite limited, I do want to revisit this one day once I move my infra to a new motherboard perhaps, but for the time being, think I’ll look into WSL2
@teltersat you might want to look into Nextcloud. While it usually runs on Linux, I can’t imagine it would be impossible to get it up and running on IIS or with the windows build of Apache/nginx. I don’t know if it supports raw files, but it’s very configurable.
if the host NIC is in bridge mode than WSL is a seperate system on the network. i think by default WSL is in NAT mode. that will cause you issues.
you are stacking technologies and it will just make it more and more frustrating to trouble shoot, and asking for help on something like that will end in frustration.
Just speaking through my own biases. My use cases are just that, mine - I was speaking to those alone. Think it may have been misunderstood.
Thank you! Narrowed it down to:
Nextcloud
Damselfly
Piwigo
I’ll have to do some tinkering in how I approach this from now on, because I think this may lead me to hosting some of my services in Linux, or I may still try to go the native Windows Docker CE approach… Indeed have to do my own research on this from now on. Thanks!
if you currently have a HYPER-V environment setup already i would use a real VM with linux in it and or just install a XAMPP, or just a plain old LAMP server, then put Nextcloud on that.
Containers are all the rage right now, but for a single item it may not be worth the extra steps.
I’m not really a Windows guy, so I’m not the best to help there, but I figured I would throw in a suggestion for you. Best of luck and if you do run into a snag, definitely make a post about it, I’m sure there are people who can help!
