Software to allow normies to edit metadata of hosted images over a web interface

Software & Operating Systems Open Source & Web-Based
1

I’ve been googling myself in circles for a couple days, so it feels like it’s time to reach out to y’all.

I’ve been asked to assist on a project for my partner; her family is not especially computer-savvy.

I’ve got thousands of family photos recovered from the estate of a deceased family member. They’re being scanned into a digital format, but I need to make these pictures available (over the web seems simplest, but other equally accessible alternatives are welcome) to some immediate family to be able to add info into metadata comments. It’s important that this information stay ‘in’ the images themselves when they are removed from whatever hosting suite I end up using, but only because it seems like the easiest way to keep them associated with each other.

I looked most thoroughly at NextCloud, piwigo, and Lychee. None of these support this functionality from what I could see. Is there a self hosted software out there that does this? Open source / closed source / free / paid is all fine but I’d prefer to host this myself rather than pay to use someone else’s hardware.

Thanks in advance!

2

Photoprism looks like it is going to check these boxes nicely, going to set it up and give it a shot.

3

As far as I can tell, software that hosts images and support metadata editing universally does not support natively shoving that metadata back into the source image. Googe photos, for example, outputs a JSON file. Apple photos uses XML files but doesn’t support metadata at all on shared albums.

So it came down to which software does the following:

  • provides an ‘intuitive’ interface that prioritizes accessibility to editing metadata (how many clicks until I am typing a description)

  • stores that data in a readable format and stored in an accessible location

Photoprism seems to fit these paradigms nicely. All that is left is to get familiar with the wealth of configuration options for photoprism and learn how to set up a reverse HTTPS proxy in order to expose the service to the wider internet.