Photo Management Tool Candidates for Librem One

Services Librem One
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Very impressed with Librem One’s concept and excited to see it progress.

It seems the aim is to eventually offer an all-in-one service that can replace the likes of Google/G Suite and other Big Tech offerings.

Many people want a way to manage their photos. For Apple users, the default is Apple Photos, which works seamlessly on macOS and iOS via iCloud. For Google users, it’s Google Photos. These programs also offer basic photo editing capabilities.

What existing FLOSS would you like to see added to Librem One for the purposes of enabling similar seamless photo management across devices?

For example:

  • You could take a photo on your Librem 5, and then it automatically shows up on your Librem 15 moments later.
  • You make an edit on one, and it shows up, synced on the other.
  • Perhaps there is also a web interface for the cloud so that you can still access your files from a third device when required and do basic edits.
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And you don’t see any privacy risks with that? :slight_smile:

Seriously though I would like to break it down into several different but related activities

  • photo editing (crop, colour adjust, brightness adjust, …)
  • photo metadata (categorising, captioning, fixing dates, …)
  • photo sharing (and synchronisation and backup)

It could be that software that you pay for (one way or another) better seamlessly integrates those three activities together. I have very limited interest in the third list item above.

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Perhaps this functionality could be optional? However, normies expect it. So, if we want Purism to grow beyond its current sophisticated and privacy-savvy audience, this would need to be available. Apple Photos and Google Photos are so easy to use in this regard that people don’t need to think about all the details. All they know is that it “just works.”

Agreed, but it needs to be all integrated and easy - just like Apple Photos or Google Photos. Normies aren’t going to adopt it if they need to figure out three separate applications.

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4

With Librem One, this could certainly be a possibility, provided Purism is behind it and has the resources. I say this because “Librem Files” is already on the published roadmap for Librem One, provided the backers are there.

Once that infrastructure exists, it would be a matter of integrating Librem Files with the Photos application. As I am not a developer by any stretch of the imagination (I’ve dabbled, years ago), I do not know how simple or complicated this portion of it would be.

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I think this is coming with nextcloud, which is expected to be the Librem Files 50.000 backers goal.

Lock for nextcloud gallery app here. With nextcloud you can sync all sorts of files, including photos folders, and the gallery app gives you the web gallery part. I think there is no editing in the gallery app for next cloud but editing on any device should be synced to the others.

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6

Pretty easy to securely share between 2 Linux devices. No reason to involve a cloud. The biggeru issue is sharing with other users.

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Agreed, however the idea is to make the Librem devices as accessible to “normies” as possible. In this case, that would mean signing up for and then into a Librem One account on both devices, and things sync as one expects based on previous experiences with Apple, Google, et al. All with one critical difference: Librem respects you.

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as long as “normies” have a sufficient understanding and caring of what that ACTUALLY means.

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True that, though concern over what the giants are doing with our data is becoming evermore widespread. It is true that many are blissfully ignorant with no intention of enlightening themselves, but there are plenty that will wake up and seek alternatives. This doesn’t mean that they will have an interest in becoming particularly tech-savvy.

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not so sure about that. it might be that the two are more inter-related than we are WILLING to admit - but i don’t believe it’s right to force anything on anyone.

on another note

this is similar to what the Logitech MX master mouse does over wifi beeing able to transfer files from one computer to another with just dragging the file over from one screen to the next. the proprietary nature of this seemed particularly disturbing to me here.

@dlkr does this seem like a usefull software ? https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ < rapid photo downloader for gnu/linux desktop but maybe it can be adapted for librem5 down the road in a “non-cloud” way.

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Maybe my comment was misunderstood.

I had in mind the scenario where you take a photo on your phone that you perhaps ought not to have taken / in a more sober state would not have taken / were just mucking around / maybe it wasn’t even legal to take (or not legal to distribute) due to consent issues - and then it is instantaneously synched onto the cloud.

There have been enough high profile public instances of this, never mind about the ones that were kept mostly quiet.

Proprietary software or not, I would have reservations about “synching moments later”. I would prefer to have either explicit control over the uploading or a configured time delay or both.

It’s true that you can chase down the cloud copy to delete it - provided that you have a respectful provider (with a disrespectful provider there is no right-to-delete and the copy will potentially live on forever). It certainly makes it harder to chase down all copies. (For example, you would be asking your provider about their backup regime, if any.)

Conversely, there may be times when “synching moments later” is exactly what you want and need - hence why giving the user control over this is what I am advocating for.

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Seems like a step in the right direction, but at first glance, the screenshots of its UI don’t look as polished as Apple Photos or Google Photos. For mass normie adoption, we’ll need a UI which hides complexity from the 80% of users who don’t want it.

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A fair point, indeed!

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you started a thread about photo-management-tools for the librem one (which is designed to run on the librem 5/13/15 ) as such it is a convergeance based freedom-respecting service offered by Purism.

from what i could tell SO FAR there haven’t been 10.000 units sold of each of those. your particular interest in “mass normie adoption” in our case seems a little out-of-scope at the present moment.

that beeing said - USUALLY - serious photo-management-tools DO include (although sometimes hidden) advanced features for photographers or people that might use it outside of the typical “normie” use case.

now for my particular use case i do VERY much care how DEEP those advanced features are hidden in order to appease the “normie” population. i wouldn’t want to be left out or at a disadvantage just because i’m a minority.

in short what i’m trying to say is that a compromise will leave BOTH sides a little sore. do we want that or do we want to have modes in each aplication that will allow us to select between basic and advanced-mode ?

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Good questions.

Perhaps Purism could clarify whom they consider their prime target market. For example, a Linux distro such as Elemental seems to be aimed at first-timers considering transitioning from Macs. Whereas other distros are clearly aimed at sophisticated Linux veterans.

Judging from the Librem One video ad, it does seem to be normies they are trying to reach. If they were targeting privacy/security gurus, it would have been all about the technical details. Instead, they just used simple language and concepts that even my grandmother could understand.

Apple Photos seems to do a good job of hiding its more advanced features without making them buried too deep. But, it’s not aimed at pro photographers. They prefer to use Lightroom. And, in the FLOSS world, perhaps those same photographers would be using DarkTable or digiKam.

I’m not qualified to judge what is the most suitable choice, which is why I started this thread to see what existing FLOSS applications the community would like to see adopted (i.e. forked and rebranded by Purism for inclusion/integration into the Librem One suite).

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fair enough. just one more thing - yes LightRoom is prefered among other software in photographer/mac land but the example above was given from here > https://lessons.rileybrandt.com/ - where he illustrates how photography on the gnu/linux side (provided one is willing to use non-free-hardware such as cpu and gpu - he’s using fedora 2016) can be accesible and very much on par in the illustrated use cases with proprietary alternatives from windows and mac.

he uses in his tutorials gimp, darkroom, displayCAL(for monitor measurements/calibration/profiling) and rapid-photo-downloader.

to be honest i allways felt that the way software works on gnu/linux - besides the few hardware inconveniences - is more easily accessible in the makes-sense kinda’ way while tutorials and learning material for the proprietary software is convoluted and just doesn’t click like it does on the free side.

now as i said librem 5 is a new-young-developing platform who knows we may be able to see down the road versions of gimp, lightroom, displayCAL etc addapted for the convergeant market just like there is a mobile-touch-friendly-Photoshop on the windows/apple store.

everything that is possible on the proprietary side is possible on the free/open side. code is just code.
it can be at first non-state-of-the-art but that is what RND does. only it requires at least the amount of interest that proprietary had so far in order to reach that state-of-the-art we all want on the condition that software-freedom is assured and in time also hardware.

so it is up to the people to understand that in order to get somewhere you have to start somewhere like it was with the first gen Apple. only Apple was quite big even in 2007 when it first launched. people bought the phone because it was a novelty but they didn’t know what to expect from it so they just shelled the cash away and now 12 years later - iPhones X.

so is the librem 5 - it is a novelty as are the services that the librem one bundle includes. why ? because no one does software freedom - wrapped as you said - in “Just-Works”. but that doesn’t mean it’s NOT for nerds also. it still has the terminal/the-shells/vim/emacs and all the gnu/linux goodies sys admins, programmers, web-developers, hackers, security-analists, engineers etc use more-or-less on a daily basis.

if i may - photographers/desingers/architects - or the graphics dependent crowd are the bunch that sit in the middle but that doesn’t mean they don’t ocasionally dable into the advanced-nerdy stuff.

freedom/privacy/security is for everybody as such we can’t demand only tools for “normies” in the hopes that the numbers might go up because it might go sideways. it’s having powerfull tools that features modes is the answer.

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