jon_nais Posted May 30, 2011 Posted May 30, 2011 Hi, We are in the unfortunate situation where staff have uploaded soooo many photos to our shared areas that we are in danger of running out of space. While just going through the drives and deleting older photos or resizing is an option (though not the easiest as full res images are required in places so we would need to be able to pick and choose folders...) Does anyone out there use any online storage facilites for photos? Picasa has been mentioned, any others? We have a VLE based on sharepoint, which we would like to link to the online photo storage if possible. (just before anyone says, why not keep the photos in sharepoint, the content database would become massive and would make managing backups etc a right headache, scheduling extra backups for systems is a nightmare as it is, but to increase the sharepoint content by 5 fold would just cause our poor network manager to implode...) Good management of the photo system would be handy, choice of resolution to upload to, management of older photos, good folder structure and possibility of managing permissions easily are all plus points we would look for. Many thanks for looking. Jon
Ric_ Posted May 30, 2011 Posted May 30, 2011 I had a think about doing something similar a while back but managed to solve the storage problems another way. I would be careful about uploading all your pictures... just in case there's potentially sensitive stuff there. For example, some parents may not like the kid's photos appearing online. The solution I came up with was a cheap server with a load of inexpensive disks (speed isn't too important for this) running Gallery - see Gallery | Your photos on your website
bart21 Posted May 30, 2011 Posted May 30, 2011 We bought a cheap 4TB buffalo terastation for our photo storage. nick
edutech4schools Posted May 30, 2011 Posted May 30, 2011 If you get a QNAP nas drive you can install the Gallery that Ric_ above talks about onto the drive.
MemoryLoss Posted May 30, 2011 Posted May 30, 2011 and what do you say when a photo is required in high-res for a school mag or somesuch? 1. Try to get the originator to weed out the rubbish 2. Buy storage - it's cheaper than sweating over it 3. After a suitable time -lag (at least an entire academic year) go through and weed out the unremarkable and useless - but get colleagues to agree a policy on this first shink them down, use the win xp photoresizer thingy
imiddleton25 Posted May 31, 2011 Posted May 31, 2011 currently having same issues, we now archive all photos to dvd at the end of acedemic years keeping just last 12 months on sharepoint. Tried asking staff about this but they always say oh yes need all of them. So to start i move the folder contents to an old array with a txt file saying if these pictures have been relocated please call IT if you need them. Three years no one ever rang . so now burn dvd and file it away after a year on old San . My next thought is quoter the storage for pics so they have to manage it themselves instead of uploading everthing from camera including out of focus and pics that are no use.
TechMonkey Posted May 31, 2011 Posted May 31, 2011 What do people feel is a suitable res then? Unless they are doing full page or bigger than A4 prints I can't see more than 1024x768 being hugely needed. Or am I being a philistine? I would love to be able to keep the high res images as I do at home, but with some students copying 30+ images at a time across it just isn't viable.
CyberNerd Posted May 31, 2011 Posted May 31, 2011 All staff and students have a Picasa web album that is linked to their school Google Apps account. Tonnes of space, sharing etc.
dhicks Posted May 31, 2011 Posted May 31, 2011 Good management of the photo system would be handy, choice of resolution to upload to, management of older photos, good folder structure and possibility of managing permissions easily are all plus points we would look for. Storage is cheap, just buy a basic server, bung in some harddrives and away you go - both Dell and HP's entry-level servers should cost under £500 with four 2TB harddrives, giving you a RAID-5 array of 6TB or so for image storage. A Samba server is all you really need to serve files, although some scripting to do some organisation at the backend can come in handy - for deduplicating files, shrinking and compressing images, and so on.
IKWeb Posted June 1, 2011 Posted June 1, 2011 I would say get Gallery, as mentioned above, and then get yourself some website hosting, say GoDaddy, who offer unlimited storage for about $10 a month, upload all your images, install Gallery so they can be viewed, and then password the whole site, and give staff the username and password to be able to view the site. GoDaddy backup your site so you dont need to worry about backups.
jdoyle Posted June 2, 2011 Posted June 2, 2011 though aimed at FE and HE, JISC have a website offering advice re photos, digital image management etc which might be of interest : JISC Digital Media - Systems for Managing Digital Media Collections 2
Nick_Parker Posted January 4, 2012 Posted January 4, 2012 My problem with both Gallery & Picasaweb is that neither seem to support sub-folders. Ideally we want to be able to create a folder structure something like this: 2010 -Junior Preparatory --Sports --Academic --Cultural -Senior Preparatory --Sports --Academic --Cultural -High School --Sports ---Cricket vs Kyalami - 19th August 2010 ---Rugby vs Heronbridge - 23 August 2010 --Academic ---Prize Giving - 12 February 2010 --Cultural ---Romeo & Juliet - 17 July 2010 2011 -Junior Preparatory -Senior Preparatory -High School So we have a complete searchable history in one place. Picasaweb would be perfect if only it allowed folders.
edutech4schools Posted January 4, 2012 Posted January 4, 2012 Last time i used gallery it had sub albums. We have just started to use Google apps for Ed (Picasa) and its going very well.
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