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For years and years, I used Gallery/Gallery2 to self-host photos, but more and more, I found myself taking photos with my phone instead of a regular camera. From the smartphone, it was much easier to upload to Facebook (and now, G+) than it was to get photos into Gallery. Once every so often, I would bother connecting my phone to my computer, sync the photos over, and then upload them into Gallery. But by then, they were already shared among my friends and family.

My gallery is still up, but the last time I updated it was apparently in 2011. There was a android client that came out that I had tried, but it didn't really work that well. I still backup photos from my phone to my computer and NAS, but couldn't be motivated to go beyond that.

I've looked at times to improve this situation. I much prefer to have my photos self-hosted. I haven't really found a gallery type program that worked as well as Menalto Gallery, but Lychee looks like it's a good contender. I also like that it can share out to other services.

At first I was thinking that since this doesn't have an android client, it would fall into the same disuse as my Gallery installation. But I noticed that it could read from an uploads folder and you could essentially ftp upload to the server. This made me wonder if one could just have an auto-upload (scp/sftp or otherwise) to a server.

I found a couple apps that do this, but [Auto-Share](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dngames.au...) looks the most polished. So I can see this working out.

tl;dr Looks like a great photo manager, love the option to share out to other service. There may be some Android Apps to automatically upload, even if it's not natively supported in Lychee.




Ok, so I installed it and added some pictures into uploads/import. Lychee imported these and dropped them into a smart album called Unsorted. I then wanted to organize these into albums. The first thing I noticed was there was no way to select photos. You have to open them one by one and move them. This would be my feature request numero uno.

Second thing I noticed is there doesn't seem to be support for sub-albums. I guess this isn't necessarily a deal killer, but I had a system of organizing albums in YEAR/MM type albums. If there was a lot of photos or an event, that would be a sub-album within the month it took place. If a single event took place between months (New Year's Eve party) I just handled that on a case by case basis.


Tip: You can right-click on single images/albums to rename, move or star them. By now, it may be easier to upload photos directly into the album of your choice.

Multi-select is planned.


I automated synchronization of the photos folder on my phone with my desktop computer whenever I'm at home. Removes one tedious step in the process at least. You could probably automate other steps as well.

Used FolderSync Lite[1] for Android. Syncs via ssh to my desktop (linux) every hour, but only when on the home wi-fi. I also sync deletions so moving them from the folder on the desktop removes them from the phone as well.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/search?q=foldersync%20lite


the tl;dr really ought to go at the start of your stuff, otherwise it's of no value to others because we've already read the whole thing before we arrived at it.




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