Software Recommendations:Large Photo Library

[ghetto2ivy]

Shotwell has become very unreliable as my photo collection has grown. I take a lot of shots of my kids an also do some amateur photography. To the tune of about 300 GB of photos now, and the pace of adding is increasing as I start to add in some HD video. Opening shotwell now takes over a minute and it still crashes often, presumably due to the size of the database.

So I'm looking for a replacement that works well with large libraries. I have been running Picasa 3.9 on Wine and it works well. I like that it can sync with G+, and like the facial recognition as a tool to help organize and find my photos. However, it too takes forever to load and its DB is over 5 GB right now.

So anything else work well with large libraries?

Dream features:

• Sync with Flickr, G+
• Facial Recognition
• Light Editing
• Raw Support
• Video Support (Import, Albums, Open with editor)
• Configurable import
• Easy Export of albums (sharing, shutterfly, facebook)
• Stability!

Any photo intense users find a good program (suite of programs)?

[tgalati4]

You might have to step up to a photo webserver such as gallery: http://galleryproject.org/

[BluegrassHero]

You might have to step up to a photo webserver such as gallery: http://galleryproject.org/

I've been using Gallery for... forever but stopped about 5 years ago when a few features weren't quite implemented in a way that worked for me (mostly importing). The thing I have always loved about this software is that (at least in earlier versions), it didn't mess with the originals the way iPhoto or others will do. I have similar requirements / needs and seeing this reminded me that Gallery is still in existence! I've tried Shotwell, Fspot, and some custom Perl that weeded out duplicates. As cumbersome as it might seem to create a web server just to manage your photos, it seems to do a great job of organizing them. I do hope they've added some better mass-import features. Ok, I'm off to try this out now.

[tgalati4]

Generally speaking, the web-based managers are better able to scale to much larger collections. Now whether they address all of the OP's requirements will require testing. I'm sure the OP will keep us informed as to what works and what doesn't.

[ghetto2ivy]

I used to use gallery remotely 1.x variety. I hadn't considered using it locally. That's a thought.

[BluegrassHero]

I used to use gallery remotely 1.x variety. I hadn't considered using it locally. That's a thought.

The gallery remote package allowed mass-imports, but seems to be obsolete after Gallery V1. I found little goodness in Gallery 3 this week unless I choose to upload each picture individually (and via Flash plugin).

I think I'll head back to V1 and see what I can do. Fewer bells and whistles, but I can't think of anything specific I'd be losing -- and I'd be gaining a key feature (import of entire directories)

[sudodus]

Try DigiKam! It is much better than Shotwell and F-spot. I have no own experience of cloud services for this purpose.

[ghetto2ivy]

DigiKam is showing the most promise right now! Exports to everything. And I can run my large DB on one drive (SSD) even using MySQL as a backend, while keeping pictures anywhere (removable media, network, external.) Nice!