Photo proofing (*NOT soft proofing) a.k.a short listing of photos using Nextcloud’s API?
Does anyone have any idea (or probably insights) for building a photo proofing web app using Nextcloud’s API? Or even better, how about a native nextcloud app for soft proofing that integrates well with the nextcloud files/photos?
The backstory for this app:
If I’m right, the tiresome & boring task in a wedding photographer’s life would be sending 1000s of JPEGs via Internet and get back around 250-300 photos for album-making from the clients.
My clients would normally use a file manager (such as Windows explorer or Apple’s Finder) to short list the photos i.e. Put the shortlisted photos in a separate folder → Zip it → and then email me.
App idea:
The idea is to have an image gallery that would contain a tiny ✓ and ✗ below every thumbnail using which the users can shortlist the photos.
Probably two filter views to view the ✓ or ✗ photos alone.
Nextcloud is an awesome open source alternative for Google drive (or) Dropbox where we get to own the server and it’s data. I already have a nextcloud server set up and running in my home which I use to transfer photos/videos to my clients and vendors.
Nextcloud has a native photos app which I think we can hack to customize our need.
Since Nextcloud is free to use and open source, I think we can write a standalone web app (or even better - a native nextcloud app) for this purpose which would make our lives much easier.
Like the idea?
Then please share me your suggestions/insights on this topic. I know a little python and let’s make it open source. What say?
There are commercial websites for exactly that, which are used by e.g. wedding photographers. However, I would really like something like that in my nextcloud. That leads me to the suggestion part .
The use cases might be very different, and what would be great to have is some flexibility. My particular use case would be editorial work. Features that would be useful for me are grouping of photos, individual 5 star rating for technical quality, content quality and usefulness, and comments for individual photos and groups.
But how does the photographer know which family or friends group portrait to print or not?
The average no. of photos for a 4 days Hindu wedding would be somewhere around between 2000-3000. So it’s a pain in the arse for us to extract the raw from the shortlisted JPEGs.
Actually I was going to suggest the 5 star rating, tags, and comments as well, but then for the sake of simplicity I didn’t add that in the original post.
However, like you said there are many commercial apps available for that. Some even have iOS/Android versions too.
But the new idea here is, to have such a feature inside Nextcloud. Trust me, owning a nextcloud server has totally changed the way I handle data with my clients. So I would love to have that feature inside my cloud.
I am not a programmer, so I will probably be of little use here. Especially web programming is a big mystery to me, as it looks very messy for my eyes.
However, I have some thoughts. Your approach to start with something simple (yes/no only) is the way to go, but it should be implemented in an easily extendable way.
It needs to be accessible without account by the official nextcloud public sharing framework.
Not sure how much of the official nextcloud metadata should be utilized (such as comments or ratings) our if it would be better to have the metadata organized in a separate structure, e.g. a special file (csv, json or sqlite) in the “shared” folder. But I would for sure avoid direct integration in the image metadata, for speed and consistency reasons. Optional writing of xmp files in the flavour of the different apps would be nice though. As a darktable user, I must admit that it is a bit sad that darktable does not have a flag metadatum. However, one could assign yes/no tags which could easily be translated e.g. to colour marks inside darktable.
And something additional: As multiple people may be rating the images, the metadata has to be assigned to people. For a publicly shared gallery, even with password, this would require a name input before the images are shown.
Nice. As a matter of fact, Nextcloud already has ‘Tags’ that we can assign to any type of file. May be we can use that tag feature as selected or rejected.
But for that we need to have a public shared folder with ‘edit’ access as a starting point and think something from there?
Should be a nextcloud plugin. Then when you share a folder, same as the options to upload / edit / password protected… add option for client proofing. I will even add a field “Number of pictures”
Maybe we can post this at upwork and raise some money to pay the development and make it open source?
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