Recommendations for using Digikam on cloud-based storage

Hello,

Was hoping maybe the community can give me some ideas on an issue I’m facing… This isn’t really a support issue, rather more like a brainstorm thing to figure out a better workflow.

I’ve been looking into using Digikam to do some photo management. In particular I’m interested in its face recognition and tagging features. In the past I’ve used Picasa’s desktop application, which was great, but is discontinued. digiKam seems like the best alternative nowadays.

I have accumulated a lot of photos and videos over the years, reaching more than 1TB. I’ve put it in cloud storage (Dropbox, but slowly transitioning to self-hosted Nextcloud). By doing it this way, I am able to selectively download individual albums on the different devices I use (laptop, desktop, etc.) as well as conveniently browse my photos stored on the cloud without needing to download anything.

Now, I would like to run digiKam’s tools on my cloud based photos. But because of the sheer size of it, I cannot download the entire thing into my machine because I simply don’t have the space for it. I may be able to make some room, but not for long because I’d probably need that space for games or something else. So how should I go about managing my photos with digiKam if I cannot get all my photos all in one place at one time?

I am also considering alternatives, like Nextcloud’s Photos and Recognize module, but it’s nowhere near as full featured as digiKam, and I couldn’t get it to work anyway. Plus I’d much rather have everything stored in a file, if possible.

Have you found a solution? Otherwise, I will respond to this tomorrow, as I have to go pretty much now. In short: I have a NAS and store my photos on that, while I use DK on my laptop to manage the collection residing on the NAS. I use a local database file and use lazy synchronization to write metadata to the files after each editing session.

I haven’t worked on this in a wile, and so I don’t really have a full solution yet.

I am thinking of transferring photos and videos from Google Photos to pcloud and using both digikam and kdenlive as well as Google Photos to process my images and videos.
I have to move my Google Photos images and videos off of a University account and delete that part of my account and am still wondering about how to make it all work out.

I have used digikam and kdenlive before.
I used to use Picasa and have used Google photos a good amount.
Pcloud would be new to me.
I believe I can move my University Google Photos to pcloud while I am testing it.

I am also thinking of switching from KDE Neon to Kubuntu and looking for advice for that.

Thanks.

  • Jim