Way to view photos and videos in same folder?


sonofdbn

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Before I resuscitated my unRAID server, I got a Synology DS414, which has a package called Photo Station. This lets users browse photos AND videos stored on the Syno, using IOS and Android apps.

 

It works beautifully with my folder structure, because I usually take photos and videos on my camera and import them into folders that are named by date plus descriptor. So, for example, the family knows that 2016-12-20 Holiday has the holiday photos and videos from that date, and they can easily browse there via a Syno app (DS Photo) and see the photos or videos, and the thumbnails are shown quickly, so it's quite a smooth experience. (However, the uploading part is clunky, but my guess is that this is in part to generate the thumbnails while uploading, so it doesn't have to be done on the fly.)

 

I now have my photos/videos on the unRAID server, and would love to have similar capabilities without having to copy everything across to the Syno. I thought at first that the Plex would work, but a) it seems it can't handle folders with both photos and videos and b) even just browsing photos is for some reason quite slow, with some people speculating that this is because of thumbnail generation.

 

So my question is whether there's anything I can run on unRAID that will give me similar functionality. I've read some of the comments on these forums on Photoshow, Piwigo, Lychee and possibly others, but they seem to handle only photos.

 

Any suggestions?

 

 

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Well, after a little more hunting around, it seems that Emby might work.

 

I saw in the Wiki for Emby that there is a content type called "Unset (mixed content)", but it turns out that this is not photos and videos, but perhaps TV shows and movies (based on some quick and not definitive googling). Just as I was about to give up on Emby, I noticed that in the content type options there was one for "Home videos & photos". A quick test showed that it seemed to work as expected, and now it's trundling through my photo/video files. Let's see how that turns out.

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  • 2 weeks later...

For anyone still following this thread...

 

Emby was sort of OK, but doesn't automatically generate folder thumbnails in all situations, and there's nothing in the photo/video thumbnails to distinguish between photos and videos.

 

I took a brief pass at Tonido, but the sharing wasn't quite what I wanted (and it seemed to leave Tonido .db files in every folder). It seems interesting for other use cases, but not for what I wanted to do.

 

So I thought, why not just go back to using Synology's Photo Station? It's not particularly well-documented, but although the Photo Station Uploader gives the impression that it converts uploaded photos and videos, it actually generates thumbnails and alternative resolution videos in addition to uploading the originals.

 

One nice touch is that it can be set to ignore duplicates, but the downside is that there's no logging, so you can end up with empty folders because (correctly) the files are duplicated elsewhere, but if you need to know where those files are, you have to find them yourself. The other downside is that sometimes it thinks files are duplicates when they aren't. For example, if there are two different files named DSC0057.jpg in different folders, it seems to think they are the same, and there doesn't seem to be a way of fixing this.

 

The other downside is that the thumbnail/video generation takes a while and ties up the uploading PC. An alternative is to simply copy the photo/video files into the right folder and let the NAS do the thumbnail/video generating. Unfortunately with my DS414, the CPU is quite limited, so this takes a huge amount of time compared with using the uploading software on a PC (which is already quite slow).

 

Part of my original objection to using Photo Station was that this meant having to keep another copy of my photos/videos on the DS414, but the positive angle is that I can think of unRAID as keeping the backup copy of the files.

 

While I was waiting for Photo Station Uploader to finish another batch of files, I idly googled Plex again and found a forum thread where it was mentioned in passing that Plex does in fact now handle photos and videos in the same folder. (I couldn't find any reference to this in the Plex documentation.) And it turns out that this is in fact the case, and it works beautifully. I installed the Plex docker on unRAID and set up a library of photos and videos very quickly. (To be fair, the unRAID CPU is much faster than the DS414 one, and also I think Plex is not generating videos in alternative resolutions.)

 

I need to do a little more playing around with Android clients, but for now Plex seems like a good solution.

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