A Family Collaboration Server?

esobofh asks: "I'm interested in putting together a server for my family that would allow everyone to share & store pictures, movies and music. Whenever we have a family gathering, there are always a ton of digital cameras out and clicking away, so I'd like to have everyone share and submit the pictures and movies they've captured for everyone in the family. I am sure I could roll my own collaboration server, but I'm hoping there is something already put together and pretty. I'd like it to use standard files and directories for storing photos (as opposed to a database), that way the files can easily be moved and manipulated. Is there an application that can handle user accounts, picture submissions (file upload via browser), and other such content?"

Re:Share movies/music?

[omeomi]

Better make sure you're not connected to the greater internet then. The **AAs would sue the pants off you - after all, a central server is easier to find than a distributed P2P network.

You do know that many people have video cameras, right? The **AAs aren't going to sue anybody for posting their own pictures and videos.

Re:Wiki

[Pfhreakaz0id]

I tried a wiki.. and what you and I consider easy to use and the masses who aren't really into tech consider easy to use still has a big gap. They said it was too confusing.

Grab an old PC...

[Anonymous Coward]

Take an old PC. Stick some fair-sized hard drives in. Install FreeBSD, lighttpd, and proftpd.

Give each of your family members an account on the machine, so they can FTP in and upload pictures to their directory. They can even create their own directory hierarchies, so as to organize their photos as they wish.

Set up lighttpd to allow directory listing, and have it serve up content from the directories your relatives can FTP files to. That way they don't have to create a web page containing their images, or anything like that. Of course, if they want to, they're free to do so.

If they're running Windows, you can easily copy files via FTP using Explorer. It's the same drag-and-drop interface they should be used to using locally.

The best part of setting up a system like that is that it's very simple, of minimal cost, and doesn't involve PHP, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, CGI scripts, or anything else like that. Not only that, but it can take full advantage of the security offered by UNIX-like systems.

Re:Wiki

[Atzanteol]

TikiWiki allows for the creation of image and file galleries. It even allows for one to upload an entire directory at a time. Uses a DB backend though...