Despair! All Metadated Up With Nowhere To Go :(

[Anaxagoras]

Throwing myself on the mercy of the forum here. I finally got all my fields finely formatted (thanks to y'all) only to be let down for the umpteenth time by Lightroom. I'm the designated organizer of several collections of old family photos (each ranging from around a thousand images to around ten thousand) and need a photo management application/DAM/whatever that supports the following:

+ ability to share a photo collection with a group of people
+ allows them (not just me) to search the collection/album/group by keyword and by common metadata fields (right now I'm using Title,CreateDate,Country,State,Location,Description,Keywords), ideally in combination and from a search box/bar
+ allows them to comment on photos
+ can be fully accessed through a desktop browser, not just via a mobile app
+ is extremely simple to use (as most of the folks poring over these images are 75 and up) and easy to access -- I sent my comparatively tech-savvy aunt a link to a shared Lightroom album and she said "you'd think I was trying to access National Security Secret Documents. There were several layers of verification"

Is this really too much to ask?  Lightroom is out (no search feature in shared albums, only for the creator) as is Google Photos (no ability to search within an album and no tags/keywords). Years ago I did something like this with Flickr but haven't kept up with it.  I saw a comment online that Microsoft OneDrive supports tags/keywords but I'm not sure I'm ready for the letdown of discovering the tool you just sank time and money into is missing some essential feature.

If anyone has a solution to recommend my appreciation would be extreme.

[Hubert]

I would take another look at Flickr. I don't use it that much myself, but it seems to do pretty much what you need - it's web browser based (there's also a mobile app), you can restrict uploaded content to friends and/or family, you can allow them to comment, you can create albums, you can tag images etc etc. I think searching may be a little limited though.

Hope it helps...

[Anaxagoras]

Thank you! That's definitely close, working through the details to see if it checks all the boxes.

[wywh]

I'm the designated organizer of several collections of old family photos (each ranging from around a thousand images to around ten thousand) and need a photo management application/DAM/whatever that supports the following

Google Photos was the best free or even commercial solution I found for my noncommercial photo publishing needs which should support: searchable captions and keywords, dates, location maps, subscribed user comments, an alert to subscribed users when new images are added to the shared album, admin rights to selected users, no sign-in needed for anonymous users, downloadable original quality media for any user, cross-platform web browsers and mobile apps.

Two years ago I also tried Dropbox, Apple and Microsoft cloud, Picasa, Flickr and SmugMug. But I am not perfectly happy with Google Photos either:

+ Other users can subscribe to the shared album and receive notifications when it is updated. Also non-subscribed users can view the album via an URL. Subscribed users can optionally comment or "like" individual photos. Trusted users can even granted admin rights to the album (I have not tried how well this works).

+ The albums can be viewed via a computer web browser or a mobile app (works fine in iOS).

+ Users can view the albums as web pages with multiple photos automatically neatly arranged on one page, clicking an image zooms into individual image mode with an optional neat sidebar showing the scrollable Caption text (I haven't tested if it uses "[IPTC] Caption-Abstract" and/or "[XMP-dc] Description"), EXIF date and time, image name, resolution, size, and location map (clicking the map in Google Photos opens a more detailed Google Maps in another page. It would be nice to have an option to just zoom into smaller map with satellite view and keep that zoom factor and view).

+ The photos can be stored in original quality (within Google account limits) with all metadata.

+ Subscribed and nonsubscribed users can download individual images or the whole zipped album with original quality images.

Google Photos has some major drawbacks:

- Low-resolution images do not automatically fit the window. It is possible to zoom in with cmd/ctrl + but then other GUI elements get too large. And the user might not know this zoom shortcut.

- Captions are automatically imported and neatly displayed but linebreaks are ignored and moderately long Captions are clipped, so linebreaks must be clumsily re-edited or whole Captions pasted back in Google Photos.

- It is not possible to view Keywords.

- Captions, dates and locations can be edited in Google Photos, but the edited metadata does not download with the images! This is why I must clumsily maintain the album in GraphicConverter and periodically remove and re-send all images to Google Photos so other users can download the images with updated metadata (I must then also remember to re-paste long Captions or edit the linebreaks back)!

- EXIF dates older than 1902 are displayed incorrectly so images older than that need clumsy workarounds. Even in newer dates sometimes incorrect date fields are used for sorting and display instead using correct EXIF dates. Sometimes time is displayed and sorted as 0.00 unless metadata is rebuilt and images re-imported.

- I miss an option to share non-image files inside the shared album. As a workaround I have an image with a Caption text URL pointing to a Dropbox .xls file.

- The worst: It is not possible to search Captions or Keywords! Can you believe there is a Google product that can't search!! Search is only possible at the Google Photos main window, not inside albums. To do a Caption or Keyword search (I don't know if it searches both) users have to add the album to their own photos and do the search there, or download and open the album in other apps like GC. This is a great pity because I have an album with dozens of carefully picked Keywords per image. Currently other users don't have an easy access to filter those 1000 images via Keyword searches.

Here is an example of a Google Photos album:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/B8FoHCDkTyfZ8j4p8

I briefly tried Dropbox, Flickr and Photos.app web sharing but they didn't fit those requirements at all. Here is an example of a Flickr album when I tested them:

https://www.flickr.com/gp/144002348@N07/357h30

I have not yet tried to share movies and their metadata.

- Matti