photoriver2

Multi-node photo synchronization service

Use case

This service is intended to be used to keep a large collection of photos in sync between one main (local) storage location and one or more remote services.

Status: planning

Supported destinations for remotes:

• main local folder
• other local folder (or locally mounted folder)
• Google Photo
• Flickr (?)

Key functionality

• Runnable in Docker on any local setup (including NAS supporting Docker, such as TerraMaster F2-221)
• On each run all configured remotes get synced to the same state
• In default state deletes are NOT propogated, so to really delete a photo it must be deleted from all remotes between two sync runs
• State changes can be checked before application with "--dry-run" option
• Service remembers previous state of each remote in order to speed up updates
• A remote may have a blacklist matching a large part of the collection (to save space) - changes in blacklisted files/folders are ignored.
• Photos get normalized to a predetermined local structure with year/month/day folders
• Albums get represented by local folders in a special subfolder and use symlinks to year/month/day storage to avoid double disk usage
• Adding files to a local album folder would add them to the same album on the service (and move local file to year/month/day storage with symlink left behind)

Future extentions

Integrate workflow from photoriver - assuming that one of the nodes is a SD card in a WiFi-enabled camera (or a WiFi SD card), make that an inflow-only node with all photos appearing on that node automatically flowing into a pre-configured album (and synced to all other nodes), potentially with extra processing, like adding EXIF information about the event.

• Preserve ordering of photos in an album

Technical requirements

• 100% Python
• Test-driven
• Runnable in Docker
• Plain text configuration files
• JSON or YAML data storage

Test execution

Run unit tests

$ sudo apt install python3-nox
$ python3 -m nox

Run unit tests in Docker

$ python3 -m nox -s "docker_tests"

Configuring the service

$ mkdir ~/.config/photoriver2
$ cp river.conf ~/.config/photoriver2/
$ vim ~/.config/photoriver2/photoriver2.ini

Example config with two local remotes and one Google Photos remote

[base]
type=local
folder=/river/base

[usb_drive]
type=local
folder=/river/locals/other_folder
blacklist=19*,200*,201*,2020*,2021*

[gphoto]
type=google
token_cache=mytoken.cache

Running the service

$ docker build -t photoriver2 .
$ docker run --rm -it --user ${UID} \
	-v /home/${USER}/Pictures:/river/base \
	-v /home/${USER}/.config/photoriver2:/river/config \
	-v /mnt/other_folder:/river/locals/other_folder \
	photoriver2 --dry-run

Google Photos remote will first ask you to authorize its access (by opening the provided URL and pasting back the access token provided by Google) and will create a token cache file in the specified file in config folder based on the data provided via OAuth process.

Remove the "--dry-run" option when you are sure that the sync will do what you want it to do.