I also want to make the switch away from Lightroom and it looks like that you here might have the solution for my problem. The Lightroom feature, where I can import everything on my PC and then sync these "smart previews" to their cloud and then hand out a link or just a tablet to my wife, friends or anyone, makes everything so much easier. They can then decide which photos they want to keep or be deleted and also label those, which I should develop first. Is there a FOSS (or at least non-Adobe) solution that would give me similar possibilities? I'm not afraid of hosting something myself.
Thanks! I don't know how plugins for digiKam work but that would probably be a good point to start. Though I think I have not enough time at the moment look at this more thoroughly. Sometime maybe :)
We rsync the jpgs (not the RAW files) to our self hosted photoprism instance. Not for the same reason you do, but it could easily be used the way you describe it!
Alternatively, if you don't shoot in jpeg+raw, or if you want to reduce the size of the jpegs before you sync them, digiKam has a batching tool that would let you automate exporting smaller versions of all of your files as part of the import process.
Ideally I would love to have the votes synced back to digiKam, especially if it's about sorting out hundreds of photos. But that sounds like a workable solution until I found or developed a plugin, that can do this. Thank you!
We don't sync back so I haven't tested it, but as long as you have a gallery that writes back to a sidecar file, digikam can work with it.
Digikam has direct integration with Exiftool as well as batching, so anything you can get in to a sidecar file, you can get out with Digikam, and then stick in custom albums/categories etc.
Some quick searching turns up a tool called Piwigo (which I haven't tried) that has the ability to run contest modes via plugins. Assuming it can write the votes/results back to the sidecar file in some manner, you should be able to get to it in Digikam
Thank you that is really helpful! I'll look into it! It's probably a bit of work until it is a smooth workflow but I'm willing to try it. Maybe then I can finally ditch Lightroom :)