Multi-User Remote Access to DigiKam

[Remco Viëtor]

On samedi 13 janvier 2018 10:19:19 CET Gerhard Ellinger wrote:
> We are a museum association of a small village and have collected several
> thousand historical pictures in our inventory.
> These images are already digitized and are now to be classified, described
> and coded by a few authorized persons.
> In a preliminary project, we have already processed two thousand images and
> are very satisfied with DigiKam. In this phase, we worked locally on a
> computer system (Windows 10).
> Now we want to put the project on a broader basis and provide access for
> several people remotely. However, we encounter configuration and performance
> problems.
> 
> Request for a recommendation, we should proceed.

Two things that can cause you problems, both related to the remote access.

- By default, Digikam uses SQLite for its database engine, this requires the 
database to be on a disk local to the machine on which Digikam runs.
To get around this, you'll probably have to use a MySQL server database, which 
requires you to set up MySQL (or MariaDB, which afaik is a fork of MySQL) on a 
central machine. Users will then have to configure Digikam on their machine to 
point to this database. The pictures will also have to be available through a 
networked drive/server (NFS?)

Unless you have the server(s) and your users on a protected network (i.e. 
behind a good firewall), you'll have some extra security to take care of.

- Then you'll have the network latency, for database access and image display. 
This will be inherently slower than a local installation. 

As an alternative, and depending on exactly what your aims are:
give each authorized person a copy of part of the database, and let them work 
on it at home, using sidecar files to store the added metadata (tags, titles, 
captions). When done, copy the images and sidecars back to the main 
repository, and have Digikam resync metadata from those new sidecars.
This will work for classification of a fairly fixed collection, not if there are 
regular additions.

Also, how do you want to use the collection afterwards? I'm not sure Digikam 
is at all suited to present images from a collection: while it can create 
presentations/slideshows, I wouldn't want to allow live access to the 
collection by the public.

Remco