Hi guys, this might or might not be entirely off topic. I am looking for a solution that would in a civilized manner allow me to gather photos and maybe videos from a bunch off poeple.
Background
There will be an anniversary at our local community and we are preparing a printed publication. Due to us being a bunch of incompetent, naive fools, all photos are spread across our memberbase. We don’t have any collective storage or album.
We want to use these photos for our publication, thus we need to collect them from our members and to make things worse, it is really on short notice, we have like 14 days to pull this off.
What do we need right now?
- Online upload
- about 50 users
- ages from teens to seniors
- mostly Windows users, mixed Android, iOS and dumbphone
- possible mobile app
- Anybody with URL shall upload and edit folders
- Shouldn’t need to create account or log in
- preferably folder structure (no AI sorting nonsense)
- total size unknown - my estimate is <100GB
- I don’t care right now if it is FOSS or not
Right now preferably not self hosted
Wrong community, I know. But, my home server is not accessible outside LAN and I am afraid that I wouldn’t set VPS fully working in time. I would be very happy and grateful for both advice for our current situation and for (FOSS) selfhosted solution we could use in the future. Hopefully I can finally convince everyone, we really need at least NAS, so there will be no next time… Cheers
Dropbox website has a special folder you can create as a temporary upload space for anyone with the link.
Oh shoot, great, that should do it for now and is definitely eisier than setting out the nextcloud. Though I hope we will get our own nextcloud server somewhere down the line.
Thanks
You can do this with something like Nextcloud. Just set up a folder shared by a link and you’re able to make it a drop box of sorts that anyone can upload to.
Obviously, be careful allowing arbitrary uploads from the whole internet. I’d set a time limit on the share so people can’t upload junk forever.
I had Setup nextcloud for this scenario for two weddings now - share a folder, create a QR code for the URL and print that on flyers, cards, whatever is handed out to the guests. Folder is set to upload only, so it’s much like a “just place your files here”-link. Add another share link with read/write permissions to the same folder if needed, create a second QR code and you’re good to go :-)
Depending on what permissions the “guests” should have, keep in mind that person a could delete person B’s photos (un-) intentionally, so I would go for read only access if you have like inexperienced or old users, that don’t know technology so well.I do run Nextcloud on my home server, and in an ideal world I would like to use it as I have sufficient disk space, even though my internet connection speet would be the bottleneck. The problem is, I am at the moment hidden behind a hell of a NAT maze and my server is simply not accessible from outside, even with VPN.
I have found out in the meantime, As you said, I found out as well, Nextcloud permit uploading without need for signing up. I am now thinking about setting up an acount at some Nextcloud provider, but they seem to by limited by capacity…Did you try Tailscale? It is working behind gnat
I know of it but haven’t tried it yet. For my personal needs I actually use Zerotier to connect to my server remotely, but having two IP adresses is a bit anoying and not family friendly. Also it doesn’t work 100% of the time, sometimes I have troubles connecting. When the right time comes and I will get my IPv6 address I will switch to Wireguard to tunnel home, but until then…
In my case right now, any VPN is out of question, as it doesn’t meet the no-authorization condition, and I don’t want 60 people poking around on my LAN.
But thanks anyway, I might try Tailscape over zerotier to see if it is better.
If you want to make your NextCloud available to the internet it’s pretty easy (and very reliable) to do so with cloudflare tunnels.
I think your best bet in this case is google drive. Most people have a google account, and if they don’t, I believe it’s possible to set it up in a way that it will let them upload anyway. I don’t think you’re getting out of the account requirement, outside of you setting up an anonymous ftp server in a vps or something.
I thought of google drive as well, even if I had to pay for expanding the capacity. Unfortunately it requires signing up to permit upload, download is permited to everyone with the link though.
Maybe OneDrive? I think people who aren’t tech-oriented find OneDrive slightly harder to use than Google Drive. But you do get granular control over view/edits permission and expiry of links.
If you need fast online share you can use nginx + WebDAV module . You can use ip filters or auth. Or disable any auth.
Thanks to everyone for ideas and your time. We have set a dropbox account and sent out a file request link, it is filling up already.
When this anniversary is over, on our next meeting I will bring up the possibility of deploying our own NAS with nextcloud at our building.
CheersAcronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation VPN Virtual Private Network nginx Popular HTTP server
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
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