How to setup a shared photo library for all users?

IT_ipyum · 09-05-2023 06:16 AM

To create a shared photo library for all users I have set up an album in the Admin account and have ensured that all users in the organization have been invited to the shared album.

Today I realized that Save does not work as expected. Even after Save in the Admin account of a photo added to the shared album from another user's account, when the photo is deleted in the account that is was shared from the (supposedly) Saved photo in the Admin account is also deleted. I tested this sevreal times.

This does not meet our needs, we want to capture photos and keep them regardles of what the user does with the photo after it is shared.

So what is the best way to create a shared photo library?

GuibsonPrieto

Hello, I believe that if the current "Google Photos" solutions is not doable given the stated examples, i would recommend the following,

Create a Shared Drive (Company owned shared folder) which you then can grant access to all users as per Individual basis or Google Groups (all members of the group, e.g. All_Company_Employees@domain.com.
The users that have access will then be able to set the desired photos as "Starred" works like their favorites feature, giving them access to them within Google Drive, permissions or access can be granted at the Root level, or per folder level (if you have a photo gallery per department) that can be granted with that granularity as well, happy to guide you, or provide more details if you believe this is something that can help you solve the current issue.

Best
Guibson Prieto

IT_ipyum

Thanks Guibson for your reply, but by using Drive instead of photos we
lose a lot of functionality for managing what will become a large
photo collection. Lost functionality includes facial recognition, and AI
driven search using text and objects in pictures.

Cheers,
Carl

icrew

+1 to @GuibsonPrieto 's suggestion of using a shared drive.

Photos is generally a bad idea in terms of Workspace. Since it's a non-core tool, it's not supported, it's not protected by the terms of your organization's contract with Google (it's instead covered under their consumer terms of service, like free Gmail accounts), and most importantly, there are no administrator controls or APIs for it.

This lack of admin controls means that you have no ability to do things like transfer the ownership of stuff in Photos from a departing member of the organization to someone else, no ability to fix sharing issues, no ability to clean out inappropriate or expired content, etc.

And despite that complete lack of control, Google still inexplicably charges companies using Workspace for the storage used by Google Photos. See https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Google-Photos-quota-and-having-it-both-ways/m-... for more on that.

Because of all these issues, we've disabled Photos for all of our users.

Hope that helps,

Ian

IT_ipyum

Thanks Ian, Makes sense. You are a much more experianced admin than I. But then do you have a central repository for photos, and if so what do you use? Greenfly is an example but it's out of our league in terms of price and complexity. I do not like the idea of hosting thousands of photos on Drive the UI is not built for it. Maybe we need to look at flicker or some other google photos competitor.

icrew

I'm sorry, I honestly don't know--it's been close to a decade since I did any looking at the digital asset management (DAM) space, so I really can't comment intelligently. Perhaps https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/digital-asset-management would be of some help?

IT_ipyum

Thanks both for your solutions, it seems like there is no good answer. The workaround to the problem of contributors later deleting their contributions is to periodically download and upload the sahred album, thereby backing it up. Of course you can do this using Takeout.

bethstaton

Thanks for this conversation. I'm with a tiny nonprofit and photos are our lifeblood. We switched from a folder on our shared drive to Google Photos not realizing it wasn't part of Workspace. We were looking for functionality like face recognition, sorting by date and location, etc. If anyone has ideas as to best practices on this, please let me know. Thanks!

Maor

I was also looking for a solution, doesn't seem that there's a straight forward one. In Microsoft based companies they're also using OneDrive or SharePoint to share photos, which don't have relevant features.

I'd refrain from using Google Photos in a business account due to the reasons mentioned by @icrew .

brynnc

I was hoping to find a solution here as well. We use Workspace and really love the features of Google Photos. The only solution I've found for now is to have one user in charge of uploading the photos and sharing the album that is based on the year. The biggest downside is that you can only see the pictures and not use the other tagging and face recognition features like you can in the owner account.

bmcpadmin

Same issue. Non-profit that needs photo collection. Unfortunately, you can't search in a shared photo album so even if we had one photo user and shared the album, nobody can find anything in it. I was hoping to take advantage of new AI features to find a "landscape with a sunset", for example. Currently we have all our photos on a google drive. They are indexed in a google sheet, but even that is made as difficult as possilbe. Google seems to go out of the way to make sure you can't see a thumbnail of a photo on drive. I finally made it work by using a script to convert the photo to a base 64 data image and then create an image back from that into the spreadsheet. Then Google doesn't know it's coming from a google drive. I'm really disappointed in Google workspace. It seems like a great idea half-assed implemented as a bunch of disjoint technology projects with no desire to make it better.

bmcpadmin

Just to put another idea out... There is a product called pics.io that is a digital asset manager that uses a google drive to store all the assets. It sees all the exif data and support sharing, searching etc. It does not have an AI search. It seems like a very useable solution, but it's expensive, even for Non-profits. Too bad. I wish there were a simpler, cheaper solution.

GenevieveCory

I'm going to try to convince my people to do it. As a non-profit we can create unlimited accounts, and then they can use that account to access the central photo album, save to their organization's account, and then they can use all the ai and face recognition etc. Fantastic for making photo albums of someone's time at the organization... 5 year anniversary, 10 year anniversary...

Even if someone contributes a photo to a crowdsourcing album and then they leave the album, as long as the responsible person (me) has saved the album's new photos, then I just have to put it back in the album. And the contributor's name is still saved with the photo, essential for us, as our crowdsourcing volunteers don't take the time to label their things appropriately.

This also seems to me to mean that anyone else can also save all the photos to their organization account and create a new album with them, which other people could save, thus making the "ownership" of an album superfluous...? I think?

If it works in one non-profit, I'll implement in in my others too...

TrishUntermyer

I also work in a tiny nonprofit with a large photograph collection. Has anyone tried this remedy --

Create a new user email with a name like photos@___.org and give everyone access to it. Then upload all the company photos to Google Photos under that username. Then people who want to access photos can sign in as photos@___.org and do whatever they need to do with the photos.

Other than being a bit clunky, is there any reason that wouldn't work?

KAM

@TrishUntermyer technically, this would be against Google's T&C from my understanding but other than the logging in and out, it should work. The 2SV might be a pain for users to handle is the main technical hurdle but things like passbolt can provide shared OTTP. -KAM

StephenHind

@TrishUntermyer just use a Shared Drive to store the photos in and then share it appropriately with the people who need access (this is what Shared Drives are for).

TrishUntermyer

Thanks for your responses.

It seems the idea has many flaws - thanks @KAM

@StephenHind we currently do use a shared drive but with 1000s of photos, it's clunky and slow and does not have the capabilities of searching for photos and creating albums like google photos does, which is why I'm looking for a different solution. Sadly, it has to be a free solution.

KAM

Agreed. I wish they would make a Photos for Business feature building on Google Drive. I have also had issues where people's drive storage allotment was taken up with photos and as admin, I couldn't do anything about that. -KAM

StephenHind

@TrishUntermyer you can use folders for albums and, rather than upload the photo twice, you can use shortcuts to make the photo appear in multiple folders. Yes the search is nothing like Google Photos as Drive does not have those clever machine learning on the images itself.