How to setup a shared photo library for all users?

[IT_ipyum]

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 .