I and my partner have an iPhone which we use for taking pictures. We would like our pictures somewhat combined on a private server (Linux; e.g. NextCloud, WebDAV etc — scripting/automation on the server is definitely an option). NO iCloud. The "owner" should be preserved.
Ideally, each of our iPhone pictures would just be rsync'ed to a folder on the server. Then we would both find all of our pictures on the server, in separate folders and can use symlinks etc. to organize them.
Nextclouds Auto Upload function seems to come close. However, it's not really reliable. Worse so, it copies the pictures as soon as they are taken and does not "rsync" the iPhone picture library. We take lot of pictures and then delete most of them. Nextcloud want to upload all of them, even when we delete them afterwards. In that case, uploads hang and generate error messages. If we delete a picture on the iPhone after it has been uploaded to NextCloud, it is not deleted on the server.
I know iOS is such a hopelessly closed system with barely opportunity for automation but I still hope we can find a somewhat reasonable flow. Any suggestions?
Best Answer
Have you considered Dropbox? Dropbox is NOT a server and it's not exactly what you want but Dropbox could be installed on a Mac or spare iPad and share permission given to you both. Both of you would need to install Dropbox on your respective machines. Dropbox may be too expensive for photos as they take up more space than most other files.
If you don't have a Mac or spare iPad you could both just install Dropbox and one could give share permission to the other.
On a Mac, using the terminal, one can cd to Dropbox and use shell scripts to manage the files there. The same thing can probably be done on an iPhone.