Author Topic: Catalog server on a separate system  (Read 2465 times)

Offline ejhutch

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Catalog server on a separate system
« on: December 03, 2021, 03:37:10 AM »
Responding to this is low priority.  From a different thread, I read, with interest, the following:

Quote
If the image came from the catalog, the mapping of the UUID to the last known path is always performed as the metadata for the image is streamed from the Catalog server to the Photo Mechanic Plus client (they usually both run on the same system.)

Does PM+ officially support running client and server on separate systems? If so, where can I find the documentation to explore it?

Also, it is interesting to me to browse Apple's latest Photos APIs, and their photo library databases within an Apple Photos library and get a glimpse of how they're supporting syncing the photo library with their cloud services and with shared albums.  It would be great if someone, somewhere could add could sync and multiple users to a photo catalog software DAM implementation that worked in a user friendly way without all the headaches of an enterprise class DAM system and the IT support that goes along with it to support the server and multiple users.

Clearly, with the improvements that Apple has made to Photos, from way improved photo editing capabilities, to face and category search and recognition in the library, to sharing photos with multiple users, they are heading in that direction.  For example, I just discovered that if you search for "plant", it tries to return all photos with plants in them as a primary subject. It's not perfect yet, but pretty amazing for what it does considering it's not using any previously added tagged metadata to categorize photos of plants.

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Catalog server on a separate system
« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2021, 08:14:58 AM »
Responding to this is low priority.  From a different thread, I read, with interest, the following:

Quote
If the image came from the catalog, the mapping of the UUID to the last known path is always performed as the metadata for the image is streamed from the Catalog server to the Photo Mechanic Plus client (they usually both run on the same system.)

Does PM+ officially support running client and server on separate systems? If so, where can I find the documentation to explore it?

No, not yet.

-Kirk

Offline ejhutch

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Re: Catalog server on a separate system
« Reply #2 on: December 05, 2021, 03:59:36 AM »
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Does PM+ officially support running client and server on separate systems? If so, where can I find the documentation to explore it?

No, not yet.

You tease. Of course, the followup question is: Does that support eventually lead to multiple user concurrent access of the same shared catalog?

Ambiguous response accepted if necessary. :)

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Catalog server on a separate system
« Reply #3 on: December 06, 2021, 09:09:46 AM »
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Does PM+ officially support running client and server on separate systems? If so, where can I find the documentation to explore it?

No, not yet.

You tease. Of course, the followup question is: Does that support eventually lead to multiple user concurrent access of the same shared catalog

That's the direction we were headed.  But don't expect anything on this front anytime soon.

-Kirk

Offline ejhutch

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Re: Catalog server on a separate system
« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2021, 09:47:54 AM »
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That's the direction we were headed.  But don't expect anything on this front anytime soon.

Great! Seriously, you've definitely got your work cut out for you. Perhaps as an interim step to multi-user, a catalog DB service running on a server that the PM+ client could connect to over the network so that the catalog server could run it's queries and filesystem accesses locally to itself, and return the results to the PM+ client much faster than having to make network filesystem calls.  But you've probably already have thought about that.