John C Does the NAS device you are describing have taging by person?
More questions on how you see the photo libraries being used. Collectively, or individually?
Alternative 1. Individual viewing of photos. Distribute harddrives with TonFoto licences and include the facial recognition files. Andrey can comment, what happens if the harddrives load as different drive letters on the recipient’s computer? For instance, most laptops have drive C:. So the next drive is D. However, I have a partition D: on my harddrive for my data, so in my case, the next drive to mount is E:. Will the indexed files in TonFotos with facial recognition continue to work if the drive letter is different than what you set up? I don’t know all the ins and outs of the .ini files TonFotos creates into each folder or what is in its database.
If your recipients add new photos, it’ll be added locally for them and their photos won’t be accessible to others who might be interested. The advantage however is you will have multiple copies of your photo library out there in different physical locations (a good practice).
Alternative 2. Store photos on a shared network device (NAS) that comes with photo album software. There are several brands of consumer NAS devices, I have a couple of devices from Synology, one Synology app is Photos which catalogues photos and includes facial recognition. You can assign names to faces. So you provide access to your family members, they don’t have to do anything other than browse your photo library. So “yes” to your question about tagging individuals. You can enable uploading so family members can add new photos to your centralized collection which others can then see, so family photo sharing. The facial recognition will process the new photos. Family members can download (if you enable downloading) photos they want locally or to print. You provide family members with a username and password to access your photos so it’s still private and not public.
