Recommendations for photo manager anyone?

Adobe Lightroom will do 1, 2, 3, and 6 and it will do it on the Mac.

The great strength of Lightroom is that edits are non destructive, the full edit history is simply reapplied to the original 'digital negative' either DNG or native camera RAW format every time you view the file.

Having personally written de-duplication algorithms they tend not to be fast and it is a complex process to determine which duplicate in which folder should be removed, it is much easier to specify a pattern for removal when the duplicates live in the same folder as then you can usually remove the 'copy' or 'numbered' versions fairly easily and preserve your file naming scheme, when the duplicates perhaps share the same name but live in different folders it's a much bigger problem trying to decide which one to remove.

(edit: my de-duplication algorithm did content comparison to determine if the files were identical it didn't rely on filenames, I used hashing in combination with a random sample of bits from across the file)

Even more complex when you look to ask a Photo Library application to take on this task as the duplicates may well have different metadata and different edits applied, again Lightroom has the notion of virtual copies to allow multiple versions of an image to be derived from a single original file but again it is only the edits that are stored no actual changes are made to the RAW files, of course many people have real file duplicates in their library and I would suggest that it is better to de-duplicate prior to bringing the images into the Photo Manager/Library application.

I don't know of any DNLA servers that would host RAW files but then again I haven't tried, I will check and see if Kodi can do this after I home, Lightroom will certainly render various types of website from your library but these are exported jpegs which have had the actual development edit history applied so these images are in fact the prints from your digital negatives as such.

I am not sure you will find a Photo Manger that also included DNLA capability personally I would aim for that to be a combination of the likes of Lightroom and for instance Kodi.

Hmmm... it's interesting, I have thought in the past about writing this kind of system, essentially what you are looking for is a private intranet version of Flickr or one of the other major online image hosting systems, would you expect the content to be delivered from the RAW's or from the rendered Jpegs?

Essentially this is a web database application designed only to run locally on your own intranet so presumably without sign-on security ?

Interesting I will take a look at Plex this evening.

I am that fanatical every time they improve the raw processor I will go back to some favourite picture and re-develop them, I've often modified renderings many years later

The thing that will be tricky for any application is the management of custom tags and custom index data as the file EXIF will not contain all the tagging information that you might desire.

How many images are we talking about? My own photo collection is probably well over 40,000 images but I would only consider it desirable to display a small fraction of them.

I've had a look at Kodi and while it will parse a collection of images it does not seem to natively treat this as a library that can be served via DNLA, I think it looks like it might work through add-ons, the parsing of the EXIF is rather limited and certainly no real search facilities.

I am taking a look a Plex soon.

Ten seconds to render a Jpeg?

God that's slow!

So you probably need a combination of native client app for iOS and Android and a server application that will extract EXIF data from the jpegs including custom tags, allow organisation of the images in Albums, Collections (Collections of Albums), 'Photo stream' and 'Camera roll' and 'tagged view' (photo stream is order and search by date posted, camera roll is order by date taken, tagged view is filtered by your custom tags). Personally I would add automatic EXIF views like group by lens, camera, shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

The back end would be centralised and managed through a database which would track all the above metadata and the locations of the files, the database would manage the metadata and locations but the files would have real physical traditional locations in a standard file system. The back end will also need to generate thumbnails for its front end user interface so that collections of images can be rapidly previewed.

The server application would need a user interface (probably web based) to allow the posting management and file EXIF analysis and the association of custom tags to each image or to arbitrary batches of images as and when desired, it will need to be able to serve the file content and the metadata via a consistent protocol that can be easily consumed by the native client applications running on a TV, Mac or phone.

It's a combination of Lightroom and Flickr with a better UI than Flickr and one that would run on more platforms.

The back end will be a WebApi server based on cross platform .Net Core probably using a SQLite database as it needs to run on Linux, front end would be built using Xamarin cross platform tech which would allow it to work on iOS and Android phones and Tablets and additionally it would work on Windows Phone.

Ok I'll get started on it at the end of next week, it'll take me about 6 to 8 months work at home in my spare time at night

Actually I would really quite like something like that myself I wonder if there is a decent market

Numpters we do have a Photography Forums section, it does not get that much use but you are welcome to post any photography questions you want there or elsewhere on the Forum in general