ReadyNAS Photos II Service

Thats handy - I was trying to figure out why an album I created that day hadn't sent emails. I'm still trying to get it to send but still no luck - must still be down?

If you're tired of being tied to Netgear's proxy service for sending out invitations and/or links to your albums, you might be interested in how I avoid both. I still use Photos II to create and share albums -- but the email invitations are sent from my ReadyNAS, and the links that are shared are direct links to the albums on my ReadyNAS. In other words, I am not dependent upon Netgear's proxy service at all.

I understand that this approach might not be for everyone -- but I like it :-) All it took was some reverse engineering of two SQL databases used by Photos II and some perl.

If you are interested in learning more, read my blog here: http://pkas.zxq.net/?p=14 -- and read the first reply. The blog post explains how it all works, and the reply contains the perl script.

pkas

Looks like that link is down pkas

Wow -- you're right. Sigh -- hopefully the hosting service will be back up soon, although they admit that there is no ETA for service restoration.

If it doesn't come back soon, I guess I will just document all the details for avoiding the photos.readynas.com proxy in this forum. Until then, if you want my script that automates the entire process, PM me.

pkas

Hi everybody,

I can confirm that with the script provided by "pkas" I can share photos using Photos II (avoiding the photos.readynas.com Proxy). It works great!

Thanks a lot "pkas" for all your help :D

Please don't hesitate to contacting him, he is very friendly and is always available :)

You're welcome! I'm glad it has worked for you. I will be adding some features soon -- I will let you know as new versions become available.

pkas

The Photos II emails have never worked for me, I'm lucky if 1 mail gets sent, I've tried pkas link but it's still down, going to send him a PM to pkas for his proxy fix.

Has anybody tried Piwigo?
Can Piwigo be used as an alternative to Photos II?


Regards,

Slim

Hi,

I'm just trying too share pics with Photo II on my RN102.
Doesn't seem to be compatible ?
Can you confirm ?
Any way to make it work ?
Any other way too share pics with "out of home network" persons ?

Thx for ansmers !

Nico

Hi everybody,
Can someone provide the Pkas's script and the instructions ?
Thanks.
@+. Sn@il

Having spent ages creating albums, I too was suffering from E-Mail invitations vanishing into the ether.
I don't have pkas's script and links to it seem to have vanished but here's a couple of suggestions that get round the problem (for me at least).
Perversely, as I write, the Photos II server is back up and delivering mails - but a rare occurrence in my experience.

My own requirement was simply to generate the encrypted link which I could send by e-mail myself. So I was sending invitations to myself - you can create multiple users easily just by varying capitals/lowercase in the email address. eg: myself@somewhere.com is different to mYSelf@somewhere.com.

Sending to myself also meant I could check the mail was actually sent - and 99% of the time of course it wasn't.

Workaround No 1

I wanted to give a particular set of users access to a particular set of albums. A bit of a pain but I created a new photographer account and created just the albums I wanted to share with that particular group. Then permit public access to each of those albums. Choose which album the users should 'land in' and copy the URL displayed in the public access section. Email that link to users and it's sorted - they can then 'Return to Album View' and see the albums you've shared.

Workaround No 2

Send E-Mail invitations as usual (and expect them to fail :( )
If you're very, very patient (and lucky) you'll get a non delivery report when the mail systems finally give up on contacting Netgear's server. This can take a long time of course! Anyhow, look in the NDR and you'll see the URL with the encrypted link. You'll still have to e-mail the user conventionally with that link of course.

Such a shame about this major flaw in the Photos II system since it really does work quite well apart form this.