Is there a way to ...

[subtlecourage]

Here is the following scenario.

User 1 has unedited photos, they want to send User 2 these unedited photos, have User 2 edit them, and then after doing what User 2 needs them for, User 2 will sends them back.

Im trying to come up with a way where these two users could swap photos easily, make publicly available the edited photos, and have a non-public folder for the unedited files.

I would want these pictures hosted online in something like lychee.

The more automated the better. My users are extremely not tech savvy, so I need the solution to be as simple as sending a text message or sending an email and having the photos be where the server can pull from and then auto publish the edited photos.

My thought was If I set up a mount for Photos and attach that to Lychee, then I could create two folders, one for public, one for not public photos.
But what I don't know how to do is to facilitate getting the photos there easily. What would be really awesome is if I would set up some sort of nextcloud or syncthing sync so these users accessed two shared folders. One for edited/unedited photos alike. But in order to have the photos appear in the mount, i'd need to set the app up on the server (it is a VPS with 9tb of storage, so I am not worried about space) right? And then what about backups?

I guess I am just hoping for some advise from the community here for this.