Photofield
photofield.dev
Self-Hosted Personal Photo Gallery

Hi all!

I’d like to share some slow, but steady progress I’ve made on my self-hosted personal photo gallery - a Google Photos alternative. It’s been a while since I last posted any updates - the last time was about v0.9.2 on /r/selfhosted, so it’s actually my first post here.

What’s new?

Lots of things! Here’s a quick summary:

Show me the demo

https://demo.photofield.dev/

Now hosted on Hetzner’s arm64-based CAX11 - 2 vCPUs & 4 GB of RAM - the cheapest one.

The photos are © by their authors. Since migrating to the CAX11, it only uses one size of internally pregenerated sqlite-based thumbnails, taking up roughly 4% of the disk space of originals. Support for Synology Moments thumbnails is still there, but doesn’t seem as crucial as before.

How do I try it out?

It’s very low commitment, a single executable or Docker image that you can mount with read-only access to an existing file structure, see Quick Start (also on GitHub if the website is dead).

Another one??? Why?

It’s a conspiracy to increase fragmentation and increase shareholder value of big tech companies. 😄 Jokes aside, I think there is some space for a fast, self-contained, extremely easy to deploy solution. But mainly, it’s to scratch my developer itch and I get to learn new things.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who’s been using it, contributing, and giving feedback! See also foss_photo_libraries for alternatives if this doesn’t fit your needs.

Let me know what you think and what you’d like to see next! 🙏

  • CodeGameEat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    Interesting, i might give it a try when i finish setting up my new servers, havent been satisfied with other picture solutions, usually feels like they’re doing too much haha. I just want simple and fast, so this might be it.

  • Mr. Forager@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Wow wow! Just trying the demo out feels super snappy and good, also crazy how fast the images load compared to other solutions i’ve tried! Will defo give this a shot when available on Unraid (Unless i do it myself).

    Here’s a 🌻 as my appreciation for your work!

    • mlunar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Thanks!

      Unfortunately I have no idea about the Unraid ecosystem, so I’m not sure what’s the best way to approach that. It seems like you can run Docker images, so that’s probably one way to go? Let me know if you get it to work!

    • mlunar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      No concrete plans for auth yet, but there’s an feature request for this. I didn’t really want to give a sense of false security with a half-baked solution.

      For uploading, I thought about it briefly and it could be interesting. How would you expect it to work?

      I imagine you would configure a sort of a target folder structure, then it would dump all uploads based in that structure? Or fully managed like GPhotos/Immich where the app hashes, dedupes and owns the files directly? 🤔

      • Weslee@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        I haven’t tried it yet, just moved and waiting for the internet to be installed.

        I suppose any type of upload would work really, depends how “lightweight” you wanted to stay.

        It’s just a convenience feature

  • EisFrei@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    The demo instance doesn’t show any images when using android+Firefox. Android+chrome is working.