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:
- New website! photofield.dev - bonus, it’s embedded in every install, in fact, even the website is just hosted from the app itself. 😎
- UX polish - lots of small improvements, like better interaction & fixed video controls and better error messages & autoreloading config.
- Zoomier than ever - since v0.15.0 when you zoom into a photo, it zooms the whole scene! This wasn’t the case for a few versions due to a technical detour, but I found a way to get it back without too many compromises.
- Related image search - you can Find Similar Images now, using the same AI functionality as the semantic image search.
- Map view - you can see your photos on a map. Still has some quirks, so make sure to zoom in first. To be improved.
- Reverse geolocation - you can see the location of a photo in the timeline view. Completely local, using tinygpkg.
- Tags (alpha) - you can tag your photos now. Quite basic for now, but should be a good foundation for things to come.
- ARM Docker images - since v0.14.1 the published Docker images are multiarch - x64 and arm64, including photofield-ai. Makes it possible to run on cheaper, ARM-based servers, and faster on M1/M2/M3 Macs.
Show me the demo
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! 🙏
Do you have any plans for user Auth and uploading via the web app?
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? 🤔
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