Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

#41

Post by poisonborz »

qtETlwyxkD wrote: post #34

Step 1: Install XAMPP by going to https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html -- Download option "8.2.4 / PHP 8.2.4" or highest current version for your operating system. -- Note the directory where the files were installed. -- Inside the directory, open the "htdocs" folder. -- Create a folder here called "images" or whatever you like. -- Copy your images to this folder. -- Launch XAMPP, if not already launched. Step…

Don't recommend this. Bare metal install is very outdated nowadays. You surely want to use your server for multiple purposes down the line. You shouldn't install every app directly on your main OS - any misconfiguration or problem will bring down all other services, or make a machine-wide security issue. Also an attacker of one app will gain instant access to your whole server.

- Either use something simple and user friendly, like Synology with it's marketplace apps - Or use virtualisation host OS that allows you to install multiple containers/virtual machines, each for your own application, like Proxmox - Add containers via some container manager like Portainer or CapRover

Maybe these options seem like a bit more complicated first, but you will be very thankful for the invested time.

Re: Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

#42

Post by poisonborz »

ortusdux wrote: post #31

Can anyone recommend one that would work over a local WIFI network without internet access?

Any of these. You can access your server locally via its IP address (disclaimer: some might require additional configuration as they require a pre-set hostname)

Re: Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

#43

Post by ajdude »

SanchoPanda wrote: post #15

Believe it or not, Plex. It's a truly mediocre photo organizer, with glaring missing features, but because I already have a Plex server - it's zero marginal work aside from just dropping the photos in a folder on the NAS running it. I use FileBrowser to autosync the photos off my phone, and family can easily access them because they already know how to use Plex. The fact that there is a client for every device I have…

Seconding plex. I was able to share photos with family, even grandparents, by giving them access to our plex share.

Re: Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

#44

Post by bayindirh »

poisonborz wrote: post #41
qtETlwyxkD wrote: post #34

Step 1: Install XAMPP by going to https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html -- Download option "8.2.4 / PHP 8.2.4" or highest current version for your operating system. -- Note the directory where the files were installed. -- Inside the directory, open the "htdocs" folder. -- Create a folder here called "images" or whatever you like. -- Copy your images to this folder. -- Launch XAMPP, if not already launched. Step…

Don't recommend this. Bare metal install is very outdated nowadays. You surely want to use your server for multiple purposes down the line. You shouldn't install every app directly on your main OS - any misconfiguration or problem will bring down all other services, or make a machine-wide security issue. Also an attacker of one app will gain instant access to your whole server. - Either use something simple and user…

As a person who does sysadmin work as a day job, I can't disagree more. For something for a home server with very light load, VMs are extra heavy. For someone not knowing container networking and reverse proxies, things are complicated and more prone to misconfiguration.

Also, not all services are best suited for containers. JSWiki doesn't like to share the host, and wants its own subdomain. NextCloud from Container is a painful experience when it comes to add-ons from its built-in store. Installing it directly to OS is 1000x smoother.

The biggest exception is GitLab. When you install the OmniBus package, you can only use the server for GitLab, however, with that resource usage, you won't want to share it with another service, anyway.

When you give half the effort required to install a couple of services to bare metal, things work more efficiently, without any downtime, and any problems actually.

Any half-decent distro has the relevant packages in recent versions, good security support and constant updates. There's no reason to not install a Debian stable box with auto-updates enabled and servers downloaded from official repos.

I managed to run 5 services on an OrangePi Zero with 512MB RAM with no downtime and performance problems. It's possible and enjoyable.

Re: Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

#45

Post by superkuh »

dewey wrote: post #29
superkuh wrote: post #21

Install nginx. Put the photos in folders in your ~/www dir. Enable indexing. It's incredibly secure and has pretty much zero maintainence. Just link people to the http://yourIPhere/photos/ dir. It will be very easy for the wife to use since all she has to do is put the photo files in folders using the normal operating system GUI. This is something everyone knows how to do.

That's not really "photo organizing / sharing", that's just a directory listing. What you want from a photo specific software is things like thumbnails, exif info, powerful search, maybe indexing the content of the pictures (Searching for "dog") etc.

Ah, in that case after the wife has looked at photos, named their file names accordingly and put them in the dir she can run http://xome.net/projects/jigl/ or any other .html photo gallery generator. It'll show thumbnails, exif info, and she can press ctrl-f to search in the browser.

I guess you want the gallery generation to be automagic though. Might be some work but you could whip up a cron shell script to see if any sub-dir in ~/www/photos/ has files and doesn't have an index.html and have it autogenerate them.

As I write this I do realize it's starting to get pretty complex. Almost like you'd wish for an all-in-one solution like you'd asked. But I still think this method would be better long term though.

Re: Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

#46

Post by darknavi »

lugia_ wrote: post #27
mirchiseth wrote: post #11

A comprehensive list comparing features https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries Personally I use Photoprism installed inside TrueNAS Scale. They don't have a good mobile app that syncs with the NAS. So might try Immich in future.

I have both configured. Photoprism doesn't have a native app but I would recommend using PhotoSync if you are on iOS. It works infinitely better than Immich's upload for camera rolls that have 50k+ photos/videos in them. It also works in the background much better than Immichs app.

+1 to PhotoSync.

Custom file naming is clutch.

Re: Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

#50

Post by mceachen »

MehdiHK wrote: post #48

I recently discovered Photostructure. After trying a few other alternatives, this is what I prefer now. https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

Neat! I'm the solo developer of PhotoStructure.

Know that there's a very active community of PhotoStructure users on Discord: https://photostructure.com/go/discord/ -- although I opened it as just another support channel, it's evolved to include discussions about future feature work, self-hosting, digital archival, privacy news, hardware, and photography, too.

I self-host https://forum.photostructure.com/ that uses Discourse, but it has 10-20x fewer posts on it than Discord.

OP: Make sure you get backups in place (and one offline) before trying any of the software suggested here--it reduces your risk from "oh-no-what-have-I-done" and "what-in-the-actual-heck-is-this-app-doing-and-where-did-all-my-files-go" to zero.

Post reply on HN