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Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

lychee.electerious.com

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Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#51

Post by ytjohn »

For years and years, I used Gallery/Gallery2 to self-host photos, but more and more, I found myself taking photos with my phone instead of a regular camera. From the smartphone, it was much easier to upload to Facebook (and now, G+) than it was to get photos into Gallery. Once every so often, I would bother connecting my phone to my computer, sync the photos over, and then upload them into Gallery. But by then, they were already shared among my friends and family.

My gallery is still up, but the last time I updated it was apparently in 2011. There was a android client that came out that I had tried, but it didn't really work that well. I still backup photos from my phone to my computer and NAS, but couldn't be motivated to go beyond that.

I've looked at times to improve this situation. I much prefer to have my photos self-hosted. I haven't really found a gallery type program that worked as well as Menalto Gallery, but Lychee looks like it's a good contender. I also like that it can share out to other services.

At first I was thinking that since this doesn't have an android client, it would fall into the same disuse as my Gallery installation. But I noticed that it could read from an uploads folder and you could essentially ftp upload to the server. This made me wonder if one could just have an auto-upload (scp/sftp or otherwise) to a server.

I found a couple apps that do this, but [Auto-Share](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dngames.au...) looks the most polished. So I can see this working out.

tl;dr Looks like a great photo manager, love the option to share out to other service. There may be some Android Apps to automatically upload, even if it's not natively supported in Lychee.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#52

Post by electerious »

mschaef wrote: post #41
electerious wrote: post #2

I developed this project in my spare time. It's a self-hosted photo-management-system and a great place to share, store and manage your photos and inspiration. I hope you guys here on HN like it. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

This looks really good. A couple questions: 1) Is there any kind of RAW file support? 2) Does the software de-duplicate uploaded images?

RAW files are not support and every photo is uploaded and stored with its own copy.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#53

Post by blahbap »

marban wrote: post #37
electerious wrote: post #2

I developed this project in my spare time. It's a self-hosted photo-management-system and a great place to share, store and manage your photos and inspiration. I hope you guys here on HN like it. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

Private albums with a random access token in the url would be awesome (instead of passwords). On a side note, I'd donate 100 bucks for a Lightroom Sync Plugin any minute.

I second that - I have been looking for something like this, but it would be extremenly conventient to be able to upload directly from LR.

Another request - I love the free flow, tiled display of images a la Flickr photostream - any chance that could be an option?

Otherwise, great job! - I was pleasently surprised at the quality of this applications.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#54

Post by chime »

sz4kerto wrote: post #24

It would be so great if it could simple serve files from a directory (without in-app upload). Then I could simply sync the photos using btsync (or anything else).

That's what I do for my own photos. http://chir.ag/gallery/ just shows everything from a folder on the server. The thumbnails shown in the gallery view are random and auto-generated. I use subfolders to caption/group the photo in large albums: http://chir.ag/gallery/alaska-cruise-2013

The folder names are underscore delimited column data. E.g. "alaska-cruise-2013_2013-07-27_5th Anniversary Alaska Cruise_critters,cruise,hiking,juliet,travel" => "alaska-cruise-2013" is the permalink, 2013-07-27 is the start date, "5th Anniversary Alaska Cruise" is the gallery title, and the rest of the comma-separated words are tags for filtering, e.g. http://chir.ag/gallery/tag/cruise. I have a few local scripts to resize the raw photos and rsync everything with the server.

It's really not complicated code. Pretty simple stuff that anyone with half a year of coding experience can build. I have been taking and sharing photos on my 'blog since late 2001. I have tried many, many things over time and finally settled on the current method. While my gallery looks/works very simply, it has taken years to refine this exact strategy. I LOVE the Boston Big Picture view and always wanted that. But I also like the thumbnails to jump. I love clicking on the left/right of a pic to advance but I also like to scroll up/down if needed. Sorting gallery by name vs. date, filtering similar albums by tags, and of course captioning without using a text file or DB were things I always wanted but didn't want to deal with a complicated system. I re-did my gallery after our Alaska trip and have been very happy ever since.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#56

Post by dangravell »

belorn wrote: post #48
dangravell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ok, but that's a services business. That means committing time. It's difficult to build a fly-wheel that way. I guess you could outsource on oDesk or similar.

I do not think anyone should sell products without understanding the service part of doing business. if you buy something, people expect someone to be responsible for the product. This mean you got to spend time on providing service, or it get defined by most people as a cash grab.

Oh, of course, provide support (great support at that) by all means. I thought you meant getting into the murky world of custom installations.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#57

Post by jagermo »

marban wrote: post #37
electerious wrote: post #2

I developed this project in my spare time. It's a self-hosted photo-management-system and a great place to share, store and manage your photos and inspiration. I hope you guys here on HN like it. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

Private albums with a random access token in the url would be awesome (instead of passwords). On a side note, I'd donate 100 bucks for a Lightroom Sync Plugin any minute.

Lightroom Plugin would be fantastic, I agree.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#58

Post by dangravell »

unicornporn wrote: post #30
belorn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple solution, they provide a package that is the program and a friendly service contract which provide help setting it up or adding customization.

OK, seems everybody wants to pay per copy, am I rite? I think that is a pretty bad idea that will slow down adoption and development. Yes, this is an open-source project and more developers could help out. I think developers are less likely to jump on the wagon to help out a duo that gets all the money. Instead, don't try to monetize this now. Make adoption and interest grow. Then sell a hosted variant at lychee.io,…

Make something of value -> now sell it.

Why be more imaginative? It sounds a pretty simple offering to me, and is highly transparent.

A hosted variant isn't a bad idea (I was going to ask if there were recipes for EC2, Docker etc... some people might want to "self" host on a machine they control) but it's more "value added" than the original codebase.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#59

Post by ytjohn »

ytjohn wrote: post #51

For years and years, I used Gallery/Gallery2 to self-host photos, but more and more, I found myself taking photos with my phone instead of a regular camera. From the smartphone, it was much easier to upload to Facebook (and now, G+) than it was to get photos into Gallery. Once every so often, I would bother connecting my phone to my computer, sync the photos over, and then upload them into Gallery. But by then, they…

Ok, so I installed it and added some pictures into uploads/import. Lychee imported these and dropped them into a smart album called Unsorted. I then wanted to organize these into albums. The first thing I noticed was there was no way to select photos. You have to open them one by one and move them. This would be my feature request numero uno.

Second thing I noticed is there doesn't seem to be support for sub-albums. I guess this isn't necessarily a deal killer, but I had a system of organizing albums in YEAR/MM type albums. If there was a lot of photos or an event, that would be a sub-album within the month it took place. If a single event took place between months (New Year's Eve party) I just handled that on a case by case basis.

Re: Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

#60

Post by masukomi »

ytjohn wrote: post #51

For years and years, I used Gallery/Gallery2 to self-host photos, but more and more, I found myself taking photos with my phone instead of a regular camera. From the smartphone, it was much easier to upload to Facebook (and now, G+) than it was to get photos into Gallery. Once every so often, I would bother connecting my phone to my computer, sync the photos over, and then upload them into Gallery. But by then, they…

the tl;dr really ought to go at the start of your stuff, otherwise it's of no value to others because we've already read the whole thing before we arrived at it.
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