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

Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 15 posts

Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers?

#1

Post by steamodon »

Hello HN, my wife and I just had a newborn daughter, and we're trying to figure out how to manage our photos of her. Right now we're keeping our photo libraries in Google Photos, and manually sharing via SMS, Facebook, and WeChat. Keeping everybody on the right conversations is getting tedious already. I'd love to be able to centralize this in a self-hosted app, if possible. Does anyone have suggestions?

Top priorities:

* Open source & self-hosted

* Easy upload from Android & iOS devices

* Easy sign-on / viewing from web, Android, and iOS devices

Nice-to-haves:

* Easy sharing to social media

* Authenticated RSS feeds or some sort of notifications for registered users

* Allows sharded installs or advanced permissions management (in case I can convince the rest of the family to use this for their photos as well)

I've looked a bit at Pixelfed, but it looks like it fails on the mobile device front.

As a follow-on question, does anyone know how likely a self-hosted app like this would be to work across the Great Firewall? My in-laws are in China (hence sharing through WeChat).

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers?

#6

Post by znpy »

lazyant wrote: post #4
pwg wrote: post #3

Give Gallery a look: http://galleryproject.org/

unmaintained since 2014?

from the link:

Good news!

Brad Dutton has been leading a community that is continuing Gallery development. He and his team have made progress over the past year and have a stable version of Gallery 3 that is PHP 7+ compatible, contains a replacement for the old Flash-based image uploader, an updated jQuery Library and other features. They've been testing it for a year now with no problems and have released it as Gallery 3.1.0.

You can download it from galleryrevival.com

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers?

#8

Post by mceachen »

PhotoStructure is a self-hosted DAM that runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, or Docker and exposes a fun, novel web UI to browse extremely large libraries quickly.

I've focused first on fixing my own disorganized mess of many hard drives from n failed cloud photo services and cancelled photo apps that left me with not-quite-duplicate variants and missing tags scattered over many drives.

The current beta solves this robustly. I'm adding secure sharing and additional tagging and browsing next.

As it's self-hosted, it's up to you (at least with the current beta version) to set up an https reverse proxy with auth. Several of my beta testers are doing this.

https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers?

#9

Post by Roybot »

I was chatting with a few friends about the concept of a dedicated device to host your family media. I'll probably end up building this for myself at some point. And if the project lives up to its vision I'll share.

After searching a bit it seems many stitch together their own solution at home. And others use cloud exclusively. Seems like a nice big problem to solve.

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers?

#10

Post by noodlesUK »

eaandkw wrote: post #7

Start an email for her and send pictures and letters to it throughout her life. Then on her 18th birthday give her the email with all the memories.

I think this is a great idea, but be sure to take backups. Emails can be lost, weird things can happen to attachments...
Post reply on HN