13 ms·

Self-hosted, super simple photo stream

166 points by harper 7y ago

vpEfljFL 7y ago
Awesome. What a joyful experience after IG or similar services. Nimble and simple.
ncarroll 7y ago
Thank you for sharing! I've been looking for something just like this forever.
odkamkfn 7y ago
This is nice and all, but why on earth do I have to enable JavaScript to see the photos?
wiennat 7y ago
thank you for sharing. I was thinking about building the same thing.
davidgatti 7y ago
Very nice, congrats! :)
StavrosK 7y ago
If you're looking for a self-hosted/decentralized Instagram alternative, there's also pixelfed.org, a very active project which supports ActivityPub. This means that people can follow your "Instagram" (really Pixelfed) stream from their "Twitter" (really Mastodon) account.
- drcongo 7y ago
  I keep looking at Pixelfed, and even as a relatively technical person, I have absolutely no idea how to get going with it. Right now, go to pixelfed.org and there's a "Join" button in the top right corner, click on that and there's a message telling me "To join Pixelfed, you need to pick an instance. You can find a list of instances on the sites below." - click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. At this point I always give up.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    > click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. Hah, you're right, you end up in some slow-loading dashboard (hooray fancy graphed realtime numbers!). I clicked on a random hostname, it's another dashboard page with the hostname in large, the same hostname as a link as a subtitle. I clicked the link, and hey, it's a page that looks like Instagram's sign up page, with the difference being that this one says: "Registrations are closed." I tried a few more sites, even the one with the most number of users, and they all say this. Only the 5th site I clicked on allows me to register. Ah only now do I notice the column "Open Signups" in their fancy dashboard...
    - eitland 7y ago
      The author very actively try to avoid centralizing it which may explain why all big instances has signups closed.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Yes, it's still early days for them so signing up isn't as easy as it can be. It's very usable already, though.
- rickosborne 7y ago
  But it's worth noting that Pixelfed is intended to be your own walled garden - there's no "here's my public photo stream" configuration. It's intended more like a friends-and-family thing. That being said, it's open source, so there are hacks to make your stream public. But they're hacks, and you're not going to get that out of the box.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    What do you mean? Here's my public photo stream: https://pixelfed.social/stavros https://pixelfed.social/stavros You can even follow me from your instance. You can't get more public than that.
    - rickosborne 7y ago
      Hey, they fixed it! It's amazing what 2 months can do. The previous version had some pretty borked handling of public timelines. Having said that, it still requires a bit of hackery. There's no way to get rid of the home/landing page if there's the one user account, so you have to do a bit of php/apache/nginx/whatever magic to redirect past it to your user timeline.
- atomi 7y ago
  Looks like PHP.
kuu 7y ago
Seems interesting, but I'm missing a preview site ;)
- neo1691 7y ago
  It[1] was in the project description on GitHub. 1. https://maxvoltar.photo/ https://maxvoltar.photo/
t0mislav 7y ago
I need exactly this! Looks very nice and simple, and fast.
mighty_plant 7y ago
Looks cool. How much storage do Github Pages or Netlify support for free?
- pjc50 7y ago
  Github pages will limit you to their git repo size, which appears to be 75Gb and a maximum of 100Mb for any one file. (Using github to host my photos was my thought as well)
zigzaggy 7y ago
I like the look and feel of this. My wife is an amateur photographer and she’s been looking for a simple way to post / share outside of social media. Fun side project for the weekend setting this up!
twak 7y ago
Look awesome - I've been looking for some hackable code like this to present my photos from google drive. Cheap photo hosting from google + minimal load on my server...
hiisukun 7y ago
Hmm, this looks great. I'd really love to pair it with a simple way to add text or tags to my photos. What is the simplest way to write "Visit to the creek after the bushfire" and save it with the two or three photos I took that day? I wish (hope?) something simple like this is supported in a linux picture viewing application, and I just don't know which one it is. Can a line or two of text be stored in an EXIFish field? Has someone already written a script to take care of this? But back to the main point - this is a great app and I can see myself using it to share photos with friends and family. Thanks for making it :)
- davefp 7y ago
  This is built using Jekyll, which has built-in support for both categories and tags (for blog posts, anyway) via yaml front-matter: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/#categories-and-tags https://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/#categories-and-tags That might be more involved than you want, but given the structure of this project I don't know of a better way.
- rjeand 7y ago
  As for the 'linux picture viewing application', I've started using the mpv video player[1] for showing a local gallery of photos and videos. Text is added as subtitle files, such as SubRip .srt files[2]. Image-specific options can be configured in mpv, such as the "image-display-duration"[3]. [1] https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip [3] https://github.com/occivink/mpv-image-viewer/blob/master/mpv.conf https://github.com/occivink/mpv-image-viewer/blob/master/mpv...
- harrier 7y ago
  Something like Lychee might provide more of the feature set you want. https://github.com/electerious/Lychee https://github.com/electerious/Lychee
- mceachen 7y ago
  EXIF has a well-adopted Comments tag (if you edit the comments on Windows, it'll show up under XPComments). You can pull them out with exiftool, and using -j renders output as json. If you want cross-platform support, auto-install of exiftool, better parsed results, and typescript typings, you can use https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js (which I extracted from PhotoStructure and open-sourced).
rodolphoarruda 7y ago
Very interesting if you consider the "offline fist" or "local first" movement that supports the idea that all content must be created, stored and managed by the user first, then shared in the cloud(s). We saw the first wave of discussions about text-based content, then a void when the focus moved to images and video. Solutions like this one may represent a turning point.
WhyNotHugo 7y ago
I do like the idea, and I've love to move from Google Photo into something... now Google. However, Google Photos covers an aspect that this does not: it syncs the photos _off_ my phone into an online stream. I actually use Google Photos because it's the only way of getting photos off your phone. The only other mechanism is iCloud, but if you don't have a Mac, there's no way to read from it.
- kossae 7y ago
  While the interface isn't great, icloud.com _does_ allow you to view and download your photos without a Mac. I really do wish they would put more resources into updating their web UI, though.
- HenryBemis 7y ago
  I now use Huawei/Android and before that I was on iPhone/iOS. In both cases I am using Dropbox as the means move photos to my hard disk. I upload all photos I want to Dropbox. Dropbox renames the images from "Image1" to Image-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.jpg. I then download the lot as one big zip file, expand it on my backup disk and that is sucked to my cloud backup. I do this every month, it is a manual process but it's not an overkill. This way I save time on renaming the files.
- wwn_se 7y ago
  nextCloud and similar have the sync photo functionality and could probably be glued together with this without to much effort. That said I also use Google Photo even though i have a servers and stuff for other personal uses.
  - Jnr 7y ago
    Nextcloud synchronization is decent only on iOS (I use it). On Android it's a pretty bad experience. On Android something like Syncthing could be better for the job.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    I use Google photo, but I have an api scripts to pull the photos local.
choward 7y ago
Just finished the readme and I have no idea what makes this "super simple".
amerkhalid 7y ago
Just wanted to say thank you, I have been looking for something almost like this. Only thing it is missing for me is support for videos. But I know videos are pain to self-host and if you use embedded player from YouTube or Vimeo then it kills the aesthetics.
- waz0wski 7y ago
  peertube attempts to address this pain and supports the activitypub fediverse https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
blacklion 7y ago
I hope it could be extended to retrieve tags and titles from IPCT/Exif. To rename files to photo titles is not very viable and scalable solution, IMHO.
ehosca 7y ago
where is the back button ?
keybits 7y ago
Another good option in this space: https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup

166 points by harper 7y ago

vpEfljFL 7y ago

Awesome. What a joyful experience after IG or similar services. Nimble and simple.

ncarroll 7y ago

Thank you for sharing! I've been looking for something just like this forever.

odkamkfn 7y ago

This is nice and all, but why on earth do I have to enable JavaScript to see the photos?

wiennat 7y ago

thank you for sharing. I was thinking about building the same thing.

davidgatti 7y ago

Very nice, congrats! :)

StavrosK 7y ago

If you're looking for a self-hosted/decentralized Instagram alternative, there's also pixelfed.org, a very active project which supports ActivityPub. This means that people can follow your "Instagram" (really Pixelfed) stream from their "Twitter" (really Mastodon) account.

drcongo 7y ago
I keep looking at Pixelfed, and even as a relatively technical person, I have absolutely no idea how to get going with it. Right now, go to pixelfed.org and there's a "Join" button in the top right corner, click on that and there's a message telling me "To join Pixelfed, you need to pick an instance. You can find a list of instances on the sites below." - click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. At this point I always give up.
- netsharc 7y ago
  > click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. Hah, you're right, you end up in some slow-loading dashboard (hooray fancy graphed realtime numbers!). I clicked on a random hostname, it's another dashboard page with the hostname in large, the same hostname as a link as a subtitle. I clicked the link, and hey, it's a page that looks like Instagram's sign up page, with the difference being that this one says: "Registrations are closed." I tried a few more sites, even the one with the most number of users, and they all say this. Only the 5th site I clicked on allows me to register. Ah only now do I notice the column "Open Signups" in their fancy dashboard...
  - eitland 7y ago
    The author very actively try to avoid centralizing it which may explain why all big instances has signups closed.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Yes, it's still early days for them so signing up isn't as easy as it can be. It's very usable already, though.
rickosborne 7y ago
But it's worth noting that Pixelfed is intended to be your own walled garden - there's no "here's my public photo stream" configuration. It's intended more like a friends-and-family thing. That being said, it's open source, so there are hacks to make your stream public. But they're hacks, and you're not going to get that out of the box.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  What do you mean? Here's my public photo stream: https://pixelfed.social/stavros https://pixelfed.social/stavros You can even follow me from your instance. You can't get more public than that.
  - rickosborne 7y ago
    Hey, they fixed it! It's amazing what 2 months can do. The previous version had some pretty borked handling of public timelines. Having said that, it still requires a bit of hackery. There's no way to get rid of the home/landing page if there's the one user account, so you have to do a bit of php/apache/nginx/whatever magic to redirect past it to your user timeline.
atomi 7y ago
Looks like PHP.

kuu 7y ago

Seems interesting, but I'm missing a preview site ;)

neo1691 7y ago
It[1] was in the project description on GitHub. 1. https://maxvoltar.photo/ https://maxvoltar.photo/

t0mislav 7y ago

I need exactly this! Looks very nice and simple, and fast.

mighty_plant 7y ago

Looks cool. How much storage do Github Pages or Netlify support for free?

pjc50 7y ago
Github pages will limit you to their git repo size, which appears to be 75Gb and a maximum of 100Mb for any one file. (Using github to host my photos was my thought as well)

zigzaggy 7y ago

I like the look and feel of this. My wife is an amateur photographer and she’s been looking for a simple way to post / share outside of social media. Fun side project for the weekend setting this up!

twak 7y ago

Look awesome - I've been looking for some hackable code like this to present my photos from google drive. Cheap photo hosting from google + minimal load on my server...

hiisukun 7y ago

Hmm, this looks great. I'd really love to pair it with a simple way to add text or tags to my photos. What is the simplest way to write "Visit to the creek after the bushfire" and save it with the two or three photos I took that day? I wish (hope?) something simple like this is supported in a linux picture viewing application, and I just don't know which one it is. Can a line or two of text be stored in an EXIFish field? Has someone already written a script to take care of this? But back to the main point - this is a great app and I can see myself using it to share photos with friends and family. Thanks for making it :)

davefp 7y ago
This is built using Jekyll, which has built-in support for both categories and tags (for blog posts, anyway) via yaml front-matter: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/#categories-and-tags https://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/#categories-and-tags That might be more involved than you want, but given the structure of this project I don't know of a better way.
rjeand 7y ago
As for the 'linux picture viewing application', I've started using the mpv video player[1] for showing a local gallery of photos and videos. Text is added as subtitle files, such as SubRip .srt files[2]. Image-specific options can be configured in mpv, such as the "image-display-duration"[3]. [1] https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip [3] https://github.com/occivink/mpv-image-viewer/blob/master/mpv.conf https://github.com/occivink/mpv-image-viewer/blob/master/mpv...
harrier 7y ago
Something like Lychee might provide more of the feature set you want. https://github.com/electerious/Lychee https://github.com/electerious/Lychee
mceachen 7y ago
EXIF has a well-adopted Comments tag (if you edit the comments on Windows, it'll show up under XPComments). You can pull them out with exiftool, and using -j renders output as json. If you want cross-platform support, auto-install of exiftool, better parsed results, and typescript typings, you can use https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js (which I extracted from PhotoStructure and open-sourced).

rodolphoarruda 7y ago

Very interesting if you consider the "offline fist" or "local first" movement that supports the idea that all content must be created, stored and managed by the user first, then shared in the cloud(s). We saw the first wave of discussions about text-based content, then a void when the focus moved to images and video. Solutions like this one may represent a turning point.

WhyNotHugo 7y ago

I do like the idea, and I've love to move from Google Photo into something... now Google. However, Google Photos covers an aspect that this does not: it syncs the photos _off_ my phone into an online stream. I actually use Google Photos because it's the only way of getting photos off your phone. The only other mechanism is iCloud, but if you don't have a Mac, there's no way to read from it.

kossae 7y ago
While the interface isn't great, icloud.com _does_ allow you to view and download your photos without a Mac. I really do wish they would put more resources into updating their web UI, though.
HenryBemis 7y ago
I now use Huawei/Android and before that I was on iPhone/iOS. In both cases I am using Dropbox as the means move photos to my hard disk. I upload all photos I want to Dropbox. Dropbox renames the images from "Image1" to Image-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.jpg. I then download the lot as one big zip file, expand it on my backup disk and that is sucked to my cloud backup. I do this every month, it is a manual process but it's not an overkill. This way I save time on renaming the files.
wwn_se 7y ago
nextCloud and similar have the sync photo functionality and could probably be glued together with this without to much effort. That said I also use Google Photo even though i have a servers and stuff for other personal uses.
- Jnr 7y ago
  Nextcloud synchronization is decent only on iOS (I use it). On Android it's a pretty bad experience. On Android something like Syncthing could be better for the job.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  I use Google photo, but I have an api scripts to pull the photos local.

choward 7y ago

Just finished the readme and I have no idea what makes this "super simple".

amerkhalid 7y ago

Just wanted to say thank you, I have been looking for something almost like this. Only thing it is missing for me is support for videos. But I know videos are pain to self-host and if you use embedded player from YouTube or Vimeo then it kills the aesthetics.

waz0wski 7y ago
peertube attempts to address this pain and supports the activitypub fediverse https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

blacklion 7y ago

I hope it could be extended to retrieve tags and titles from IPCT/Exif. To rename files to photo titles is not very viable and scalable solution, IMHO.

ehosca 7y ago

where is the back button ?

keybits 7y ago

Another good option in this space: https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup