Photo gallery for self-hosted personal servers
Photoview is a simple and user-friendly photo gallery that's made for photographers and aims to provide an easy and fast way to navigate directories, with thousands of high-resolution photos.
You configure Photoview to look for photos and videos within a directory on your file system. The scanner automatically picks up your media and starts to generate thumbnail images to make browsing super fast.
When your media has been scanned, they show up on the website, organised in the same way as on the filesystem.
If you have questions regarding setup or development, feel free to join the Discord server https://discord.gg/jQ392948u9
Visit https://photos.qpqp.dk/
Username: demo Password: demo
There exists a lot of open-source self-hosted photo galleries already. Here are some, just to mention a few.
So why another one? I love taking photos, and I store all of them on my local fileserver. This is great because I can organize my photos directly on the filesystem, so it's easy to move them or take backups. I want to be able to control where and how the photos are stored.
The problem is, however, that RAW images are extremely tedious to navigate from a fileserver, even over the local network.
My server holds a lot of old family pictures that I would like my family to have access to as well. And some of the pictures I would like to easily be able to share with other people without the hassle of them having to make an account first.
Thus, I need a solution that can do the following:
All the photo galleries can do a lot of what I need, but no single one can do it all.
This section describes how to get Photoview up and running on your server with Docker. Make sure you have Docker and docker-compose installed and running on your server.
make
should be installed as well if you'd like to use providedMakefile
, which is optional (see step 4 for more details).7zz
should be installed in case, you'd like to use it in scope of the backup scenario instead of the default .tar.xz format. Read the comment in theMakefile
, located on top of thebackup
section for more details.
Download the content of the docker-compose example
folder to the folder on your server, where you expect to host the Photoview internal data (database and cache files).
Please note that this folder contains 2 versions of the docker-compose file:
docker-compose.example.yml
- the fully-functional and recommended for the most cases configdocker-compose.minimal.example.yml
- the minimal and simple config for those, who find the previous one too complex and difficult to understand and manageWhen downloading files, you need to choose only one of them.
Rename downloaded files and remove the example
from their names (so, you need to have .env
, docker-compose.yml
, and Makefile
files). If you choose the docker-compose.minimal.example.yml
on previous step, make sure to rename it to the docker-compose.yml
.
Open these files in a text editor and read them. Modify where needed according to the documentation comments to properly match your setup. There are comments of 2 types: those, starting with ##
, are explanations and examples, which should not be uncommented; those, starting with #
, are optional or alternative configuration parts, which might be uncommented in certain circumstances, described in corresponding explanations. It is better to go through the files in the next order: .env
, docker-compose.yml
, and Makefile
.
Make sure that your media library's root folder and all the files and subfolders are readable and searchable by other users: run the next command (or corresponding sequence of commands from the Makefile
):
make readable
If command(s) return Permission denied
error, run them under the user, owning corresponding files and folders. Alternatively, run them adding sudo
before the command: this will switch the execution context to root
user and ask for the root password. You have to have permission to run sudo
in the system.
If you don't want to give required permissions to others
group for your files, alternatively, you can:
photoview
service being owned by this group; then set the appropriate permissions to the group
section.photoview
service to this user; then set the appropriate permissions to the user
section.If you configured other mounts with media files from other locations on the host (like HOST_PHOTOVIEW_MEDIA_FAMILY or anything else), you need to run the same commands, as in the Makefile
readable
target, for each media root folder on your host manually: copy each command to your shell and replace the variable with the absolute path to an additional media root folder without the trailing /
. Run both commands for each additional root folder.
In case, you don't have make
installed in your system or don't want to use it for the Photoview management activities, you could use the same commands from the Makefile
and run them in your shell directly, or create your own scripts. Make sure to apply or replace the variables from your .env
first in this case. Makefile
is provided just for your convenience and simplicity, but is optional.
Start the server by running the following command (or corresponding sequence of commands from the Makefile
):
make all
If the endpoint or the port hasn't been changed in the docker-compose.yml
file, Photoview can now be accessed at http://localhost:8000
If everything is set up correctly, you should be presented with an initial setup wizard when accessing the website the first time.
Enter a new username and password.
For the photo path, enter the path inside the docker container where your photos are located.
This can be set from the docker-compose.yml
file under photoview
-> volumes
.
The default location is /photos
.
A new admin user will be created, with access to the photos located at the path provided under the initial setup.
The photos will have to be scanned before they show up, you can start a scan manually, by navigating to Settings
and clicking on Scan All
We suggest securing the Photoview instance before exposing it outside your local network: even while it provides read-only access to your media gallery and has basic user authentication functionality, it is not enough to protect your private media from malicious actors on the Internet.
Possible ways of securing a self-hosted service might be (but not limited to):
Setting up and configuring of all these protections depends on and requires a lot of info about your local network and self-hosted services. Based on this info, the configuration flow and resulting services architecture might differ a lot between cases. That is why in the scope of this project, we can only provide you with this high-level list of possible ways of webservice protection. You'll need to investigate them, find the best combination and configuration for your case, and take responsibility to configure everything in the correct and consistent way. We cannot provide you support for such highly secured setups, as a lot of things might work differently because of security limitations.
/api/example.env
to .env
and update the MYSQL_URL
field/ui/example.env
to .env
Make sure golang is installed.
Some C libraries are needed to compile the API, see go-face requirements for more details. They can be installed as shown below:
# Ubuntu
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:strukturag/libheif
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:strukturag/libde265
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libdlib-dev libblas-dev libatlas-base-dev liblapack-dev libjpeg-turbo8-dev libheif-dev
# Debian
sudo apt-get install libdlib-dev libblas-dev libatlas-base-dev liblapack-dev libjpeg62-turbo-dev libheif-dev
# macOS
brew install dlib libheif
Then run the following commands:
cd ./api
go install
go run server.go
Make sure node is installed. In a new terminal window run the following commands:
cd ./ui
npm install
npm start
The site can now be accessed at localhost:1234. And the graphql playground at localhost:4001
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