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Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers?

10 points by steamodon ↗ HN
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).

14 comments

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pwg
Give Gallery a look: http://galleryproject.org/
lazyant
unmaintained since 2014?
znpy
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

webmaven
Piwigo or Lychee may be what you are looking for.
RemingtonLak
Very kool. didn't know I needed them! thx. Not having had time to look indepth, wonder if either platform will allow embedded videos, particularly from youtube? currently have a bunch uploaded as private links since it was the easiest to share. It would be awesome if they allowed it or may be could be mod...

[EDIT] wow..you have given me some motivation to look. Didn't realize how many there are. however, still want/need to find one where I can embed youtube videos but thx for the push to look!

eaandkw
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.
noodlesUK
I think this is a great idea, but be sure to take backups. Emails can be lost, weird things can happen to attachments...
RemingtonLak
I too did the same! Before my son was born, I was sending him emails with snapshots of him kicking mommy's tummy :) ultrasounds.

I also sent many articles about personality development etc which I started to realize some info is too advanced and wish somehow they could be viewed at the "right" times in his life. Like he doesn't really need to know nor understand neuropsychological advances in research :) So little pondering on how to "feed" him the right info at the right time. Also extremely timely, since its email, if I miss a particularly important day sending it out, I'm late :(.

Nevertheless, if gmail holds out for the next 18yrs, it would be a killer present to have his entire life online w/ pics and at the time memories handed to him. and like other commenter suggested, may need to do a regular "takeout" for him.

Furthermore, in addition to that, I'm also trying to address the needs of our immediate family sharing his day to day fun but don't want to use the currently available privacy fiasco social media.

So I'm also in this dilemma like others howto share w/o going to FB/Twit/Insta and alike. Want something very private but easily available. And like the other commenter, I came to the conclusion of creating my own. So I'm on my way of wireframing, prototyping a PWA based service where everything is private and is fee based. Kinda like the antithesis of all social media as we currently know it. Time seems ripe to address the need for privacy....

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/

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.

mceachen
Many companies have tried this in the past: make sure you make different mistakes from those predecessors.
Roybot
That's interesting - could you share some of the more notable companies? Why do you suspect they failed?

Sounds like a fun project more than anything, I'll explore it.

RemingtonLak
I would love to figure out howto implement something like this: https://visjs.github.io/vis-timeline/examples/timeline/

into a blog/photo story of sorts to show my son's development.

Also want to see if something using this as a base platform into a social media.

So instead of horizontal scrolling, the obvious direction would me vertical to suit more mobile/tablet browsing which I believe is more "conventional."

As I commented below, I'm trying to accomplish the exact same thing you're after.

-Self hosted or some very very trusting src/platform

-Super easy to use (ie it must be grandma tested)

-All platforms for sure.

Adding to you Nice-to-haves: -Jitsi or brie.fi/ng webrtc video conf so can vid conf while viewing pics

-realtime whiteboarding with typing

of course trying to shoot for MVP for now...