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Self-hosted, super simple photo stream

166 points| harper | 6 years ago |github.com

57 comments

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[+] stavros|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] rickosborne|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] hiisukun|6 years ago|reply
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 :)

[+] mceachen|6 years ago|reply
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 (which I extracted from PhotoStructure and open-sourced).
[+] davefp|6 years ago|reply
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

That might be more involved than you want, but given the structure of this project I don't know of a better way.

[+] rodolphoarruda|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] zigzaggy|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] amerkhalid|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] WhyNotHugo|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] dreamcompiler|6 years ago|reply
FWIW, Dropbox can automatically pull photos off your phone as you take them. I like it better because less Google in my life is good.
[+] dawnerd|6 years ago|reply
Plex can also auto upload photos to a server you own.
[+] odkamkfn|6 years ago|reply
This is nice and all, but why on earth do I have to enable JavaScript to see the photos?
[+] choward|6 years ago|reply
Just finished the readme and I have no idea what makes this "super simple".
[+] vpEfljFL|6 years ago|reply
Awesome. What a joyful experience after IG or similar services. Nimble and simple.
[+] twak|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] blacklion|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] ncarroll|6 years ago|reply
Thank you for sharing! I've been looking for something just like this forever.
[+] mighty_plant|6 years ago|reply
Looks cool. How much storage do Github Pages or Netlify support for free?
[+] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
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)

[+] wiennat|6 years ago|reply
thank you for sharing. I was thinking about building the same thing.
[+] t0mislav|6 years ago|reply
I need exactly this! Looks very nice and simple, and fast.
[+] ehosca|6 years ago|reply
where is the back button ?