
Ask HN: Self-hosted family photo managers? - steamodon
Hello HN, my wife and I just had a newborn daughter, and we&#x27;re trying to figure
out how to manage our photos of her. Right now we&#x27;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&#x27;d love to be
able to centralize this in a self-hosted app, if possible. Does anyone have
suggestions?<p>Top priorities:<p>* Open source &amp; self-hosted<p>* Easy upload from Android &amp; iOS devices<p>* Easy sign-on &#x2F; viewing from web, Android, and iOS devices<p>Nice-to-haves:<p>* Easy sharing to social media<p>* Authenticated RSS feeds or some sort of notifications for registered users<p>* 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)<p>I&#x27;ve looked a bit at Pixelfed, but it looks like it fails on the mobile device
front.<p>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).
======
RemingtonLak
I would love to figure out howto implement something like this:
[https://visjs.github.io/vis-
timeline/examples/timeline/](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...

------
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/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)

------
searchableguy
You should try [https://nextcloud.com](https://nextcloud.com)

It is pretty much open source clone of google's offerings.

------
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.

------
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.

~~~
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....

------
pwg
Give Gallery a look: [http://galleryproject.org/](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!

