Photofield v0.15.0 released: Google Photos alternative, now zoomier than ever! Plus related image search, map view, arm64, tags (alpha), and more!

mlunar@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 218 points –
photofield.dev

Hi all!

I'd like to share some slow, but steady progress I've made on my self-hosted personal photo gallery - a Google Photos alternative. It's been a while since I last posted any updates - the last time was about v0.9.2 on /r/selfhosted, so it's actually my first post here.

What's new?

Lots of things! Here's a quick summary:

Show me the demo

https://demo.photofield.dev/

Now hosted on Hetzner's arm64-based CAX11 - 2 vCPUs & 4 GB of RAM - the cheapest one.

The photos are Ā© by their authors. Since migrating to the CAX11, it only uses one size of internally pregenerated sqlite-based thumbnails, taking up roughly 4% of the disk space of originals. Support for Synology Moments thumbnails is still there, but doesn't seem as crucial as before.

How do I try it out?

It's very low commitment, a single executable or Docker image that you can mount with read-only access to an existing file structure, see Quick Start (also on GitHub if the website is dead).

Another one??? Why?

It's a conspiracy to increase fragmentation and increase shareholder value of big tech companies. šŸ˜„ Jokes aside, I think there is some space for a fast, self-contained, extremely easy to deploy solution. But mainly, it's to scratch my developer itch and I get to learn new things.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who's been using it, contributing, and giving feedback! See also foss_photo_libraries for alternatives if this doesn't fit your needs.

Let me know what you think and what you'd like to see next! šŸ™

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Sorry if these are stupid questions.

Not at all! Thanks for taking an interest.

Does this only show these foss_photo_libraries and your local photos?

I'm not sure what you mean. foss_photo_libraries is a comparison table of different apps someone else maintains, but I thought it was a useful resource. The photos in the demo are a subset of the open images dataset and a couple of other samples that I picked for demo purposes.

If you install it locally you can point it to a folder and it should use each subfolder as an album, or you can configure custom albums.

Does it support jpegXL?

Yes actually, but I don't have many files to test it, so I'm not sure how well it works. If you do I'd be interested to hear how it works for you. It uses FFmpeg to on-the-fly convert anything it can't read natively.

Iā€™d love a seamless zoom feature for images in the browser. I use imagus but Iā€™d love if the popup window could zoom to be bigger than the browser window.

You can zoom by using the mouse wheel or by pinching to zoom if that's what you mean? You should be able to zoom pretty much as much as you want. If you're in the main view where the mouse wheel scrolls photos up and down you can hold Ctrl (Cmd?) to zoom instead.

Cheers, didn't know that something like a usable "open images dataset" existed. Awesome.

The last bit isn't really relevant for your app, just a general rant really. It's just that I'd like better image viewing support all around. Like in browsers there is an image and you can click on it but then a new tab opens. I have imagus but it's not ideal and restricts the image to the smaller browser window. In the explorer I have quicklook now that opens images with space but the zoom feature is half assed too. Then many images apps have long startup times (>0.2 secs) or are bloaty. It's just a bit annoying that it's 2024 and PCs still can't handle images really well.

Haha, I hear you! Some things are a lot harder than they have any right to be.