hi. i’m looking for an extremely simple selfhosted photo gallery software.
i have photos from my laptop, a camera, and my phone. they are all rsync’ed onto my server. so on the server I have ~/Pictures/Laptop ~/Pictures/Camera ~/Pictures/Phone filled with JPEG/PNG/HEICs and no subdirectories.
i want to view photos from all three directories on a single timeline/feed, from the web (and if possible, via a mobile app). currently I VNC onto the server to run XnView and check each directory and this is a terrible user experience especially on a phone.
i don’t want to run a separate database or anything complex, so things like Immich or Photoprism are not an option. would be nice to be able to assign a tag to some images (“work”, “computer”, …) but it’s not a necessity. and i don’t need the ability to edit/remove images from the gallery.
i’ve considered rolling my own solution but thought there might be something already available.
thanks!
Does that matter if you’re self hosting and not exposing it to the internet?
That entirely depends on what your threat model is. You may not get any value out of that feature, but others may want it. One reason may be ease of storage drive disposal upon drive failure; i.e., if your drive is unencrypted and has your personal photos on it and it fails, the data is still recoverable with no easy way for you to destroy the data. If it was encrypted at rest, you wouldn’t have to worry about it because you would only have to rotate the encryption key.
If you’re using a raidz array (which you should) the data would be irrecoverable anyways when you dispose of a single drive, wouldn’t it? Also, why would you throw away a server drive that still works?
Why should I use a raidz array? I use other scalable storage solutions. Encryption at rest is a standard core tenant to cybersecurity. If one of the raidz drives is removed from the array, and you’re not encrypting your datasets, someone could recover data from the drive.