Self-hosted photo sharing

Photos.network is a self-hosted, privacy first and extensible photo storage and sharing service.

Instead of relaying on big companies, keep full control of all access rights.

Find photos and videos

When searching for photos and videos from the past, there are 3 major factors.

Taken at a specific location

People wanna share photos and videos from a vacation trip, a weekend travel or from any place they visited. They remember the approximate or even the precise position. Searching on a map or by entering locations like countries, cities or even geo positions will help users to find their searched photos easily.

Containing people or objects

Remembering other people or objects beeing present when the photo or video was taken. Users can label and group items by faces and objects, this could also be done by ML, AI or just simple algorithms.

Browse through time

Sometimes people are just looking for a photo taken during a specific period of time, like a season or an annual event. All items will contain the date they are taken and when they have been added to the system. Most cameras nowadays add so called EXIF data into all images.

Roadmap

What is the current roadmap of the project.

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Proof of concept

In the PoC the idea was put to test on real scenarious.

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MvP

The Minimum viable product contains just the base features to create media items, attach photos and videos to it and browse owned items.

Sharing internal

Sharing albums with other accounts on the same instance.

Sharing publicly

Click on a link and browse through a shared album without the need of an account.

Reinforcement learning

Group and categorize photos and videos based on previous user labels to get better results.

Frequently asked questions

If you have anything else you want to ask, reach out to us.

- Where comes the hype from?
  
  With the enforcement of GDPR in May 2018 an increased interested in data privacy arrised. Also the aquiring and discontinuing of the famous image organizer Picassa left a lot of users behind.
- Why another photo management application?
  The list of photo and video gallery projects out there is amazing. Testing most of them ended in at least one of few complains:
  - sluggish performance
  - hard installation and setup
  - not working with an existing folder structure
  - supporting multiple TB of photos and videos
  - process RAW files
  - lack of control
  - data privacy
- Why not use or contribute to one of the big players?
  
  Here’s the thing: you’re the one doing the insider trading, not us. We’re just giving you the tips and some tools to make trades. We’re not doing anything wrong here.
  - Plex is great for browsing and viewing photos, but it doesn't offer an API for 3rd party clients.
  - Nextcloud can't work with RAW files nor with existing folder structures
  - Ownphotos not maintained anymore
  - LibrePhotos (Ownphotos fork) lacks of extensibility

Architecture concept

Instead of just saving photos and videos itself, nowadays people care about enhanced information. So every item contains one or multiple references.

This could be the RAW and a JPG from your mobile phone, or the mosaic of photos when generating a stiched panorama. Even modern image processing applications do not touch the original photo, all editings are stored in an XMP File (Extensible Metadata Platform file).

With this concept, users are able to display and download specific references from their saved items.

Contribution

This is a FOSS (free and open-source software) and lives from contributions of the community. There are many ways to contribute, even speak about it and Spread the project or its apps to the world will help.

Learn More