Happy 2026 folks!

If you're in the market for a minimalistic self-hosted photo gallery, read further :)

I'm not entirely sure whether I should post here for every release or not, what do you think? I guess more than once a year wouldn't hurt 😅

Spurred by some household needs, the big thing in v0.21 is an easier search interface with search chips, but maybe more interestingly: wildcard date search.

You can now search for e.g. all Christmas day photos with created:*-12-25 or all photos on the first day of the year with created:*-01-01.

The demo is now on v0.25, feel free to give it a spin.

Of course, to see all the photos you have on your birthdays, you'll need to try it out on your own 😁

What do you think? Any ideas or comments welcome!

Hi everyone!

I've recently set up a NAS running TrueNAS Scale and learning about ZFS and associated machinery. ZFS has a pretty cool feature called snapshots, which allow for a kind of version control, but for the whole file system. I set up Tiered Snapshots, which seem to be working great!

To my surprise, there didn't seem to be an easy way to actually browse these snapshots. Yes, you can use "Previous Versions" on Windows, but I'm running Fedora at the moment, so that doesn't help. You can also access .zfs/snapshot/ at the root of the dataset, which is fine if you know exactly which snapshot you want, otherwise it seems a bit clunky. There is also httm, which is a "CLI Time Machine" I've yet to learn more about, but I was looking for something a bit more graphical / browser-based.

Thus, with much hacking and vibing, the proof-of-concept Timeship was born! It has a thousand limitations and compromises for now, so I'm mostly reaching out to see if there is any interest from others on this.

If you use tiered snapshots which happen to be named similar to mine, you can try it out like this:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -v /mnt/tank/your/dataset:/mnt/:ro ghcr.io/smilyorg/timeship

For now, it has a very simple file browser, it detects and shows snapshots via the aforementioned .zfs/snapshot/ directories, allows you to preview the file system and text files at different points in time, and allows you to download a file at any snapshot.

Of course, extending it to support different ways to see the history would be nice, image preview, diffs, downloading archives of multiple files or directories, supporting histories beyond ZFS (e.g. git or borg backups), the list could go on and on. I can't claim I'll have the time to implement any or all of those, but you gotta start somewhere :)

What do you think? Any ideas & comments very welcome!

Hey folks!

It's been a year and a half since I last posted about my self-hosted photo gallery here with release v0.15.0.

If you are happy with Immich that's great! I'm mostly having some fun here and the more the merrier, right? :)

See link for the release notes since v0.15 or just skip to the demo.

Happy to hear any feedback, ideas, suggestions, or comments :)

Hi! I've posted on photofield here before - my self-hosted photo gallery software. There's been a bunch of changes since last time that you can check out in the CHANGELOG, but this is my first attempt to write about why I made it and how it's different! Any feedback is welcome!

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:

• New website! photofield.dev - bonus, it's embedded in every install, in fact, even the website is just hosted from the app itself. 😎
• UX polish - lots of small improvements, like better interaction & fixed video controls and better error messages & autoreloading config.
• Zoomier than ever - since v0.15.0 when you zoom into a photo, it zooms the whole scene! This wasn't the case for a few versions due to a technical detour, but I found a way to get it back without too many compromises.
• Related image search - you can Find Similar Images now, using the same AI functionality as the semantic image search.
• Map view - you can see your photos on a map. Still has some quirks, so make sure to zoom in first. To be improved.
• Reverse geolocation - you can see the location of a photo in the timeline view. Completely local, using tinygpkg.
• Tags (alpha) - you can tag your photos now. Quite basic for now, but should be a good foundation for things to come.
• ARM Docker images - since v0.14.1 the published Docker images are multiarch - x64 and arm64, including photofield-ai. Makes it possible to run on cheaper, ARM-based servers, and faster on M1/M2/M3 Macs.

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 © 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. 😄 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! 🙏