Best way to share family photos and videos on private website

Forums › Off topic › Best way to share family photos and videos on private website - static website generator software?

timmmay

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#290052 18-Oct-2021 08:14

I have 10+ years of family photos and videos well organised on my computer that I share with family. I currently use a ten year old version of JAlbum to generate the website, which I upload to my AWS EC2 server. I use EC2 / Nginx for password protection, otherwise I'd just use S3.

My old version of JAlbum isn't working on my new computer, so I'm looking at options before I just go and pay for the latest version. Does anyone know a good static website generator aimed at photo / video other than JAlbum? Or have an alternate suggestion?

I'm not really wanting:

To use Facebook or a public service, I'd rather keep it private
To use a fancy active hosted system, that's not really necessary. I would consider it if there were enough advantages, but I'm keeping a medium res online, I don't need to manage the collection.

Yoban

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#2796890 18-Oct-2021 09:00

hi there

Been having some good success with Photoprism (https://photoprism.app/). They have a demo site too https://demo.photoprism.org/

Does not generate website, but is a web interface to your photo libraries that can site behind nginx allowing users to log in etc.

I have this hosted on a homelab for family to access.

Shindig

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#2796892 18-Oct-2021 09:03

This looks like a really good alternative to Google photos

The little things make the biggest difference.

Ge0rge

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#2796894 18-Oct-2021 09:04

I too use Photoprism, I have it hosted in unRaid and use SWAG to provide reverse proxy access - I found it very easy to use.

If you go down this route, definitely host your own instance of MariaDB - the DB built into Photoprism struggles a bit with very large collections.

timmmay

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#2796897 18-Oct-2021 09:14

Yoban:

Been having some good success with Photoprism (https://photoprism.app/). They have a demo site too https://demo.photoprism.org/

Does not generate website, but is a web interface to your photo libraries that can site behind nginx allowing users to log in etc.

I have this hosted on a homelab for family to access.

Interesting option. I could upload all the web sized media (which I'd have to resample) and it's dynamic from there. Few questions:

Can it put photos and videos in the same gallery?
Does it support nested folders ok? I tend to sort by year, month, then event
Can the UI be made really simple, just showing the gallery without a sidebar?
Any idea of resource usage? I have a small AWS EC2 server with 5% of a core, bursting to two cores, this could burn through a lot of CPU.

Static generation and a nice simple website is still probably preferred, but I'll think about it because it would reduce maintenance.

Yoban

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#2796928 18-Oct-2021 09:59

Shindig:

This looks like a really good alternative to Google photos

yes - one of my reasons for usage too. Still missing face recognition, but believe this is in the pipeline.

Ge0rge:

I too use Photoprism, I have it hosted in unRaid and use SWAG to provide reverse proxy access - I found it very easy to use.

If you go down this route, definitely host your own instance of MariaDB - the DB built into Photoprism struggles a bit with very large collections.

Agree with using a different back end - the inbuilt sqllite is not great. I too have embarked on unraid and using this platform to host...a few questions may come your way :-)

Yoban

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#2796931 18-Oct-2021 10:07

timmmay:

Yoban:

Been having some good success with Photoprism (https://photoprism.app/). They have a demo site too https://demo.photoprism.org/

Does not generate website, but is a web interface to your photo libraries that can site behind nginx allowing users to log in etc.

I have this hosted on a homelab for family to access.

Interesting option. I could upload all the web sized media (which I'd have to resample) and it's dynamic from there. Few questions:

Can it put photos and videos in the same gallery?
Does it support nested folders ok? I tend to sort by year, month, then event
Can the UI be made really simple, just showing the gallery without a sidebar?
Any idea of resource usage? I have a small AWS EC2 server with 5% of a core, bursting to two cores, this could burn through a lot of CPU.

Static generation and a nice simple website is still probably preferred, but I'll think about it because it would reduce maintenance.

Yes I have been able to have a mix of photos and video.

It can maintain your file/folder structure when importing or create a completely new one based on dates.

Not sure on UI modification, but since it is open source, then I would suspect you can access the code. Have a look at their github site. it also has a security model within the application so this maybe able to be uses to prevent displaying it

Generally the usage seems to be when importing images and indexes created etc. which is all in the DB. Have not monitored this though. it is easy to setup locally to test this out as it comes in a docker container

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davidcole

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#2796957 18-Oct-2021 10:42

I'm another for photoprism.....but equally I think nextcloud maybe have been on use to you. You just don't get all the categorisation of photoprism. But you do (with the mobile apps) get auto upload, which is how I get my photos onto the server, which I then let photoprsim run over. Nextcloud also gives you just a pure view of your folders

Photoprism is bringing out an app that will have upload + auto upload, but it's not official yet. That will feel more like a flickr experience.

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timmmay

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#2796962 18-Oct-2021 10:52

Thanks Yoban, I'll have a play some time. The in-place might work well. Seems like an interesting product :)

For me it might be worth just paying for JAlbum, since it's all set up and working. I do like free software, but often my time is worth more than the cost of learning, changing things over, etc. If I find an open source static site generator I might have a look at that too, but they seem thin on the ground, bit of a niche product.

rphenix

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#2797048 18-Oct-2021 12:56

timmmay:

I have 10+ years of family photos and videos well organised on my computer that I share with family. I currently use a ten year old version of JAlbum to generate the website, which I upload to my AWS EC2 server. I use EC2 / Nginx for password protection, otherwise I'd just use S3.

Instead of using an ec2 instance as a gatekeeper I've used a Lambda function in the past with cloudfront with a private s3 bucket as origin. There is quite a few guides out there showing how but this is one example.

timmmay

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#2797064 18-Oct-2021 13:32

rphenix:

Instead of using an ec2 instance as a gatekeeper I've used a Lambda function in the past with cloudfront with a private s3 bucket as origin. There is quite a few guides out there showing how but this is one example.

Interesting option, thanks, if I was starting fresh I'd probably do that. I'll probably keep using EC2 with CloudFlare as I have the server for other things and it has enough of disk space, and since it's set up it's simpler than adding CloudFront / Lambda.