myndir: a simple self-hosted photo gallery

👷🧑‍🏭 Work in Progress ⌨️⚒️

(but already functional, see https://photos.morve.us/ )

How this works:

1. 🚀 Deploy
2. 📸 Put photos in your source folder
3. 👀 Enjoy

Context

I have a camera capable of uploading pictures through FTP/SSH, so I wrote a simple tool allowing me to create "sessions" (let's say "Trees") from my smartphone, so every picture snapped from the camera lands in a named folder on my home NAS.

Then a script picks the folder up, spins up a pod on my Kubernetes cluster and creates a DNS entry: "trees.mydomain.com", effectively creating a quick gallery in real time from RAW pictures, as long as I have Internet connectivity where I'm shooting.

This project is the "gallery container" part, and will work for any JPEG, PNGs... you throw at it. The RAW processing part is not covered here, as it's manufacturer-dependant.

Why another gallery project

I was looking for a very simple an lightweight photo gallery matching those criteria:

• Easy to deploy
• No database (I hate SQLite)
• As few dependencies as possible
• Only based on one mounted folder
• Quick to redeploy
• Updates automatically when I add a photo to the folder
• Resizes my pictures before serving them in the gallery
• Without a config file/env file, or at least a very small straightforward one if required

I've tried a lot of awesome open source projects but there was always something bothering me (either some SQLite database, or a very long redeployment delay which isn't my cup of tea in a Kubernetes cluster) I decided to write my own.

What's working:

• Simply mount your photos folder in the container (mine's in a K8S cluster)
• The photos get resized automatically
• Minimalistic design
• Simple webpage to display the pictures
• Very short (re)start/redeploy delay
• New pictures are processed and added in every X seconds (customizable)
• Zoom on picture when clicked/tapped

What's to come to meet my needs:

🔴 Replacing Flask with nginx

🔴 Using python to generate a static page instead of serving dynamically on each call

🔴 Providing a setting to set the static page update frequency (every minute, hour, ...)

🟢 Changing the title

🟢 Changing favicon (simply mount your favicon.ico file)

🟢 Sorting pictures by their creation date

🟢 Displaying pictures when clicked

🟢 Fixing the ratio in CSS (ratio is not accounted for, for now)

🔴 Allowing (or not) users to download the original file

🔴 Social links

🟢 Prettier display (I love what https://github.com/waschinski/photo-stream has done)

Deployment

Using Docker CLI:

docker run -d --name myndir -p 3000:3000 -v /path/to/local/gallery:/app/source morveus/myndir:latest`

Using Docker Compose:

git clone https://github.com/Morveus/myndir
cd myndir
docker-compose up

Don't forget to change /path/to/local/gallery for your actual photos folder.

If you want MUCH faster startup times after the first pictures generation, add this to the command line to use persistent storage for your thumbnails:

-v /path/to/local/output-files:/app/optimized

(or edit the docker-compose.yaml to mount this folder).

Running manually

git clone https://github.com/Morveus/myndir
cd myndir
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

Then put pictures in your /path/to/local/gallery folder. They get processed when the app starts, and new images are added every 30 seconds / 1 minute when the app is running.