circled.me

Circled.me is a self-hosted community server that provides private photo and video backup, album management, real-time chat and audio/video calls. It targets low resource use and privacy for local communities, families or small groups and includes mobile app integration for multi-account access.

Key Features

• Photo and video backup from mobile devices with album and moment grouping
• Local disk or S3-compatible object storage support per-user or per-bucket
• Real-time chat with push notifications and browser/mobile call support (WebRTC)
• Automatic video conversion to H.264 for web compatibility
• Face detection and tagging with optional CNN mode for improved accuracy
• Albums, secret-link sharing, contributor/viewer roles and reverse geocoding for assets
• SQLite default database with optional MySQL support and Docker Compose deployment

Use Cases

• Private family or community photo backup and sharing with controlled access
• Lightweight media server for small groups needing chat and occasional video calls
• Field or event teams collecting photos and geolocation-enriched media with tagging

Limitations and Considerations

• Project is actively developed and may introduce breaking changes; exercise caution for primary/sole backup use
• Mobile app is the primary client currently; web UI/client capabilities may be more limited
• TURN server and NAT traversal require additional configuration and port forwarding for reliable peer-to-peer calls
• Face-detection CNN mode is slower and more CPU-intensive than the default option

Circled.me is a compact, privacy-oriented community server suitable for self-hosted photo sharing and lightweight collaboration. It emphasizes low resource usage and flexible storage backends while providing integrated chat and calling features.