Photoview
Self-hosted photo gallery that syncs albums from your filesystem
Photoview is a self-hosted photo and video gallery designed for personal servers and photographer-friendly workflows. It scans media from directories on your server, maps folders to albums, and builds thumbnails for fast browsing while keeping files under your control.
Key Features
- Filesystem-based library scanning with folders mapped to albums
- Automatic thumbnail generation and lazy-loading for performant browsing
- Multi-user accounts with per-user library paths and access controls
- Share albums or individual media via public links, optionally password-protected
- RAW photo support (using Darktable for conversion)
- EXIF metadata extraction and display, including map view when GPS data is present
- Video support with web-optimized transcoding (using FFmpeg)
- Face detection and grouping of photos by person
Use Cases
- Personal or family photo library hosted on a home server or NAS
- Photographer archive browsing with RAW and EXIF-focused workflows
- Private sharing of selected albums with friends/clients via protected links
Limitations and Considerations
- The official iOS app is no longer maintained or available in the App Store
- Requires an initial scan and thumbnail generation that can be time-consuming on very large libraries
Photoview is a good fit if you want a fast, web-based gallery that mirrors your existing folder organization. It focuses on performance, privacy, and photographer-oriented features like RAW, EXIF, and mapping.
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