Photoview

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• The official iOS app is no longer maintained or available in the App Store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.