HomeGallery
Self-hosted open-source web gallery to browse personal photos and videos featuring tagging, mobile-friendly, and AI powered image discovery
- Visit the demo web gallery and browse images based on topic, e.g. food, beaches or buildings
- Read the documentation or ask questions in the community chat
- Download binary for Linux, MacOS, Windows or use docker or the source code (written in JavaScript). See installation documentation for further details.
Content
Project vision
Today's problem
Digital memories are taken, shared and forgotten
The amount of personal photos and videos grows rapidly due free and convenient digital cameras and photographic mobile phones. The photos are hardly ever deleted but hardly ever looked at either. The media archive grows and grows, older images are de facto unknown and lost.
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Discover digital memories
Each saved photo should have the chance be rediscovered
A gallery should support the viewer in exploring a complete archive. It should be possible to easily browse or jump between different times, scenes and life epochs. It should be possible to quickly find a specific photo or video, even if you can't remember exactly where or when it was taken. Access to the archive should be as simple as possible, so that even young kids who cannot use a mouse device or know to type search queries, are able to use it.
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How to explore a huge unkown photo archive?
With HomeGallery you can view, browse and explore your complete unknown media archive
There are two list views available:
- timeline-based by clock icon
- similiarity-based by seedling icon
This allows you to find cross-references and similarities between images taken at times far apart, which brings images and memories to your attention that you might not have looked at otherwise. You can easily swap between order by similarity and order by timeline and offers you a unique new way to browse your images.
For example: You start with an image of a recent sunset, then choose to view all sunset photos via the plant/seedling icon. you browse your sunset imagees until you are struck by a particular sunset on the each. You now swap to images of other beaches and browse these images. The image of a beach in Greece reminds you of your time there and you swap to the timeline option to view all your images of that partical holiday.
Let's see an example screencast to discover memories via HomeGallery. The initial image is a sunset in Italy:
You can follow inspiration from one topic to the next, from one time to another, never knowing where you will endup next. Try the demo HomeGallery by similar flowers to explore my public photos just now...
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Features
HomeGallery's unique features are the automatic similar images/reverse image search feature and the no-database architecture (all search and filtering is done quickly on the client browser). This leads to a fast responsive user experience to navigate and explore the archive without any manual step.
Further features are:
- HomeGallery allows you to host your private data on your device, even on a SoC like Raspberry Pi
- Open-source built with Node.js, Express, React and Typescript
- Photo and video preview calculation
- Mobile friendly and use including PWA support as simple mobile app
- Face and object detection
- Reverse GEO lookup (geo locations to addresses translations)
- Tagging with multi-selection
- Media search with boolean operands like 'and', 'or' or 'not'
- Static site export - run HomeGallery without any backend service like the demo gallery
Read the documentation for further details, architecture and internals.
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Project status
The gallery source is shared with anyone who would like to use or expand it
This is a private pet/spare time project and has more prototype character than a final product. Even it is not feature complete or polished — it is kind of done.
With HomeGallery I have already solved my goal of creatively exploring my own media archive with over 100,000 personal photos and videos. My private web gallery at home is served by a Raspberry PI 4 and a 256GB USB stick containing all mobile-friendly 98,500 preview images and 5,500 videos (62 hours in 720p).
I work on it if time and mood is available. Work-live-balance gets a higher priority. Check any activity on the github repo (if any).
You might also have a look at other self-hosted open-source web galleries.
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