Ask HN: Collecting pictures from friends using a selfhosted service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Collecting pictures from friends using a selfhosted service?

1 pointreacharavindh4 comments

Hello HN!

My wife and I had a wedding ceremony today, and our friends clicked some great photos that we'd really like to have. However, co-ordinating the sharing of these pictures manually is overwhelming.

I do not prefer a 3rd party hosted service for this. No Facebook messenger/WhatsApp/Dropbox/iCloud/Google Photos. This restriction is due to privacy concerns and the fact that not all of our friends have the same service. Not all on Facebook, Not all are using iPhones, Not all have a Google account etc.

What I'd really like is to run some kind of service on my webserver, and generate an easy to use url/link that our friends will use to just drag & drop their photos of us. Ideally, we'd like to not ask our friends install any app on their phones. It should just be a link they open in the browser of their phones, and select pictures to upload - done.

I could not find such tools through Google search. Anybody here have any ideas?

For most people, I would bet that sending over email is the easiest thing. Create an address specifically for photos and write a script to download the attachments. You might run into issues with attachment sizes of course. But hopefully most people only have 5-10 photos they want to share. For those who want to give you a whole roll of shots, they might just be the edge case where they can just upload to their a shared GDrive or Dropbox.

You can do the following things to achieve this :

1. Create php script to upload image and then save it to your webserver. 2. Save the names of the photo in the database with a single random string to identify the photos. 3. Read this random string to identify and display the images (or create a download link for the images) 4. Share this URL with your friends.

Its just my opinion, I am looking for what other have to say.

I have no idea what your platform or experience level is, but if you have macOS, then maybe MAMP is worth a shot. You could set up your own personal Wordpress blog and only expose the upload interface?

https://www.mamp.info/en/

Sorry to be unfamiliar with other platforms in this context.

A simple flask or Django app will work

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