Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

lychee.electerious.com

92 pointselecterious69 comments

I developed this project in my spare time. It's a self-hosted photo-management-system and a great place to share, store and manage your photos and inspiration. I hope you guys here on HN like it. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

I didn't just like it, I'm really stunned by it. Great attention to details.

Please keep it open source but make it paid (libre but not free as in free beer), so you can develop more features.

Thanks for sharing.

Private albums with a random access token in the url would be awesome (instead of passwords).

On a side note, I'd donate 100 bucks for a Lightroom Sync Plugin any minute.

I second that - I have been looking for something like this, but it would be extremenly conventient to be able to upload directly from LR.

Another request - I love the free flow, tiled display of images a la Flickr photostream - any chance that could be an option?

Otherwise, great job! - I was pleasently surprised at the quality of this applications.

Lightroom Plugin would be fantastic, I agree.

Based on playing with the demo, I'd move to this in a heartbeat if there was a Lightroom sync plugin. (and would donate!)

This looks really good. A couple questions:

1) Is there any kind of RAW file support? 2) Does the software de-duplicate uploaded images?

RAW files are not support and every photo is uploaded and stored with its own copy.

Hey I had sent you an email to the email address listed in your domain's WHOIS. Is there a better way to get a hold of you?

For years and years, I used Gallery/Gallery2 to self-host photos, but more and more, I found myself taking photos with my phone instead of a regular camera. From the smartphone, it was much easier to upload to Facebook (and now, G+) than it was to get photos into Gallery. Once every so often, I would bother connecting my phone to my computer, sync the photos over, and then upload them into Gallery. But by then, they were already shared among my friends and family.

My gallery is still up, but the last time I updated it was apparently in 2011. There was a android client that came out that I had tried, but it didn't really work that well. I still backup photos from my phone to my computer and NAS, but couldn't be motivated to go beyond that.

I've looked at times to improve this situation. I much prefer to have my photos self-hosted. I haven't really found a gallery type program that worked as well as Menalto Gallery, but Lychee looks like it's a good contender. I also like that it can share out to other services.

At first I was thinking that since this doesn't have an android client, it would fall into the same disuse as my Gallery installation. But I noticed that it could read from an uploads folder and you could essentially ftp upload to the server. This made me wonder if one could just have an auto-upload (scp/sftp or otherwise) to a server.

I found a couple apps that do this, but [Auto-Share](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dngames.au...) looks the most polished. So I can see this working out.

tl;dr Looks like a great photo manager, love the option to share out to other service. There may be some Android Apps to automatically upload, even if it's not natively supported in Lychee.

Ok, so I installed it and added some pictures into uploads/import. Lychee imported these and dropped them into a smart album called Unsorted. I then wanted to organize these into albums. The first thing I noticed was there was no way to select photos. You have to open them one by one and move them. This would be my feature request numero uno.

Second thing I noticed is there doesn't seem to be support for sub-albums. I guess this isn't necessarily a deal killer, but I had a system of organizing albums in YEAR/MM type albums. If there was a lot of photos or an event, that would be a sub-album within the month it took place. If a single event took place between months (New Year's Eve party) I just handled that on a case by case basis.

Tip: You can right-click on single images/albums to rename, move or star them. By now, it may be easier to upload photos directly into the album of your choice.

Multi-select is planned.

the tl;dr really ought to go at the start of your stuff, otherwise it's of no value to others because we've already read the whole thing before we arrived at it.

I automated synchronization of the photos folder on my phone with my desktop computer whenever I'm at home. Removes one tedious step in the process at least. You could probably automate other steps as well.

Used FolderSync Lite[1] for Android. Syncs via ssh to my desktop (linux) every hour, but only when on the home wi-fi. I also sync deletions so moving them from the folder on the desktop removes them from the phone as well.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/search?q=foldersync%20lite

Our server gets hammered by you guys. Here is the direct link to GitHub: https://github.com/electerious/Lychee

Hi, great tool guys! Lovely. During configuration I keep getting an error during the creation of the database connection to mysql: "Connection failed. Unable to connect to host database because access was denied. Double check host username password to ensure that access is permitted"

Can't I write whatever username and password I want? Should I create the database before hand?

you need to create the database before hand and provide the credentials for your database and mysql username and password

This could help. Here is how the php/config.php should look like: http://cl.ly/TVft

> "Change the permissions of uploads/ and php/ to 777, including all subfolders"

> https://github.com/electerious/Lychee/blob/master/docs/md/In.... I don't think this is ok

That bothers me. That should never be necessary.

It looks like they intend everything to be in the webroot, which is a problem in and of itself. Setting everything in the uploads folder to be executable without any .htaccess directives to prevent that seems like a potential issue. If they're not validating images (properly) or sandboxing uploads, or thinking about mitigating directory traversal attacks, then there could be issues with remote code execution.

It would be so great if it could simple serve files from a directory (without in-app upload). Then I could simply sync the photos using btsync (or anything else).

Yes. I was actually hoping that this would be working without a database. I think this is a good example: http://sye.dk/sfpg/ Perhaps not UI wise, but it the idea works well for me.

That's what I do for my own photos. http://chir.ag/gallery/ just shows everything from a folder on the server. The thumbnails shown in the gallery view are random and auto-generated. I use subfolders to caption/group the photo in large albums: http://chir.ag/gallery/alaska-cruise-2013

The folder names are underscore delimited column data. E.g. "alaska-cruise-2013_2013-07-27_5th Anniversary Alaska Cruise_critters,cruise,hiking,juliet,travel" => "alaska-cruise-2013" is the permalink, 2013-07-27 is the start date, "5th Anniversary Alaska Cruise" is the gallery title, and the rest of the comma-separated words are tags for filtering, e.g. http://chir.ag/gallery/tag/cruise. I have a few local scripts to resize the raw photos and rsync everything with the server.

It's really not complicated code. Pretty simple stuff that anyone with half a year of coding experience can build. I have been taking and sharing photos on my 'blog since late 2001. I have tried many, many things over time and finally settled on the current method. While my gallery looks/works very simply, it has taken years to refine this exact strategy. I LOVE the Boston Big Picture view and always wanted that. But I also like the thumbnails to jump. I love clicking on the left/right of a pic to advance but I also like to scroll up/down if needed. Sorting gallery by name vs. date, filtering similar albums by tags, and of course captioning without using a text file or DB were things I always wanted but didn't want to deal with a complicated system. I re-did my gallery after our Alaska trip and have been very happy ever since.

This is so smooth. Wow. It's been a while since I saw something labelled as "stunning" actually stun me.

The ability to tag photos and a commenting system would make it just perfect. Maybe an RSS feed for photos and comments, too?

Tags and RSS feeds for albums are already planned.

I like it very much; both the code and interface seem clean and lightweight.

You should use mysqli prepared statements though, after a quick glance over the code I can't quite shake the feeling that there might be some sql injections lurking.

All calls to the API are going through the api.php where every $_POST gets escaped. I'm not an expert when it comes to SQL injection, but I think this should prevent it. See line 61 in php/api.php. It would be great to know if this actually helps or not.

i haven't looked at the code, but you really should switch to prepared statements. they make your code cleaner and more secure (and maybe faster, but that's pretty negligible in this case). have a look at PDO.

I will. Thanks for the notice!

Having read your code and quickly brushing up the little bits of PHP knowledge from years ago, I'd say it helps only a little. mysqli_real_escape_string alone doesn't protect you completely from sql injection attacks, it just makes it harder - see the second answer at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5741187/sql-injection-tha... for an example. Also, the homegrown $albumID validation allows bad payload to reach mysqli_real_escape_string().

Thanks! Good to know.

Dude, you could've easily made money out it. I for one would've definitely bought it. Your product is superb, simple and gives us capability to add stuff on top of it like authentication

Thanks! Donations are welcome :)

No - you didn't read what (s)he wrote. You should charge. Charging people real money gets you real users who give you real feedback. It allows you to allocate more money to the development of the project.

Providing this tool for free is a cost to you.

Sure, allow a certain number of photos free of charge and charge for more.

I also agree. I want to pay for this, not donate. This can be very important for my personal needs and I want to rely on it. If I donate, I don't get the feeling that the project is moving forward.

Simple solution, they provide a package that is the program and a friendly service contract which provide help setting it up or adding customization.

That's ok, but that's a services business. That means committing time. It's difficult to build a fly-wheel that way. I guess you could outsource on oDesk or similar.

I do not think anyone should sell products without understanding the service part of doing business.

if you buy something, people expect someone to be responsible for the product. This mean you got to spend time on providing service, or it get defined by most people as a cash grab.

Oh, of course, provide support (great support at that) by all means. I thought you meant getting into the murky world of custom installations.

OK, seems everybody wants to pay per copy, am I rite? I think that is a pretty bad idea that will slow down adoption and development. Yes, this is an open-source project and more developers could help out. I think developers are less likely to jump on the wagon to help out a duo that gets all the money. Instead, don't try to monetize this now. Make adoption and interest grow. Then sell a hosted variant at lychee.io, Wordpress stylee. Or be more imaginative than that and come up with a better idea.

Great software anyways! Thanks!

Many developers have been selling support for WordPress for a long time. Even back when it wasn't as massively popular as it is now. I wouldn't mind contributing to an open source project where some developers sell support as long as I can fork away when there is a disagreement (read: permissive license).

Make something of value -> now sell it.

Why be more imaginative? It sounds a pretty simple offering to me, and is highly transparent.

A hosted variant isn't a bad idea (I was going to ask if there were recipes for EC2, Docker etc... some people might want to "self" host on a machine they control) but it's more "value added" than the original codebase.

This is beautiful. AFAIK, the alternatives are either a self-hosted blog (not ideal, strips out EXIF data etc.) or something hideous like Piwigo.

Awesome!

Koken might be an other alternative. http://koken.me

Koken is beautiful, and powerful. Thanks for sharing!

I'm running Koken right now and I don't think it's a Lychee alternative. Koken seems geared towards users that are building a photographic or design portfolio with a limited selection of images (and that's what I'm doing). I think Lychee is something else. A way to store and display photos en masse. Perhaps a way to share all your photos from your family vacations 2005-2013.

Another alternative is Balder which I made. It is built with Rails and can easily be hosted on Heroku with images on S3. See http://balderapp.com/

Menalto Gallery is fairly good. I used it for years actually, and I think it's the most feature rich gallery app out there.

http://galleryproject.org/

I like zenphoto

http://www.zenphoto.org/

Nice. A few questions (I might add more, just using the demo)

1. How does it deal with mixed landscape and portrait images?

2. Is preloading the next image possible?

3. Scrollbars are appearing, I can't work out why, e.g. on http://electerious.com/lychee_demo/#3/13901681813613

1. If the image is to tall/wide it will be scaled to fit into your browser. This happens via CSS. Photos won't be compressed or scaled, Lychee keeps their original quality and dimensions. You can click the 'Full Photo' button on the top right to see the file.

2. Nope. Not at the moment.

3. Does this happen only sometimes or always? Which browser and OS are you using?

I also have the same problem (3). It happens when using chrome 32 on windows 8.0 with full screen mode enabled. The scroll bars appear when I open an image and click the right arrow on my keyboard to switch to the next. For me it doesn't happen if I don't navigate to another image or if I'm not browsing in full-screen mode (f11).

Thanks for the report! I will look into it.

3. Firefox on Linux, but only when I click next to go to the next photo, then it's permanent.

I love it. I've been playing with ownCloud because I no longer want to store my pictures on Dropbox (I'm running out of space, and the first tier is 100GB which I don't need).

I'm going to toy around a bit with it and if I like the API I may hack together something to automatically upload new pictures from iOS devices :)

This plugin lets you sync OwnCloud with Lychee: https://github.com/GustavePate/lycheesync It might not work with version 2.0, but the code may help you to start developing some great stuff.

I really like this! I've been wanting to work on a project where I can just insert a SD card into my home server, and it imports all the images into a locally hosted photo-management automatically. This looks like the perfect solution for that. Thanks for sharing!

Animated transitions are really distracting, I hope there's a way to turn this off (and it should be turned off by default..)

Thanks - I've been looking for something like this since Flickr went a bit mad. I'll install and play around.

Thanks for doing this!

This may be exactly the photo sharing software I've always wanted. Will definitely be setting this up soon.

Awesome. Certainly one of the most elegants solutions. Any plans to add video support?

Not at the moment, sorry.

I can really see this as a frontend to my crashplan data. They do have a nice API :)

good job! I like the simplistic and elegant interface. Like what other commenters said, it would be great if it can serve files directly instead of having to upload through the web app.

BTW, why did you name it Lychee?

I think it's a great name for a product. Almost every name which has something to do with photos is already taken. And I like Lychees ;)