Photoview

What Photoview does

Photoview is a self-hosted gallery written for photographers who keep their pictures on a file server. You tell it which directory to scan, and it picks up photos and videos, generates thumbnails and shows them organized exactly as on disk: each folder becomes an album. It rescans automatically, so new files appear without manual imports. Because organization happens on the file system, you can keep using Samba, FTP or even a Nextcloud folder to manage files, and Photoview stays a fast way to look at them.

It was built for large collections of high-resolution and RAW images. Darktable converts RAW files, FFmpeg prepares videos for web playback (optionally with Intel QSV, VAAPI or NVIDIA NVENC acceleration), and thumbnails load only when they scroll into view. EXIF data is shown next to each photo and used to place pictures on a map, grouped when several were taken at the same spot. Faces are detected and photos of the same person are grouped together.

Users and sharing

Each user account is tied to a path on the server, and that user sees only the media under it. Albums and individual photos or videos can be shared through public links, optionally protected with a password. Media files are protected with a cookie token, passwords are hashed and the API uses a strict CORS policy.

The README is frank that this is not enough for direct Internet exposure. It recommends a firewall, a VPN or an HTTPS reverse proxy, and optionally an external multi-factor login, before opening an instance to the outside.

Self-hosting Photoview

The project provides a Docker Compose example and also supports Debian 12 and 13 and Ubuntu installs, with community packages for Arch (AUR), NixOS, Unraid, TrueNAS, YunoHost and EmbassyOS. It supports three databases: MariaDB (the default), PostgreSQL 17 or 18 (usually the fastest; the main branch has moved to 18), and built-in SQLite, which needs no separate service but is the slowest. The team supports plain Docker Compose setups and asks people using Portainer or similar layers to reproduce problems without them before reporting.

Hosted version

There is no hosted service. A community demo site is linked from the README.

Limitations

Photoview reads your media but does not let you upload, so it cannot back up a phone. The official iOS app is no longer maintained or available on the App Store. Search is limited to what metadata and face grouping provide; there is no semantic search.

Who it suits

Photoview fits photographers and families who already organize photos in folders on a NAS and want a quick, good-looking way to browse and share them, including RAW files. If you also want phone backup, use it next to a sync tool, or look at Immich, which can index the same folders as an external library. For an even lighter read-only gallery, see PiGallery2.