Photoview — Self-Hosted, Open-Source

Simple and user-friendly photo gallery for personal servers. It is made for photographers and aims to provide an easy and fast way to navigate directories, with thousands of high resolution photos.

License: GPL-3.0. Built with: TypeScript, Go, Makefile, Dockerfile, Shell, JavaScript, HTML, CSS. Website: https://photoview.github.io/. Source: https://github.com/photoview/photoview.

Features

Closely tied to the file system. The website presents the images found on the local filesystem of the server; directories are mapped to albums.
User management. Each user is created along with a path on the local filesystem, photos within that path can be accessed by that user.
Sharing. Albums, as well as individual media, can easily be shared with a public link, the link can optionally be password protected.
Made for photography. Photoview is built with photographers in mind, and thus supports RAW file formats, and EXIF parsing.
Video support. Many common video formats are supported. Videos will automatically be optimized for web.
Face recognition. Faces will automatically be detected in photos, and photos of the same person will be grouped together.
Performant. Thumbnails are automatically generated and photos first load when they are visible on the screen. In full screen, thumbnails are displayed until the high-resolution image has been fully loaded.
Secure. All media resources are protected with a cookie-token, all passwords are properly hashed, and the API uses a strict CORS policy.

Installation

See official install docs: http://localhost:8000

Why self-host Photoview

Self-hosting gives you three things SaaS can’t: data ownership (the files live on disks you control), cost predictability (a one-time setup vs. recurring per-seat fees that grow with your household or team), and longevity (open-source means the app keeps working even if the maintainers move on, since you can pin a working version). The trade-off is that you take on the operational work of running a server, applying updates, and handling backups.

What hardware do you need

Most self-hosted apps run comfortably on modest hardware — a Raspberry Pi 4, a mini PC, a NAS with Docker support, or a small VPS is usually enough for personal or family use. CPU and RAM requirements scale with how many simultaneous users or how much data you push through Photoview. Storage requirements depend on the kind of data you keep; check the README for guidance on data retention.

Where to go from here

Last verified: 2026-04-22