Photoview

Photoview is an open-source, self-hosted photo gallery built for personal servers and homelabs. Unlike cloud-based alternatives, it works directly with your existing filesystem — directories become albums automatically, and originals are never moved, renamed, or modified. The backend is written in Go for fast thumbnail generation and EXIF parsing, while the React frontend delivers smooth, lazy-loaded browsing even with tens of thousands of photos.

Common Use Cases

Photographers use Photoview to browse and share their RAW library from any device without converting files or uploading to a cloud service. Families self-host Photoview as a private photo album, keeping years of memories on hardware they own rather than on a subscription platform. Homelabbers integrate Photoview alongside file sync tools like Nextcloud or Syncthing so photos synced from phones appear in the gallery automatically. Small creative teams use its multi-user support to maintain separate libraries for each member while sharing a single server instance.

Key Features

• Filesystem-mirrored albums — directories map directly to albums with no import step
• RAW camera file support via Darktable (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, and more)
• Automatic face recognition that groups photos of the same person
• Full EXIF metadata display including camera model, settings, and lens data
• GPS map view with optional Mapbox integration for location-based browsing
• Hardware-accelerated video transcoding (Intel QSV, VA-API, NVENC)
• Password-protected public share links for albums and individual photos
• Multi-user support with per-user filesystem path assignments
• Periodic automatic scanner keeps the gallery in sync with filesystem changes
• Mobile-friendly responsive interface with fast lazy-loading thumbnails

Why deploy Photoview on Hostinger VPS

Hosting Photoview on a Hostinger VPS puts your entire photo library under your control — no subscription fees, no storage limits imposed by a cloud provider, and no third party processing your personal images for face recognition or GPS indexing. A VPS gives Photoview the dedicated CPU and storage throughput it needs to generate thumbnails and transcode videos quickly, with the flexibility to scale storage as your library grows. Because Photoview reads directly from the filesystem, you can manage your photos with any sync tool (rsync, Nextcloud, Syncthing) and the gallery updates automatically on the next scan.