Photoview

Photoview is an open-source, self-hosted photo gallery designed for your personal servers and homelabs. What makes it different from cloud-based options is that it works directly with your existing filesystem – your directories automatically become albums, and your original photos are never moved, renamed, or modified. Its backend, written in Go, ensures fast thumbnail generation and EXIF parsing, while the React frontend provides a smooth, lazy-loaded browsing experience, even if you have tens of thousands of photos.

Common Use Cases

Photographers use Photoview to easily browse and share their RAW library from any device, without the hassle of converting files or uploading to a cloud service. Families can self-host Photoview as a private photo album, securely keeping years of memories on their own hardware instead of relying on a subscription platform. Homelabbers can integrate Photoview with file sync tools like Nextcloud or Syncthing, so photos synced from phones automatically show up in the gallery. Small creative teams also benefit from its multi-user support, allowing each member to maintain separate libraries 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 gives you full control over your entire photo library – meaning no subscription fees, no storage limits from cloud providers, and no third party processing your personal images for face recognition or GPS indexing. A VPS provides Photoview with the dedicated CPU and storage throughput it needs to quickly generate thumbnails and transcode videos, plus the flexibility to scale storage as your library expands. Since Photoview reads directly from the filesystem, you can manage your photos using any sync tool (like rsync, Nextcloud, or Syncthing), and your gallery will update automatically on the next scan.