GitHub - dougdonohoe/ddphotos-app: Desktop app to create beautiful self-hosted photo galleries. No subscriptions, no lock-in, deploys in minutes.

DD Photos Desktop App

DD Photos is a desktop app for quickly and easily publishing your own beautiful photo albums, like our sample site↗. A DD Photos site is wicked-fast, mobile friendly, and distraction free.

Publish for free via Cloudflare Pages↗ or Surge↗. More technical users can self-publish via AWS S3 or rsync.

The DD Photos app is a front end to the ddphotos↗ open-source static photo album site generator. Rather than hand-editing complex configuration files, DD Photos provides a friendly interface for managing your site and album data. You can also run all the major ddphotos commands to generate, test and deploy your site.

See Screenshots for full-size screenshots of each screen.

Site Overview

A DD Photos site↗ has a home page, with all of your albums, and their descriptions. You can easily switch between dark and light themes. Click/touch an album and you see a grid of all photos. Click/touch a photo to see the full size version and a caption, if it has one. You can easily swipe between photos (or use arrow keys on a laptop). It works great on mobile, tablet, and desktop.

How it Works

The idea is that you already use something else to curate and filter your photos. Maybe it is Adobe Lightroom Classic (my tool). Or maybe it is Apple Photos or Google Photos. It doesn't matter, but once you get a selection of photos that comprise an album, you export the photos into a folder. All the photos in a folder make up an album. It's that simple.

With DD Photos, you define where your albums live in the Config tab, and can specify a name, description and choose your cover photo. Here, you also define details about your site, like name, description, optional HTML text and the hero image.

Once you have defined where your photos live, you use the Photogen tab to run the photogen tool, which resizes the photos for web viewing and generates index files that the web app uses.

That's it. You can now view your personal photo albums site on your machine using the dev server started in the Run tab. You typically will repeat the edit - photogen - run loop multiple times as you refine your site, adding albums, choosing covers, setting descriptions, etc.

Once you are satisfied with you site, you generate the full static site on the Build tab, and verify it via the Serve tab.

The remaining tabs are used to publish your site. Use Export with Wrangler (Cloudflare) or Surge for the simplest path. Use Deploy for total control via rsync or AWS S3.

Installation

See Releases for the latest Mac, Linux and Windows installers.

Installers are built by Donohoe Digital LLC↗ courtesy of a license to ej-technologies' excellent multi-platform installer builder, install4j↗. We are grateful that they provided us an open source license.

Required Software

DD Photos uses the ddphotos↗ command-line tool to generate, test, and deploy your site. That tool runs inside Docker, so you need a couple of things installed before DD Photos can do its work. The built-in Setup Wizard checks for these on first launch and links you to them, but you can install them ahead of time:

Docker↗ (all platforms) — DD Photos runs every ddphotos command (photogen, run, build, serve, etc.) inside a Docker container, so Docker must be installed and running. On Mac and Windows, install Docker Desktop; on Linux, the Docker Engine. Docker must be started before you run any commands.
Git for Windows↗ (Windows only) — the ddphotos script is a Bash script, so on Windows it runs under Git Bash (bash.exe), which ships with Git for Windows. It is not needed on Mac or Linux, which already have Bash. When installing, it is fine to accept all the default options.

Beta Software

The current version of the DD Photos app is beta software and supports the majority of ddphotos features. However, some features aren't available yet. For example, in the app, you can't currently edit passwords, captions, certain deploy settings, or custom CSS. There may also be bugs.

Support for these features is coming soon. You can still hand-edit the related files as documented in the ddphotos↗ repo, and they will be used when you run ddphotos commands.

TL;DR Running DD Photos From Source

If you are impatient and just want to run the DD Photos app without reading all the developer documentation, follow these steps:

Clone this repo
Install Java 25↗ and Maven 3↗
Run these commands in the root of this repo

source ddphotos.rc
mvn-package-notests
ddphotos-app

Developer Notes

For full details on how to build and run DD Photos from source, please see README-DEV.md.

Copyright and Licenses

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL v3).

The "DD Photos" and "Donohoe Digital" names and logos, as well as any images, graphics, text, and documentation found in this repository (including but not limited to written documentation, website content, and marketing materials) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You may not use these assets without explicit written permission for any uses not covered by this License.

If you'd like to use this project under different terms, contact doug [at] donohoe [dot] info.

Third Party Licenses and Other Open Source Code

The core architecture of DD Photos was adapted from the DD Poker↗ open source project, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0↗ (GPL v3).

DD Photos incorporates other open source code, primarily as Maven dependencies (see the pom.xml files) but also as bundled resources such as fonts. These are explained in code/photos/src/main/resources/config/ddphotos/help/credits.html and the licenses mentioned therein can be found in the docs/license directory.