GitHub - kjpgit/PhotoReviewer4Net: Full screen photo and video reviewer app, with a couch & TV friendly UX

Do you or a significant other want to sit on the couch, go through your family photos and videos on the TV, and give them a thumbs up, thumbs down, or "I don't know yet" rating? Then, safely move or delete unnecessary files that everyone agrees are wasting space and costing money to backup?

The browser-based UI is designed to be simple for the whole family to use, whether they're technical or not. Run the CLI program on your media server, and access its web UI from any device on your WIFI network.

After the ratings are input, you can get the list of "Bad" filenames (or any other rating you want) and feed them into any standard CLI tool, to move, archive, resize, or delete them. (See the examples below.)

You control all modification actions — Photo Reviewer 4Net just gives you the list of files!

Installation

Photo Reviewer 4Net runs on Linux, Mac, or Windows. It's a small, modular, UNIX-philosophy tool, and there's no configuration file.

Quickstart - UNIX

To build the app, you need dotnet 8.0 or later installed. That version was released in 2023, so most distros should have it available.

git clone https://github.com/kjpgit/PhotoReviewer4Net
cd PhotoReviewer4Net
dotnet publish -o /tmp/photo_reviewer_build

Verify you can run it and see the help, then run it on a real directory:

/tmp/photo_reviewer_build/photo_reviewer_4net --help
/tmp/photo_reviewer_build/photo_reviewer_4net ~/Pictures/2025 /tmp/ratings.json

For fun, in another terminal window you can run watch cat /tmp/ratings.json and see when the web UI adds ratings in real time.

Quickstart - Docker

You can easily run a containerized version as shown below. It has read-only access to the media directory you specify, and write access to /tmp/ratings/ to save state.

mkdir /tmp/ratings   # The app can write a ratings file in this dir only

docker run --init -p 8080:8080 \
    -v ~/Pictures/2025:/media:ro \
    -v /tmp/ratings:/tmp/ratings:rw \
    public.ecr.aws/p5e0b0g4/kjpgit/photo_reviewer_4net:latest /media /tmp/ratings/ratings.json

Quickstart - Windows

Download the prebuilt binary zipfile and extract it to Downloads\PhotoReviewer4Net\.

Start a PowerShell terminal (open the start menu and type "powersh" to find it).

Verify you can run it and see the help, then run it on a real directory:

~\Downloads\PhotoReviewer4Net\photo_reviewer_4net.exe --help
~\Downloads\PhotoReviewer4Net\photo_reviewer_4net.exe ~\Pictures\2025 c:\temp\ratings.json

Accessing the Web Interface

You can open http://localhost:8080 with your web browser.

By default, the app only accepts connections from the same device (localhost). If you are on a private, trusted WIFI or LAN, use the -a option to listen on 0.0.0.0:8080. You can also change the port with the -p option.

Managing Rated Files

Here are examples on how to list, move, or delete (with confirmation) files that have a "Bad" rating. Please review all commands carefully before running!

UNIX

# Get files with a "Bad" rating (null terminated)
photo_reviewer_4net --print0 /tmp/ratings.json Bad > /tmp/files.txt

# List filenames, sizes, and modification times
cat /tmp/files.txt | xargs -0 ls -l

# Delete files with interactive confirmation
cat /tmp/files.txt | xargs -0 -o rm -v -i

For moving files, see Moving Files on UNIX

Windows (PowerShell)

# Get files with a "Bad" rating (newline terminated)
photo_reviewer_4net.exe --println c:\temp\ratings.json Bad > c:\temp\files.txt

# List file sizes
Get-Content -path c:\temp\files.txt | ForEach-Object { Get-ItemProperty -Path $_ }

# Move files to the target directory c:\temp\badfiles
# CAREFUL: Any subdirectory information is lost, they all go to one directory!
mkdir c:\temp\badfiles
Get-Content -path c:\temp\files.txt | ForEach-Object { Move-Item -Confirm -Path $_ -Destination c:\temp\badfiles }

# (or) Delete files with interactive confirmation
Get-Content -path c:\temp\files.txt | ForEach-Object { Remove-Item -Confirm -Path $_ }

FAQ

What media formats can it play? It can play anything supported by your web browser, which is a lot these days. However, old or non-standard video codecs might not work.
Can I make it full screen? Yes. Press f or double-click when viewing a video or image.
Can the top controls hide faster? Make sure the mouse isn't over a button, and it will hide faster. Also, the controls won't show if you're using the keyboard shortcuts.
Does it have light and dark modes? Yes. You can easily tweak the themes in colors.css.
Is the ratings.json file supposed to be long-lived, or contain all my media files? Not really. My use case is to review this year's pictures, delete the "Bad" rated pictures, then delete the output json. (There's no need to keep ratings for files that no longer exist.)
Does the web interface work on iPad/tablet? It runs admirably, but it wasn't designed for that form factor.
Why did you make this program? It was a Christmas present for my wife (high WAF is not a joke), and she greatly appreciated the effort... and the improvement over our old tools.

Technical

Why C#? Because it's maintained by adults and doesn't nag me with bullsh-t.
Why Vanilla JS? I'm an old backend developer who values stability and minimal churn. And I've tested it with 15,000 files loaded.
Does it use any third-party libraries? Only normalize.css, to appease the wrathful browser gods.
Was "AI" used to make it? It was not used to create it, but another person did some QA on the 1.0 version with it.
What did you learn from this project? It is a great "full stack" challenge — frontend / backend / APIs / races / cross-platform / documentation — in only 500–1000 lines of code. Simple requirements, but very rewarding based on how deep you go.

License

If you are a human, you may use and modify this code. ¹

Enjoy 👍