Photoview is a simple, user-friendly photo gallery made for photographers, designed to run on self-hosted personal servers. It provides an easy, fast way to navigate directories containing thousands of high-resolution photos. You configure Photoview to watch a directory on your file system; its scanner automatically picks up new media and generates thumbnail images so browsing stays fast.

Key Features

• Simple user-friendly UI — Clean, modern gallery interface aimed at photographers
• Directory-based scanning — Point it at a folder; it auto-scans and generates thumbnails
• Fast browsing — Generated thumbnails keep navigation quick over thousands of photos
• Timeline view — Photos arranged on an easy-to-browse photography timeline
• Map view — See where photos were taken via EXIF location data
• Face recognition — Automatic grouping and identification of people in your library
• Docker deployment — Simple container setup for self-hosted servers

Why Use Photoview?

Photoview is a great starting point for self-hosted photo management because it is genuinely simple. There is little configuration and no heavyweight database to maintain, yet it still delivers timeline, map and face-recognition views — ideal for photographers who want a clean gallery without a complex platform.

Use Cases

• Personal self-hosted photo gallery
• Fast browsing of large photo folders
• Photography portfolios
• Privacy-first alternative to cloud photo services

Platform

Self-hosted web app — runs on Linux servers via Docker

Licence

AGPL-3.0 — free and open source

Website

photoview.github.io