HomeAlbum is a self-hosted photo album platform. It allows for browsing through personal photos on a privately owned server.

The suggested workflow to add photos to the server is to copy the files via some side channel (e.g. rsync) and then run the makethumbs/makedb scripts to make photos browsable.

HomeAlbum is built around the concept of "albums" where each album is stored in a dedicated folder where the expected folder structure is:

albums/
└── 2021-01-15-family-winter-walk
    ├── DSC09886.JPG
    ├── DSC09887.JPG
    └── raw
        ├── DSC09886.ARW
        └── DSC09887.ARW

Create a virtualenv, upgrade pip and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/gardarh/homealbum
cd homealbum
python3 -m venv env
. ./env/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Create the required folders:

mkdir generated
mkdir generated/thumbs

Copy .env.example to .env.local under the root of this project and customize variable values. You can source .env.local (i.e. source .env.local) to inject the required environment variables into your shell. Remember to generate the SECRET_KEY for production setups.

Run migrations:

python manage.py migrate

Make sure your HOMEALBUM_PHOTOS_BASEDIR contains at least one album. An expected folder structure is described in the Introduction section.

With the above structure and HOMEALBUM_PHOTOS_BASEDIR configured accordingly you should now run the following:

source .env.local
cd django_homealbum/
python manage.py makethumbs && python manage.py makedb

The makethumbs generates thumbnails. A thumbnail name is a hash based on a photo contents and makethumbs does not touch the database. makedb updates the database with any new photos. Both scripts should be run after new photos have been added to the albums folder.

Next, create the first superuser:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Finally run the development server:

python manage.py runserver

Follow the steps described in "Development setup".

Create a folder for static files and run collectstatic:

mkdir generated/staticfiles
cd django_homealbum
python manage.py collectstatic

Build the frontend app:

cd /srv/homealbum/vue-app
npm install
npm run build

Create a systemd job to run the embedded tornado web server:

cp support_files/homealbum.service /lib/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable homealbum.service

Install nginx and add the following to server block in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default (assuming a Debian like environment):

    location ~ ^/(api) {
		proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
		proxy_set_header Host $host;
		proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
	}

    location /static/ {
      alias /srv/homealbum/generated/staticfiles/;
    }

    location /thumbs/ {
      alias /data/homealbum-thumbs/;
    }

    location /originals/ {
      alias /data/Pictures/;
    }

    location / {
        root /srv/homealbum/vue-app/dist;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
        expires -1;
        if_modified_since off;
        add_header Last-Modified $date_gmt;
    }

Add the following cronjob (Issue the crontab -e shell command):

10 4 * * * /srv/homealbum/make_thumbs_and_db.sh

This cronjob will detect any changes to your albums folder and generate thumbs/update database accordingly.

from homealbum.models import Album, Tag, MediaFileTag
t = Tag.objects.get(name='starred')
tnew = Tag('starred-2016-2017')
tnew.save()

for mft in MediaFileTag.objects.filter(tag=t):
 mft.tag = tnew
 mft.save()