Home NAS Part 4: Home Photo Gallery with thumbsup

After I set up my home NAS, I wanted to display my home photos on my local intranet. I looked at about 5 or so static photo gallery generator tools until I found thumbsup. More useful github link here. I was very close to writing something myself, but thumbsup was good enough.

The tool isn’t smart enough to be run on a massive collection of photos and have the result look like Google Photos. It requires cleaning and organizing your files first. To start out, I wrote a script to build a folder structure with photos for running the tool on by:

• Changing the filename to a hash of the file contents. This eliminates duplicates and issues with html encoding the URL. (I had some files with # in them and it caused issues)
• Sort into folder structure of YYYY/MM for gallery creation. I was using YYYY-MM-DD + some other stuff, but it would be too hard to find anything if I needed to drill down into individual days.
• Prioritize exiftool capture date over folder date

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

PHOTO_ROOT=${PHOTO_ROOT:-by-date}
for file in "$@";do
    HASH=$(xxh128sum -q "$file"|cut -d ' ' -f1)
    EXT=${file##*.}
    YEAR=unknown
    MONTH=unknown
    DNAME=$(dirname "$file")
    DATETIME=unknown

    DATETIME=$(exiftool -DateTimeOriginal -d %Y-%m-%d -j "$file" 2>/dev/null| jq -r '.[0].DateTimeOriginal')
    if [[ "$DATETIME" =~ .*([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])-([0-9][0-9])-[0-9][0-9].* ]]; then
	YEAR=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
	MONTH=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
    fi


    if [[ $YEAR == "unknown" ]]; then
	if [[ "$DNAME" =~ .*([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])-([0-9][0-9])-[0-9][0-9].* ]]; then
	    YEAR=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
	    MONTH=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
	fi
    fi

    if [[ $YEAR == "unknown" || $MONTH == "unknown" ]]; then
	echo "Unresolved date $YEAR/$MONTH: $file"
    else
	mkdir -p "${PHOTO_ROOT}/${YEAR}/${MONTH}"
	ln -v "$file" "${PHOTO_ROOT}/${YEAR}/${MONTH}/${HASH}.${EXT}"
    fi
    
done

I would invoke it with the following:

find 20[0-9][0-9] -iname '*.jpg' -exec ~/bin/reorg-photo.sh '{}' ';'

(And I’d also do the same with mp4 and other file extensions)

Then, install and run the tool:

npm install thumbsup
node_modules/thumbsup/bin/thumbsup.js --input /mnt/backup/photos/by-date --output /mnt/backup/galleries/timmy --photo-download link --video-download link --photo-preview link --video-preview link

Here is what the gallery list looks like (the gallery list for each year looks similiar)

View inside a gallery:

The photo view:

It could probably use some cleaning up, but this isn’t really a replacement for Google Photos. I do enjoy being able to look at things with zero lag and at full resolution though.

The files are served from apache2 which comes installed on my distro. There is nothing special in the apache2 config file–this is the gist of it:

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	DocumentRoot /mnt/backup
	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

<Directory /mnt/backup>
	Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
	AllowOverride None
	Require all granted
</Directory>

The DNS name is handled by my DNS server, which I detailed in my last post.