After the Nth photo sharing website that I'd early-adopted decided to close up shop, I determined I wanted to own the next solution I invested time into, and I founded PhotoStructure.
I've got 20-odd hard drives from laptops and servers and backups. No software that I tried, either open or closed source, would do what I wanted: organize everything into a nice, timestamped, deduped folder structure.
Many years ago, I'd shot myself in the foot by using tools to do JPEG editing and rotation, but those tools quietly deleted EXIF metadata, so PhotoStructure applies a suite of metadata inference heuristics to heal those holes, too.
The MVP is focused on high-quality metadata extraction and inference, and has a simple web-based UI. Simple editing support, along with GPS POI and face detection, is planned.
After spending more than a decade in the ads business, and (helping build) ML-powered behavior targeting based on metadata, it blows my mind that so many of us give the most rich metadata stream, our photos and videos, for free, to the FAANG. PhotoStructure isn't just an effort of love, it's also, at least in some way, penance.
I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. Use of PhotoStructure during the beta period is free.
As a semi-pro photog who is very keen to quit Adobe completely, I'm very keen to try it out.
Curious about privacy aspects though. When you say it's a private cloud, does it communicate back to your servers at all?
Any goals for Linux compatibility?
I'd love something that can store the photos on a NAS or network share drive, runs its processing in a Docker container on my LAN, and serves a web app locally with absolutely no external internet access. That's basically my dream photo manager. I can connect to my own LAN remotely to access it then, without any need for the privacy/security risk of hosting my (and my clients) photos on some 3rd party server.
I have installers for Mac, 64 bit Windows 10, and 64 bit Ubuntu. My CI suite runs all ~2,600 tests on all three platforms after every commit.
Your images, videos, and metadata stay yours, and are not uploaded anywhere.
Currently I've got error reporting that phones home if there are critical problems detected, but the log events only include the stack trace and possibly the path to the problem file.
PhotoStructure spins up a webserver bound to localhost by default. In other words, other machines in your LAN can't open the PhotoStructure web UI (unless you set an environment variable or use ssh port forwarding).
Sign up via the website or send me an email, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
I still use Picasa, because it is so fast and easy to just copy an SD card somewhere to my hard drive and have it show up at the top of Picasa seconds later.
Then I browse the pictures, star the ones I like and process them.
An no other software I have tried so far comes close in terms of speed and UI efficiency.
So I would also love to try PhotoStructure and have signed up via your landing page.
After the Nth photo sharing website that I'd early-adopted decided to close up shop, I determined I wanted to own the next solution I invested time into, and I founded PhotoStructure.
I've got 20-odd hard drives from laptops and servers and backups. No software that I tried, either open or closed source, would do what I wanted: organize everything into a nice, timestamped, deduped folder structure.
Many years ago, I'd shot myself in the foot by using tools to do JPEG editing and rotation, but those tools quietly deleted EXIF metadata, so PhotoStructure applies a suite of metadata inference heuristics to heal those holes, too.
The MVP is focused on high-quality metadata extraction and inference, and has a simple web-based UI. Simple editing support, along with GPS POI and face detection, is planned.
After spending more than a decade in the ads business, and (helping build) ML-powered behavior targeting based on metadata, it blows my mind that so many of us give the most rich metadata stream, our photos and videos, for free, to the FAANG. PhotoStructure isn't just an effort of love, it's also, at least in some way, penance.
I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. Use of PhotoStructure during the beta period is free.
https://PhotoStructure.com