DD Photos - Photo Album Website
Motivation
I was dissatisfied with photo sharing sites, especially Apple's iCloud shared albums, which typically take 20+ seconds to load. Other sites for sharing have their own irritations like cumbersome UIs, advertising, hawking of photo paraphernalia and social media distractions.
I just want to share my photos with friends and family. I want it fast, easy, mobile friendly, and distraction free. Focus on the photos. So I built this, with help from Claude Code, and it is what is behind photos.donohoe.info. It's pretty good and meets my needs. Maybe it will meet yours too, which is why I've open-sourced it.
Overview
The site has a home page, with all of your albums and their description. You can easily switch between dark and light themes. Click/touch an album and you see a grid of all photos. Click/touch a photo to see the full size version and a caption, if it has one. You can easily swipe between photos (or use arrow keys on a laptop). It works great on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Here's what it looks like on a big display (see SCREENSHOTS.md for larger versions):
How it Works
The idea is that you already use something else to curate and filter your photos. Maybe it is Adobe Lightroom Classic (my tool). Or maybe it is Apple Photos or Google Photos. It doesn't matter, but once you get a selection of photos that comprise an album, you export the photos into a folder. All the photos in a folder make up an album. It's that simple.
You can create an optional photogen.txt file in each album folder to define captions for each photo. This file can also be used to define the album's sort order, if order-by-date isn't sufficient.
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