[mceachen]

> How do you manage the "forever" part with a cloud service that could go away?

It's software that you run, on your hardware. Currently there's a desktop installer for win/mac/linux (so people can try it out easily on their laptop or whatever), but I'm building a multiarch Docker image that runs on a droplet/ec2 micro/NAS/raspberry pi.

I run it for my family off of a rpi 4 sitting in an external 10tb USB drive, plugged into my router.

The external drive gets grabbed in case of fire/earthquake, but also gets backed up to backblaze for offsite backup.

> How is this not just "dropbox, but only for photos"?

Dropbox is a file synchronization service.

* You view your files by folder

* Files can only live in one folder

* There's no automatic organization of your files

PhotoStructure is designed to make browsing millions of photos and videos fun and easy, and effortless.

* Best-of-class metadata extraction and inference

* Automatic organization and tagging of your photos and videos based on that metadata

* Hierarchical tagging, with random "tastes" of what's in that tag (or child tags)

* Automatic, best-of-class "asset variation" merging (so when you have a RAW and JPEG version of an image, along with a Apple Photos resized preview, and a Google Photos takeout, they all are considered to be variants of the same asset).

* Cross-platform, cross-file-system support (so if you plug in an external hard drive and it automatically mounts to a different path, the files on that volume are considered equivalent).

* All viewed through a webapp and image delivery system that's built to be delightful and responsive even on low-powered servers and low-powered mobile devices

[ineedasername]

I'm honestly not criticizing, I think I'm just missing something here. It seems like a good service in the interface offered, but where are the photos actually stored? Am I correctly interpreting this to mean that there's no cloud involved, everything runs off your own computer? Is anything accessible from another computer?

[mceachen]

No problem! It's not a traditional SaaS website, nor traditional desktop app, so I need to some practice with describing it so it's clear to people.

PhotoStructure runs on a computer you own, or in the cloud, on a computer you rent. That could be a laptop you have, or a home server, your NAS, or a digitalocean droplet.

Your photos need to be available to that computer when they are imported into your library, either by being on a local hard drive, or mounted from a network fileshare.

Once your photos and videos are imported, the library can be moved or copied to other computers (say, rsync'ed to your droplet). Original photos and videos aren't required.

The PhotoStructure interface is via html/css. It runs a web server that is only available to localhost by default, but there are tools (like localtunnel and trycloudflare) that lets you access your library from any device that has internet access. I'm still building out multi-user support, but a library "owner" has full r/w access, and a "visitor" may see predetermined album contents

[ineedasername]

Awesome! I signed up.