I was frustrated with photo sharing sites. Apple's iCloud shared albums take 20+ seconds to load, and everything else comes with ads, cumbersome UIs, or social media distractions. I just want to share photos with friends and family: fast, mobile-friendly, distraction-free.

So I built DD Photos, an open-source, self-hosted publishing tool. Example: https://ddphotos.donohoe.info/.

It worked great. The sites are fast, but it was developer-heavy (Go, Node, libvips), so I Dockerized it.

It was still tech-heavy (requiring typing in the Terminal and familiarity with unix commands), so I decided to build a friendly front-end that tries to remove the biggest barriers (e.g., editing YAML, CLI, etc.).

I built it in Java/Swing, leveraging the app engine I built 20+ years ago for DD Poker (https://www.ddpoker.com / https://github.com/dougdonohoe/ddpoker). Not surprisingly, it required a tiny bit of modernization :-)

But I got it done and I think (hope?) it is actually easy enough for non-techies to use it. It's also helpful to techies too (I mean who loves editing YAML?). I use it now (eat/dogfood).

I'm seeking feedback and anyone willing to give it a spin. Works on Mac/Linux/Windows.

Thanks!

Doug

Discussion of original release of DD Photos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322838