photolib/README.md

Photolib
========

Cloud-native photo and related media library software, with a focus for photography hobbyists.

Photolib provides a simple, rich, and modern UI to manage your photo and video library. It can scale to host hundreds of
thousands of photos but is also light and simple enough to host just the couple photos you shoot with your smartphone.

Photolib stores images as a logical "photoset". This allows identical images and metadata to be grouped into one item.
Many photographers shoot in multiple formats - that is, to produce multiple files per click of the shutter. A JPEG and
a RAW of some sort (Like Canon's CR2) is common. The primary idea behind Photolib's organization is that one click of a
camera shutter equals one photoset.

When photos are imported - assuming they are done in the same batch - files are grouped based on their name and
extension, using rules that apply to almost every camera format. For example, a camera shooting under the "multiple
formats" mode described above would create, from one shot, `IMG_1234.JPG` and `IMG_1234.CR2`. Photolib would detect that
since these two images have the same file name (the `IMG_1234` part), they are the same photo and should be grouped into
a photoset.

In addition to controls in the web interface, Photolib provides both a REST API and command-line tools to manage your
photo library.


Installation
------------

Pre-built releases are not currently available. See `Dockerfile` for a step-by-step installation from source.

The general steps are:

* `npm install` - install modules needed to build the frontend assets
* `grunt` - build the frontend assets
* `pip3 install -r requirements.txt` - install python dependencies
* `python3 setup.py install` - install Photolib and command line tools

Note that the npm and grunt steps can be skipped if you're not planning to run the web UI (e.g. you want only the
command-line tools).


Usage
-----

After installation, run the server:

* `photoappd --port 8080 --library ./library --database ./photos.db --cache ./cache`

Arguments are as follows:

* `--library ./library` - store the hosted image files under this directory
* `--database ./photos.db` - store the SQLite database in this directory
* `--cache ./cache` - use this directory as a cache for things like thumbnails
* `--port 8080` - listen on http on port 8080

Depending on your setup, the `photousers` command can be used to create a user account. Login information is necessary
to see images marked as private or upload images.

* `photousers create -u dave -p mypassword`

That's it - you've set up Photolib! Next steps from here would be to the other command line tools to import media.

Besides browsing, most interaction with Photolib will be done using its CLI tool, `photocli`. Note that server address,
username, and password details need to be provided via flags not shown here to in a config file. See `photocli --help`
for more information.


Commands
--------

* `photocli ingest` - import new photos into the library:


```
$ photocli ingest photos/*.jpg raws/*.cr2
```

or add a new format to an existing photo:

```
$ photocli ingest -c 52679a30-cee4-45c4-8d83-80ee92242e1c photos/*.jpg
```


* `photocli checkdupes` - scan files and print those not already in the library:


```
$ find source -type f -exec shasum -a 256 {} \; | tee shas.txt
544b5a4f3898abae73260930ee70931a3992c048649692cef89b37576e886f69  source/2018-12-09 13.52.22.jpg
d2c2c30ca4986d364026644881d667162031008e60aac6a69d7b18230b7ea98c  source/2019-04-08 20.05.02.jpg
9d42859ed92d7fb978cf73b41293480e1eab03d2d3a14c185c4daf3a49d324ab  source/2019-06-19 16.28.07.png
...

$ photocli checkdupes --sha-files shas.txt
```

TODO: support not using `--sha-files`.

This command, along with `ingest`, allows for fun tool combinations like so:

```
photocli checkdupes --sha-files shas.txt | xargs -d "\n" photocli -y ingest
```

This would ingest all the files listed in `shas.txt` that aren't already in the database.


Roadmap
-------
- Stateless aka docker support
    - Photo storage
        - ~~Abstract the storage api~~ done
        - ~~Standardize on API ingest~~ done
        - Display and retrieval of images from the abstracted image store
    - Database support
        - Get the web UI code (daemon.py) using the same db access method as the api
        - Support any connection URI sqlalchemy is happy with
        - Tune certain databases if their uri is detected (sqlite and threads lol)
    - ~~Cache~~ done
        - ~~Using the local fs seems fine?~~ done
- Option to cherrypy sessions - Redis?
- Flesh out CLI:
    - Config that is saved somewhere
    - Support additional fields on upload like title description tags etc
    - delete features
    - tag features
    - modify features (tags & images)

- Longer term ideas:
    - "fast ingest" method that touches the db/storage directly. This would scale better than the API ingest.