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Show HN: DD Photos – open-source photo album site generator (Go and SvelteKit)
by dougdonohoe
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. You export photos from whatever you already use (Lightroom, Apple Photos, etc.) into folders, run `photogen` (a Go CLI) to resize them to WebP and generate JSON indexes, then deploy the SvelteKit static site anywhere that serves files. Apache, S3, whatever. No server-side code, no database.
Built over several weeks with heavy use of Claude Code, which I found genuinely useful for this kind of full-stack project spanning Go, SvelteKit/TypeScript, Apache config, Docker, and Playwright tests. Happy to discuss that experience too.
Live example: https://photos.donohoe.info Repo: https://github.com/dougdonohoe/ddphotos
Just taking this moment to share something I made from a similar point of frustration — https://mood.site
It's a free online photo gallery app where auth is done through URL query params. You make a board, it gets an edit key, and then if you share that url with anyone else (including grandma) they can upload photos without needing to make an account. You can drag and drop, use the upload button, and it works on mobile as well.
There are lots of other little features as well, but the core thing is just a dead simple (online) photo gallery tool. You can see some sample boards here:
I'll have to play around with this :)
A similar tool I've used in the past is fgallery[0]
This is really great. At first it seems a tad over-engineered but I admit the state of the art has progressed since the days of using Yeoman to scaffold a Jekyll site. Also the fact that you don’t use Hugo deserves to be congratulated.
I have a similar frustration, on my Surface Book 2, for some reason the Photos default Windows app is sluggish to death. I have to scour all sorts of third party applications to finally find one that loads correctly. I'm using an extremely vanilla configured Windows too. I rarely open that laptop anymore because of all the bloat. Someday I'll smoosh over Windows and just dump Linux on top of it, even though the support for Linux isn't the greatest.
The Photos app on Mac irritates me too, you cannot just force it to scan everything, it has to "do it in the background" which feels like never.
I've looked at all sorts of alternative photo gallery programs, and it feels like none come close to what I wish Photos was like, without being slugs.
This looks great! I've been using ThumbsUp[1] for a similar purpose (creating a gallery of photos I can push S3), but adding album and photo captions required some un-ergonomical tricks. I'll try this out!
Thanks, appreciate it. I'll checkout thumbsup too.
Nice project. I like the approach of using static generation instead of building a full backend for something that’s mostly read-only.
Did you find any challenges handling large numbers of photos when generating the indexes?
No real challenges. I made the Go `photogen` tool run in parallel using goroutines (e.g., 3-6 depending on your CPU). It's pretty fast at churning through hundreds of photos.
Interesting approach.
Curious how this behaves with larger datasets or longer sessions.
I’m assuming the build step doesn’t resize images that have already been processed. Other than that this approach seems to handle plenty of images per album. Albums are a UX principle, so they shouldn’t be very big anyway.
Correct - if the resized image is already there it is skippped (this can be overwritten with -force flag).
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code