Files – Single-file photo gallery and file manager

The output is very polished and fast, I like it a lot. Unfortunately it&#x27;s not technically a single file as it depends on code downloaded from their server, therefore it can&#x27;t be deployed locally without Internet connection.<p>From the forum:<p>&quot;In terms of license, you don&#x27;t need an internet connection. However, Files app loads it&#x27;s own Javascript, CSS and several plugins from CDN (jsdelivr.com), and this requires internet. We already have a request to allow serving all assets locally (as an option), although in your case that might not be practical as this means Files app is essentially no longer a&quot;single file&quot;, but multiple files that you need to be included with each installation (although you could assign a global path perhaps). In any case, for now it&#x27;s not possible to load Files app without internet.&quot;

Hi, Files app DEVELOPER here. Someone notified me that the app had been posted here. A lot of negative comments, which I don&#x27;t have a problem with, but I can perhaps clarify a few things.<p>About Files app not being &quot;single file&quot; because it loads JS&#x2F;CSS resources from the CDN (internet). That is of course a correct observation, and this is already noted on the website. From an operational perspective, there is only one file to download&#x2F;move&#x2F;install, and from a functional perspective for the vast majority, it will be viewed in browser with an active internet connection. Furthermore, it was INTENDED BY DESIGN to load all JS&#x2F;CSS from CDN, because ultimately it improves the user-experience, and makes it plausible to make an app like this wrapped into a single index.php file.<p>It&#x27;s not reasonable to add ALL Javascript&#x2F;CSS directly into the index.php file. PHP is only 10% of the codebase, and it would bloat the file to insane dimensions and make it difficult to maintain. JS&#x2F;CSS is loaded from CDN service jsdelivr.com, with multi-level redundancy (Amazon, Cloudfront, Cloudflare), and will load faster and cache more effectively than anything served from within the index.php app on your own server. Furthermore, some plugins are served on-demand, for example when browser needs a &quot;polyfill&quot; or for specific features. For functional reasons, benefiting the vast majority who do not care how&#x2F;where the JS&#x2F;CSS is loaded from, JS and CSS files are therefore served from CDN. If this does not suit you, nobody has any problem with that.<p>Does anyone have any examples of any other single-file app with a comprehensive interface like Files app that is entirely self-contained?<p>There will be a future release where you can assign all scripts&#x2F;css to be loaded from local path, but then of course all these files will need to be installed alongside Files app index.php. We will NOT be adding all JS&#x2F;CSS directly into the index.php file.<p>About license, as stated on the website, you can use it as a file viewer for free (with the nag). If you want to remove the nag and use it as a file manager, license is required. Those who expect apps like this to be entirely free with updates and support, are living in dream land. It&#x27;s hardly worthwhile in the first place. There are loads of other free apps, and if you can&#x27;t see any difference, then your choice is easy.<p>I have noted comments about license info being unclear, thanks.

I like what I see on the site and in the comments here. Im looking forward to checking this out more maybe.<p>Im kind of surprised that as a species we dont have a conclusive ubiquitous solution to the foggy problem of digital photo storage &#x2F; management. So many of my photos are just in drawers on old hard drives and phones.<p>Anyway maybe its getting better. Or maybe Im just stupid.

I just want to say that the minimal design of the site feels very pleasant to me. Some days I struggle to make the simplest things feel right even with tools like Tailwind. Well done!

As somebody who recently spent two weekends trying to figure out a self hosted photo solution that actually for my needs and was easy to install, this looks fantastic.<p>(I ended up using PhotoView, which works fine, but this looks like it might have been better.)

I really don&#x27;t mind charging for software, as developers need to eat as much as the next person. $39 for something like this is really not excessive.<p>But I think it could have been made clearer that (1) you only download one file but it loads more from their CDN, it&#x27;s not truly &quot;single file&quot; and (2) the free version is heavily limited and gated with a pop-up.<p>That said, I like the demo - it looks really slick and has a lot of features.

I am still looking for a simple tool to deduplicate, organize, and tag all the photos I have accumulated over the years. Old laptop hard drives, old cell phones, iPhoto libraries, aperture libraries, etc. I want to dump them into a staging area, remove all dupes, and start organizing and tagging them into a folder structure.

I used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Jack000&#x2F;Expose" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Jack000&#x2F;Expose</a> a couple of times. Advantage: it generates a static site. Disadvantage: it must be customized almost certainly. It&#x27;s a bash script.

Very nice tool indeed, funny how the world works. I&#x27;m writing an Electron&#x2F;React&#x2F;PouchDB application that works kinda like this called &quot;Filebase&quot;, you create a library and name it like &quot;pictures&quot;, you pick a directory &#x2F; or single file on your PC and it scans&#x2F;indexes it, this allows you to tag individual files and folders so you remember what&#x27;s in it (you can search these tags). you can search and filter by type. The last feature will be archiving but keeping the directory info handy so you can search for items that are archived. I came up with this idea after watching my partner try and organize Cricket art and PDF&#x27;s. I realized that Windows Explorer kinda sucked for organizing. I wanted to build something that did not modify or touch files itself. It&#x27;s been a great way to learn Electron. I have to say Electron makes building UI&#x27;s easy for applications.

A few alternatives have already been mentioned here; yet another one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;larsjung.de&#x2F;h5ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;larsjung.de&#x2F;h5ai&#x2F;</a>

I use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sye.dk&#x2F;sfpg&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sye.dk&#x2F;sfpg&#x2F;</a> myself, another single-file PHP photo gallery.<p>It&#x27;s less polished, but it&#x27;s free.

Not quite the same thing but I&#x27;m a big fan of Filebrowsr: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;filebrowser&#x2F;filebrowser" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;filebrowser&#x2F;filebrowser</a><p>Backend in Go, frontend in Vue, deployed as a single binary.

I needed this for hosting an archive of documents and images that I didn&#x27;t want to sort and create html pages for. Without something like this, I&#x27;d get an ugly directory view that&#x27;s different browser by browser.<p>This solves the problem and it looks elegant. Great work.

I started to make my own photo gallery, and I found that while the masonry-layout shown here (where different ratio pictures are put together to a common height) looks really pretty, I ended up preferring either cropping&#x2F;zooming them or adding a margin and keep a square grid.<p>Why? Because that allows you to easily click and drag a select area and select multiple pictures, where I can then click a button to tag them all at once. With Files Gallery, you cannot drag to select so this doesn&#x27;t seem a concern, but then again I would love to be able to _manage_ files easily and not just look at them.

I remember seeing these kinds of single-file web apps when I used PHP ~15 years ago. It was a good time! Unfortunately, no such culture seems to exist in other web language ecosystems.

Great idea. I wish someone creates this in Go that way we don&#x27;t even need to install php. Just run binary in directory and start browsing.

This is the Flickr-style photo layout that I love, but I want it in a static site generator. Does such a generator exist?

Two more noteworthy alternatives that focus on photo gallery:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bpatrik&#x2F;PiGallery2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bpatrik&#x2F;PiGallery2&#x2F;</a><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piwigo.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piwigo.org&#x2F;</a><p>I’m using the first one as personal album and it works very well, including things like infinite scroll and link-based album sharing.<p>The latter is more sophisticated and has a native accompanying app but I found pigallery easier to work with.

Is there an equivalent in Python (Albeit not single-file)?

Oh boy, this may have solved one of my problems. Will try it asap!<p>Edit: oh, it&#x27;s not free... I mean, $40 isn&#x27;t bad, but then I expect a decent level of support. Also, $40 for... a year, a life?

Does anyone know any open source library that provides this feature as a widget for a web app?<p>I’d love to use Rails active storage + S3 to allow users to have a “mini Dropbox” inside my web App; the only one I could find that was nice enough was CKFinder, but it’s not open source and it’s tied to a Java or PHP backend as well.

I only get this when loading the page:<p>This page crashed. Cannot read properties of undefined (reading &#x27;destroy&#x27;)

&gt; Instructions &gt; Simply download index.php, drop into any folder and view from browser<p>This is really where PHP shines. I find it really sad to see what PHP has become, just because people keep wanting to use it for complex stuff…

I used to really like Google Picasa, but then it stopped working on Linux, and then at all [1]. It was fantastic and fit all of my ideas on how photo organization was supposed to work.<p>I got fantastic feedback when I recently asked about a personal wiki that would fit my criteria [2], so I figure I&#x27;ll ask here for a photo library management app.<p>My use case isn&#x27;t just personal photos, but also concept art. I would love to replace the scourge that is Pinterest (which I shamefully admit I use). I used Picasa for this use case before it died.<p>Here are the features I would like in a photo management system:<p>- Importing photos should be as easy as drag and drop or &quot;add directory&quot;.<p>- Images in the library should be mirrored to an internal store independent of the greater filesystem.<p>- It needs to support rich tagging. Images should be easily enumerable by tag.<p>- It needs to store all metadata in a central database or file that I can easily distribute and back up. (As opposed to writing the data into the images directly.) It would be nice if the primary keys to image were signature-based rather than filename (and especially not full file path) as it could live on different systems.<p>- Group by GPS coordinates would be nice. Even better if it can pull the location name.<p>- Group by date taken.<p>- Find or automatically ignore&#x2F;remove duplicates.<p>- Support for a NAS or cloud backup would be fantastic. Especially if it also backs up the database.<p>- It should generate pre-computed thumbnails so scrolling a large library doesn&#x27;t show blank images, but keep them off to the side so it doesn&#x27;t impact backup.<p>- It should have RAW support, but doesn&#x27;t need editing&#x2F;adjustment capabilities. (If not available, I suppose I could pre-process the RAWs.)<p>- Video support would be extremely nice too, but it doesn&#x27;t need to have any editing or miscellaneous features.<p>- It would be nice to keep galleries separate, or at least in different namespaces so I can reuse tags. Family, real estate, conceptual&#x2F;renders, etc.<p>- Replication across multiple devices would be a nice to have, especially if it can update tags and metadata across machines.<p>- Open source would be nice, but I&#x27;d be happy with paid&#x2F;commercial software if it did what I wanted.<p>- Multiplatform support (Linux, Windows, Mac) would be extremely nice. Even nicer if it supports mobile too.<p>- It should be snappier than a web-based gallery.<p>- That said, internet web access (like photos.google.com) would be killer.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30089858" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30089858</a>

I&#x27;d rather like to see something similar to `python -m http.server`, that way you don&#x27;t need a separate server and you don&#x27;t need to copy the file, just run the program.

Forgive the dumb question but where is the source code? I can&#x27;t find a Github (or similar) link.<p>Edit: Yes I know I can access the source code by simply downloading index.php but I&#x27;m looking for a place where I can file issues, submit patches, view commit history, etc.

These were the knees beeswax back in the day.<p>I’m sure there are still dozens of open source alternatives floating around - some surely even maintained!

I know it looks cool, but it is just not a single file. I guess most simple way still is spin up a HTTP server using Python.

My first thought when seeing this was whether I could run it as a docker image… I don’t know what’s wrong with me :P

Konquer used to do this some 15 years ago. Was pretty cool back then because you could view it in konquer itself.

The browser simply displays the local php source for me. Do I need to run a local PHP server to get this to run?

We need more products like this. Simple, minimal and polished.

Everything can be a single-file if you&#x27;re brave enough.

No license?

As per [1] from below -<p>Apparently it&#x27;s a nag-based paid software with an otherwise restricted feature set. This is not clearly explained on the page.<p>In fact, it looks like the site goes out of its way to try and pass for free software - the Demo is <i>NOT</i> of what you are actually downloading, no pricing info, no mention of Basic vs Full versions anywhere, including the Docs, except for an dull looking blurb at the very bottom on the home page -<p><pre><code> License Files is free to use with basic features. To remove the license-popup and unlock additional features, you may purchase a license [$39] from within the app. </code></pre> The page also pulls a lot of scripts off the Internet on every load, so that too is not explained anywhere clearly and it&#x27;s absolutely not good for hosting private photo archives.<p>Despite its good looks it kinda leaves bad aftertaste because of all these shady shenanigans.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30235138" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30235138</a>

It is hard not to get disappointed after seeing CDN loaded js files claiming single file. And the license part.<p>Thanks, I will stick to my synology.

* Not free (mostly crippleware)<p>* Requires a server to run (you don&#x27;t just &#x27;open from browser&#x27; as instructed<p>* CDN-dependent<p>This...is not terribly good or useful.

Why does the demo have a folder of just girls?

single .php file…