Name: Photarium
Author: Scott Alan Miller

The problem

It was never really your gallery

Flickr, Google Photos, and Instagram will happily host your work — on their terms. And their terms can change without asking you.

Pricing you don't control

Flickr has repeatedly rewritten its storage limits, pricing, and ownership. Every round of changes is a reminder that you're one policy update away from losing your layout, your links, or your library.

Ads on top of your art

Your photography competes for attention with ads and algorithmic clutter you didn't design and can't remove.

Their roadmap, not yours

Your gallery's URLs, uptime, and continued existence depend on a company's business decisions — not yours.

Feeds bury your best work

Algorithmic sorting favors what's new over what's good. Older work — often your best — gets buried under a feed built to maximize scrolling, not to showcase a body of work.

Invisible to search

Locked inside somebody else's app, your photos barely surface in Google — and they're effectively invisible to the AI answer engines increasingly replacing it.

Why Photarium

Built to outlast the platforms

Photarium isn't a hosted service you rent. It's free, open-source software you run — six ways that changes the equation.

You own it, permanently

Your own domain, your own database, your own cloud storage bucket. Nobody can raise your price, inject ads, or shut it down.

Built for speed

A virtualized, justified photo grid — the classic packed layout — renders smoothly through tens of thousands of photos with infinite scroll. Only what's on screen, plus a small buffer, is ever mounted.

Built to be found

Every page is server-prerendered for search engines, link unfurlers, and AI crawlers — full sitemaps, Open Graph tags, and schema.org structured data, out of the box.

Built for photographers, not "users"

Per-photo licensing, curated albums, a named people roster, freeform tags, and an optional Support the Photographer link — what a working photographer needs, without a social network's noise.

Bring your existing library

A built-in, resumable Flickr importer migrates your full export — including your original view counts and post dates — so your gallery doesn't start from zero.

Free and open source, for good

Every feature, free, under the GNU AGPL v3.0 — no subscription, no "community edition", no paid tier. The code is yours to read, run, change and share, so your gallery never depends on anyone's business model — including ours.

Open source · GNU AGPL v3.0

Free. Open source. Yours for good.

Photarium is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. There's no subscription, no license fee and no paid edition — every feature on this page is in the free download. Owning your gallery should include owning the software it runs on.

Download free Get the source code

Use it, change it, host it

Run Photarium for any purpose, on as many servers as you like, at no cost. Read the code, modify it, and self-host your modified version.

Share alike

If you give copies to others — changed or not — they receive the same license, and you must make the source code available to them.

The network clause

If you modify Photarium and let other people use your modified version over a network, you must offer those users the source code of your version (AGPL section 13). Running it unmodified asks nothing of you.

Your photos stay yours

The license covers the software, not what you publish with it. It comes with no warranty — the full text is in the LICENSE file in every download.

See for yourself

A screenshot can't prove it's fast. A live site can.

photo.scottalanmiller.com isn't a sandboxed demo account or a curated "try it" mode. It's a real, working Photarium gallery, running in production right now.

Browse albums Explore tags Meet the people

Open the Live Demo

Features

Everything a working photographer needs

All of it free and open source — nothing held back for a paid tier.

Organize

Albums with cover photos
Freeform tags
A curated people roster you control
Per-photo captions & descriptions

Browse

Justified or uniform grid layouts
Infinite scroll
Sort by date taken, date posted, or popularity
Full-text search across titles, descriptions, tags & people

Share, on your terms

Public or private, per photo — with instant CDN cache purge on toggle
Per-photo licensing metadata
Four built-in themes: Classic, Mono, Editorial, Bold
Light/dark mode with no flash of the wrong theme

Get found

Full sitemap generation
Open Graph + Twitter Card previews
JSON-LD structured data
Prerendered HTML for crawlers that don't run JavaScript — including AI/LLM crawlers

Migrate in, not from scratch

One-time, resumable Flickr export importer
Preserves your original view counts
Preserves your original posted dates

Correct image handling

Proper EXIF orientation handling
HEIC (iPhone photo) support baked into the pipeline
No sideways photos, no format surprises

Explore

A discovery home page that mixes favorites with forgotten gems
A full-library map with clustering — every geotagged photo
Browse by camera, lens and camera + lens combination
Popular: most-viewed today, this week, month, year or all time
People and album pages, and a full photostream

Curate at scale

Select up to 1,000 photos at once — by hand or everything matching a view — then tag, add people, add to albums, change privacy or delete in one go
Bulk upload with progress, time remaining and automatic retries
Exact duplicates refused on upload; existing ones found and merged
Rotate photos, correct or clear locations, pick album covers and people's portraits

Privacy built in

Private photos live in a separate private bucket, shown only to you
Clearing a photo's location also strips the GPS from its original file
Visitors can download originals of public photos; share links in one click
Rate-limited sign-in and hardened defaults out of the box

Know your audience

Built-in, first-party view counts per photo — no third-party tracker required
A traffic dashboard: most-viewed people, tags and albums
Your own browsing is never counted; bots are filtered out

Effortless to run

One-line installer for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora (amd64 & arm64)
Automatic HTTPS, or Cloudflare Tunnel with no open ports
Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2 or any S3-compatible storage
Nightly database backups to your private bucket, plus one-click download
Signed, automatic updates — when the site is quiet or at a set time — with a database snapshot first and automatic rollback; or one click on “Update now”

For the curious

How it's built

You don't need any of this to use Photarium. But a fast, durable, cheap-to-run stack is its own kind of feature.

Go backend

One small, fast Go program serves the whole site — web interface, API and automatic HTTPS — from a single static binary with no runtime dependencies. Efficient, predictable, cheap to run.

SQLite, not a database server

Pure embedded SQLite: one file, trivially backed up, zero services to patch or pay for — while still handling real query needs like sorting by date taken, date posted, or views.

Cloud object storage

Your photos live in S3-compatible object storage — Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2 or any S3 service — not on one server's disk: durable, cheap at scale, and decoupled from the app server.

Cloudflare at the edge

Public photos load straight from the bucket, never through your server — put Cloudflare in front and every rendition is edge-cached after its first view. Privacy toggles purge that cache, so nothing made private lingers.

Stop renting space for your own work.

Photarium is the platform underneath photo.scottalanmiller.com — a real gallery, running today.

See the Live Demo Install Photarium

Free and open source under the GNU AGPL v3.0 — self-hosted software you run yourself, not a signup flow. No account needed to look around.

Your photos.Your platform.Your rules.