Self-hosted photo galleries
Your photos.
Your platform.
Your rules.
Photarium is a fast, permanent, ad-free home for your photography — on your own domain, your own database, your own storage. No rented space, no algorithm, no policy change that quietly breaks your gallery.
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 software you run — five 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.
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.
Features
Everything a working photographer needs
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
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
A small, fast API server built on Fiber, compiling to 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 storage (Backblaze B2), not on one server's disk — durable, cheap at scale, and decoupled from the app server.
Cloudflare at the edge
A Cloudflare Worker fronts the bucket and edge-caches every rendition, so after the first view, photos serve from the edge with near-zero hits back to origin. Privacy toggles purge the edge cache instantly, so nothing public ever lingers.
Stop renting space for your own work.
Photarium is the platform underneath photo.scottalanmiller.com — a real gallery, running today.
Self-hosted software you run yourself — not a signup flow. No account needed to look around.