I wrote (and am still working on) this project primarily as a learning experience. If I just wanted a server I would probably (and already have) just wrote the server in javascript on node-js. The use of the sled KV database is nice because it has a good Rust interface and is designed for stateful services, and other embedded database bindings often miss features such as transaction support. Sled, however, isn’t 1.0 yet and doesn’t have a guaranteed file layout yet, and the serde KV database combination doesn’t lend itself to elegant database migrations. The intelligent choice would be to just use something that supports SQL of course.

The system currently allows user creation, file upload, album creation, and album sharing. The albums are based on Google Photo albums where photos are grouped by day into sections which are lazily loaded into the frontend to allow very large albums. Uploaded photos are thumbnailed by libvips into webp photos (better compression than jpeg, and better support than AVIF). Videos are thumbnailed using ffmpeg to grab the first frame of the video.

The frontend is a SPA built in solid-js, however, it currently lacks elegant error handling and isn’t pretty.

Links⌗

• A read-only version of the server is here. The login email is “test@inyo.dev” and the password is “password”. The server is hosted on a raspberry pi on a dynamic ip address, so don’t be surprised if it isn’t available.
• Source Code