Show HN: DD Photos – open-source photo album site generator (Go and SvelteKit)

Posted by dougdonohoe 2 hours ago

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

Comments

Comment by subpixel 42 minutes ago

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.

Comment by giancarlostoro 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by thatcherc 1 hour ago

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!

[1] - https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup

Comment by dougdonohoe 1 hour ago

Thanks, appreciate it. I'll checkout thumbsup too.

Comment by JanoMartinez 1 hour ago

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?

Comment by dougdonohoe 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by mandubird 1 hour ago

Interesting approach.

Curious how this behaves with larger datasets or longer sessions.