Why is this better than some other photo album site?

First of all, at the time that I started it (May 2001), there were no other comparable online photo albums except for some rudimentary efforts by print companies like Ofoto. Digital cameras have become far more common since then, and today there are many more ways of managing their output than there used to be. I still like my own server for reasons that include the following:

• It is not commercial. All your pictures are displayed free of junk advertising clutter. The lack of profit motive leads naturally to other features, such as...
• There is an exit path. You can easily recover the original files, exactly as you uploaded them, individually or in archives. This frees you from having to keep your own backup copies in case you ever decide you want to switch to iPhoto, another web site, etc. What would happen if you had hundreds of pictures in an Ofoto album, for example, and Ofoto went out of business? Or if they decided to start charging a subscription fee to keep accessing your album?
• There is no need to prepare thumbnails or do any other preprocessing. The server resamples the original image file on the fly to any size that you request.
• The server can do watermarking. If you choose, all your pictures are displayed with an embedded copyright message. More intrusive watermarks could be easily devised if this was desired.
• Pictures are easily integrated with other Web pages. Simple interfaces are provided that let you embed static images or dynamically selected ones (e.g. "Latest pictures I've posted") on any pages anywhere.
• It has enormous capacity. I designed the server with the intention of using it to store every photograph I take in my entire life. It will scale easily to hundreds of thousands of images, limited only by disk space.
• It provides for privacy. You can store every photograph you have, even the ones that you don't want posted on the Internet for some reason. You can select whether to make each individual image visible to everybody, nobody, or only certain people of your choosing.
• The multiple indexing and browsing interfaces exceed anything I have seen in other picture galleries.
• The technical information stored by the digital camera (date, time, shutter speed, aperture, etc.) is automatically extracted and made visible.
• It is open source. I will provide all the needed materials to anybody else that wants to run their own server. This means that if you don't like the way the site develops, or if I lose interest, or if I am hit by a bus, anybody else can continue to maintain and improve the server software.

Buying prints

If you would like to have prints made, please read the information on the help page.

DMCA Agent

We believe that almost all of the images published here are original work, in most cases directly from the digital camera of the owner. In the unlikely event that you believe an image infringes your copyright, please send written notification to the following address:

Photoprism.net DMCA Agent
c/o Michael Dickerson
310 N Indian Hill Blvd Ste. 203
Claremont, CA 91711

How this works / Acknowledgements

Photoprism is written in Java servlets and stores its data in the PostgreSQL relational database. It should be portable to any operating system or application platform that provides a Java servlet container. The original server at www.photoprism.net ran the Apache Tomcat servlet container on FreeBSD. In the summer of 2004, it was moved to Debian GNU/Linux to take advantage of the much faster IBM JDK.

The Flash browser interface is based on SimpleViewer by Felix Turner.

Cross-browser support for XMLHttpRequest is provided by a script written by Andrew Gregory.

Some graphics are from Eos Development.

Get the source code

I intend to make the photoprism site available as open source software under the GNU GPL, but haven't yet bothered to package it up or write much internal documentation, except for Javadoc markup. You can retrieve the source code and all of my working files through subversion from this URL:

https://svn.cs.pomona.edu/sys/src/photoprism

You may consider any files you check out from subversion to be licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0. Please contact me if you are interested in this, since I would like to work with you.