Tagger

A simple photo and video organizer for the web

Summary

This is a web app for organizing and browsing photo and video collections. Media are organized by date by default, and users may add custom tags for querying and access control.

This app doesn't (currently) support uploading media items. Instead, it watches a directory waiting for new items to appear. This is intended to work in tandem with e.g. Syncthing such that items from your phone and/or other devices are continuously synced to the server running the Tagger back end. Items will appear in your collection automatically as they are added to the filesystem.

Demo

You can try it out here. Note that the demo site is currently hosted on my home server via a cheap internet connection with modest bandwidth.

Features

• Supports JPEG images (including "motion photo" files with embedded videos created by some Android phones) and MPEG-4 videos
• Periodically syncs with filesystem to find new media items
• Generates and caches thumbnail and preview clips
• Automatically organizes by creation date
• Supports adding and filtering by custom tags and categories
• UI supports bulk tag/untag operations on many items at once
• Supports multiple user accounts, each with access control based on tags
• Automatically transcodes to web-standard codecs
• Consolidates exact and inexact (e.g. resampled) duplicate items
• Supports HTTP Range headers for efficient video buffering in modern browsers
• Mobile-friendly

Not yet supported (but maybe someday)

• Automatic location tagging based on embedded GPS coordinates
• Automatic tagging based on face recognition
• Uploading items within the app (use e.g. Syncthing instead)
• User account management within the app (use the tagger_admin tool and/or SQLite CLI instead)
• Simple image and video editing (e.g. crop, rotate, trim)

Supported platform(s)

The back end server has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It will probably work with minimal or no changes on other platforms, but I haven't tried that yet.

The front end is a WebAssembly-based single page app and has been tested with recent Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers on various desktop and mobile devices.

Security

TLS

The server supports TLS (via the --cert-file and --key-file CLI options), which is strongly recommended. Most modern browsers have a growing list of restrictions for plaintext HTTP sites, so Tagger may not even work correctly in your browser without TLS. Fortunately, services like Let's Encrypt make this easy.

Media item URLs

Each user account may include a tag query which limits the media items discoverable by that user to those which satisfy the query.

However, media item URLs themselves are not subject to access control. This makes it possible to share media item URLs without sharing session tokens, but it also means there's no way to restrict access to a given item after someone has the URL except by removing it from the server entirely.

Media item URLs include the SHA-256 of their content, so discovering them by brute force without prior knowledge is infeasible, but once a user has the URL they have unlimited access and can share it with anyone.

Building, installing and running

First, install FFmpeg if you want video support, e.g.

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Next, install the latest Rust toolchain if you don't already have a recent one:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Then install Trunk:

cargo install --locked trunk

Then install Binaryen:

sudo apt install binaryen

Then build the client and server code:

(cd client && trunk build --release)
cargo build --release

Create some directories for the server to store its state in, and create an account using the tagger_admin tool:

mkdir -p ~/tagger/cache
./target/release/tagger_admin add-user ~/tagger/database.dat my_user my_password --may-patch

Finally, run the server, e.g.

RUST_LOG=tagger=info,tagger_server=info ./target/release/tagger_server \
  --http-address 127.0.0.1:8080 \
  --image-directory ~/directory_containing_my_media_collection \
  --public-directory client/dist/ \
  --state-file ~/tagger/database.dat \
  --cache-directory ~/tagger/cache \
  --preload-policy new \
  --deduplicate

Then open http://localhost.com:8080 in your browser and log in using the credentials you specified above. You should (eventually) see the photos and videos in your collection, although it may take a while for everything to to be added to the database if your collection is large.

For CLI documentation, run:

target/release/tagger_server --help

License

^{Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.}
_{Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.}