Context
On one side there’s Lychee.
Lychee is a marvelous self hosted photo management application. It’s very good looking, responsive design enabled and has avery feature you wan’t to simply share your private photos. No ad, no I need a [facebook, twitter, google, whatever] account to see the photos. Just perfect to share photos with your friends and family with no bullshit.
If you don’t know this project just check it out !
On the other side, there’s Owncloud.
Owncloud is a fantastic self hosted dropbox replacement and is begining to be well known in the FOSS community. But, there’s a problem with this app. The web client Photo management is broken. The web client is far more too complex for my grand mother. Too see a photo, have a slideshow and download a full album you have to use 2 differents apps and go through a whole file tree which is not grand mother compliant.
So …
I needed to offer my family and friends a great photo browsing experience. Owncloud photo management has not passed the grandma test but lychee has brilliantly. I don’t wan’t the hassle to FTP photos on a server, the owncloud way of doing it, drag and drop in a local folder, is just perfect.
So I wrote lycheesync, a little python program that you can schedule everyday and that enslave lychee with a directory content. It works fine with owncloud (owncloud photos are stored in a directory) and can work with any directory you can access from your lychee server (dropbox, mega, skydrive, whatever…)
I hope you will enjoy it !
I do ;)