mule-image

Self-hosted photo management built on top of PhotoPrism. A SvelteKit frontend (web/) plus a small Go service (sidecar/) fill in the keyboard-driven UI and the file/folder/mark endpoints PhotoPrism's REST API does not expose. PhotoPrism itself handles indexing, originals, thumbnails, and the database; we never re-implement those.

Architecture

┌──────────────────┐    /api/v1/*      ┌──────────────┐
│  SvelteKit web/  │ ───────────────▶  │  photoprism  │ ──▶ mariadb
│  (Vite : 5173)   │    /api/sidecar/* │   :2342      │
│                  │ ─────────┐        └──────────────┘
└──────────────────┘          ▼
                      ┌──────────────┐
                      │  sidecar     │ ──▶ mariadb (mule_sidecar.*)
                      │  :8000       │ ──▶ originals FS (rename / folders / dups)
                      └──────────────┘

Three compose services — mariadb, photoprism, sidecar — plus the SvelteKit web/ app served separately. PhotoPrism's port 2342 is bound to 127.0.0.1 only; it isn't a user-facing surface. The SvelteKit app is.

What the sidecar adds on top of PhotoPrism (full list in sidecar/README.md):

• Per-photo marks (rating + color) persisted to mule_sidecar.marks
• File rename + folder create/rename/delete with PhotoPrism reindex
• Heap (album) → folder conversion
• Perceptual-hash duplicate scan + archive

Quick start

cp .env.example .env
# edit .env: set PHOTO_DIRS to the host path holding your library
# rotate PP_ADMIN_PASSWORD, PP_DB_PASSWORD, PP_DB_ROOT_PASSWORD
# before any non-local deployment.

podman-compose --env-file .env \
  -f docker-compose.yml \
  -f docker-compose.podman.yml \
  up -d

Then serve the frontend. For local use the simplest path is the Vite dev server:

cd web
npm install
npm run dev
# open http://localhost:5173

For a static deployment, npm run build produces a bundle under web/build/ that any static file host (nginx, Caddy, GitHub Pages-style) can serve. Reverse-proxy /api/v1/* to http://127.0.0.1:2342 and /api/sidecar/* to http://127.0.0.1:8000.

PhotoPrism's own UI is still reachable from the host at http://127.0.0.1:2342 if you need admin features (user management, settings) — set up an SSH tunnel from your laptop if the server is remote.

Configuration

All knobs live in .env.example. The required ones:

Variable	Notes
PHOTO_DIRS	Host path mounted at /photoprism/originals. The library.
PP_ADMIN_PASSWORD	First-boot admin password. Rotate.
PP_DB_PASSWORD	MariaDB password for the photoprism user. Rotate.
PP_DB_ROOT_PASSWORD	MariaDB root password. Rotate.
PP_UID / PP_GID	Host UID/GID that owns PHOTO_DIRS. PhotoPrism + sidecar drop to this user inside.
PP_PORT	Loopback host port for PhotoPrism (default 2342).
PP_ORIGINALS_MODE	rw (default) or ro — see Read-only libraries.
SIDECAR_PORT	Loopback host port for the sidecar (default 8000).

Sidecar-specific env (DB DSN, USER_BASEPATHS, etc.) is documented in sidecar/README.md.

Read-only libraries

The default originals mount is :rw because file operations (rename, folder mutations, duplicate archive, heap convert) need to mutate the filesystem. To run against a read-only archive, set PP_ORIGINALS_MODE=ro in .env. Browsing, marks, ratings, and color labels still work; the following sidecar endpoints return an OS error:

• POST /api/sidecar/files/:uid/rename
• POST /api/sidecar/folders / :rel/rename / DELETE /:rel
• POST /api/sidecar/albums/:uid/convert
• POST /api/sidecar/duplicates/archive

PhotoPrism's PHOTOPRISM_READONLY is controlled separately by PP_READONLY and gates its own backwrite / import paths.

Mobile & third-party apps (per-user)

PhotoPrism CE does not enforce auth_users.base_path on API reads — any authenticated user can search the whole library. The sidecar therefore ships a scoping proxy at /api/v1/* (see sidecar/handlers_ppproxy.go) and the reverse proxy routes the public /api/v1 there instead of straight to PhotoPrism. Result: any PhotoPrism-compatible app pointed at the site sees only the logged-in user's photos.

• Server URL for apps: the site itself (e.g. https://photos.hubris.network). Known-good client: Gallery for PhotoPrism (Android/F-Droid).
• Login: the user's normal username/password. For OIDC accounts (no password), mint an app password: docker exec pp-app photoprism auth add -n "gallery" -s "*" <username> and use it as the password in the app.
• What's scoped: photo/geo searches, per-photo reads and edits, batch operations, downloads by UID. Hash-addressed media (thumbnails, video streams, file downloads) is token-guarded and passes through.
• What's shared (CE has no per-user variants of these): album names, labels, and people — the photos inside them stay scoped. Album zip downloads are generated by PhotoPrism and are not scoped.
• Uploads: the reconciler mirrors base_path into upload_path, so WebDAV/app uploads land inside the user's own subtree.
• Sessions with the admin role bypass the proxy scoping entirely (the web client's settings/users/index dialogs need the raw API).

Dev iteration loop

For fast iteration on the sidecar without rebuilding its image on every change, run it as a host process — bring up just mariadb and photoprism from compose, then build and run the Go binary locally. Full instructions in sidecar/README.md.

Layout

.
├── docker-compose.yml         base stack: mariadb + photoprism + sidecar
├── docker-compose.podman.yml  rootless-podman overlay (keep-id mapping)
├── docker-compose.gpu.yml     opt-in VA-API GPU passthrough overlay
├── .env.example               required env vars (copy to .env)
├── mariadb/init/              first-boot SQL: creates mule_sidecar DB + user
├── pp/                        PhotoPrism bind-mounted state (storage, import)
├── sidecar/                   Go service — see sidecar/README.md
└── web/                       SvelteKit frontend

GPU video acceleration (optional)

Hosts with a VA-API-capable GPU (Intel iGPU, AMD APU, etc.) can layer docker-compose.gpu.yml to hand /dev/dri/* to PhotoPrism and switch ffmpeg to hardware encode/decode — a large perf win for video thumbnails and HEVC→H.264 transcodes:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.gpu.yml up -d

Set PP_FFMPEG_ENCODER=vaapi in .env (default for the overlay). Verify with docker exec pp-app photoprism show config | grep -i ffmpeg.