Introducing Galleria

Necessity is the mother of invention. – Ancient proverb

Necessities

Galleria is a software project I’ve been coding off-and-on for the past few months. In keeping with the spirit of the quote above, Galleria really does seem spring from necessity. For years I’ve been looking for software products capable of handling all types of media. I have lots of movies and music videos, music, podcasts, and audiobooks, as well as images, ebooks, and journal articles that I want to be able to put into one giant collection. I want to sort them, tag them and categorize them. If a person, such as Neil Gaiman, is associated with projects in a variety of media, it would be great to show all of them in one spot.

Over the years, I’ve never really found software capable of doing everything I wanted. Back when I used a Mac, I used Adobe Bridge, which came closest because it handles many types of media, but it’s very expensive, is huge, is slow, and doesn’t run on Linux, which is what I use now. XBMC/Kodi is good for videos, but so-so when it comes to images and audio files, and IIRC it doesn’t handle documents at all. I used to love Songbird for managing and listening to music, but it’s defunct now, and it also didn’t support movies, documents, or image galleries.

With the variety of plugins available, I thought WordPress might be an option, but nothing seemed very all-encompassing, and the most interesting media management plugins cost money, which I didn’t feel like paying when they didn’t address all my needs.

Either late last year or earlier this year (2022), I found out about Porn-Vault, which did a lot of the things I wanted. It’s also not perfect, but it’s pretty fucking good at what it does so far. The premise of PV is that it helps people manage their collections of pornographic images and videos, but despite the “porn” moniker, it’s very good at managing images and videos from any genre. It also has sections for Actors and Studios, but these could be stand-ins for People and Companies. I like the project so much, I became a supporter of it on Patreon. Despite this affection for Porn-Vault, it suffered from its lack of support for documents and audio files.

What it did, however, is provide a ton of inspiration, and made me think, “How hard can it be?” One of the biggest ideas I got from PV is that for self-hosted software I don’t really need to worry much about usernames, passwords, cookies, or anything else associated with logging in. I’ve tinkered around a bit with coding with PHP and MariaDB in the past, so I decided to give it a go and start working on my own media manager program.

Galleria

This blog post is meant to be a way of introducing Galleria. There’s a large gap between where I want it to be and where it is now. At the most basic level, Galleria is software written in PHP that uses MariaDB as a backend database. It is tested on a couple of test computers running nginx as a web server. At the moment, it’s possible to create tags, categories, people, and organizations. It’s also possible to add images one at a time.

There’s a long way to go to make it very useful, but every project has to start somewhere. In the case of Galleria, the next steps are to make it possible to add audio files, video files, and documents.

Feel free to get a copy for yourself and take a look. Galleria is available for download at Codeberg.