Sample Sites

Motivation

I wanted to share photos with friends and family without slow shared albums, ads, or social media clutter. iCloud shared albums often took 20 seconds or more to load. So I built DD Photos, a fast and simple way to publish your own photo and video album website.

How it works

You keep curating photos in the tool you already use, such as Lightroom, Apple Photos or Google Photos. You export each album to a folder. If you use Immich or PhotoPrism, DD Photos can sync albums directly, with no export needed.

The DD Photos desktop app lets you name each album, write a description, pick a cover photo, and add captions. It resizes your photos for the web, converts videos so every browser can play them, and builds a static site. You can preview the site on your own computer, then publish it for free to Cloudflare Pages or Surge. Technical users can also deploy with rsync or AWS S3.

What your visitors get

- A home page with album cards showing each album's cover, description, photo count and date range

- A neat photo grid for each album, with a full-screen viewer you can swipe through or move through with arrow keys

- Videos in the same grid as photos, playing right in the viewer

- Captions, a slideshow mode, and dark and light themes

- A shareable link for every album and every photo

- Optional passwords for single albums or the whole site, checked in the browser so they are never stored on a server

Under the hood

The site is plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript and your resized photos. It needs no server code and no database. Photos are converted to small WebP files with all metadata removed, so GPS locations are never published.

DD Photos runs on Mac, Windows and Linux and needs Docker. It is free and open source under the AGPL v3 license.