DD Photos: turn your Immich albums into a fast, static photo site

[dougdonohoe]

Hi Immich folks! 👋

I'm Doug, and I make DD Photos, a free, open-source desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux. It builds a fast, static photo website from your albums. I keep my own photos in Lightroom Classic, but I know many of you use Immich. So I set up an Immich server and added support for it. DD Photos can now pull albums straight from Immich, so you don't need to export anything first.

While building it, I spent a lot of time with Immich's shared albums. They work well, but a few
things stood out. A shared link shows one album at a time. Photo descriptions are there, but friends only see them if they open the info panel or start a slideshow. The photos stay in date order. And the link only works while your Immich server is up and reachable from the internet. DD Photos takes a different approach.

Start in Immich

Here are three albums on my test Immich server:

And here is what a friend sees when I share the Uganda album from Immich:

It works, but it is one album per link, there is a tad too much excess whitespace, and friends can't discover or browse your other albums.

End up with a site like this

DD Photos puts all your albums on one home page, with custom title, subtitle, overview and "hero" image. Each album has a cover photo and a description:

Open an album, and you get a clean grid with less white space. It works great on phones and tablets, and there is a dark theme too.

Tap a photo to see it full size, with its caption. Swipe (or use the arrow keys) to move through the album. Videos play right in the album too.

The site is just static files. You can publish it for free on Cloudflare Pages or Surge, or put it anywhere via rsync or on AWS S3. Your Immich server can stay private at home. Nobody visiting the site ever touches it.

See a live example at ddphotos.donohoe.info.

How to set it up

1. Connect to Immich. Enter your server address and an API key. The key only needs the
album.read, asset.read and asset.download permissions. Press Test to check it works.

2. Add an album. In the Add Album dialog, choose Sync as the source type, then press Choose.... DD Photos lists your Immich albums. Pick one.

DD Photos fills in the album's name and description, and suggests a URL name (the "slug"). Press Save.

3. Make it yours. Keep the name and description from Immich, or override them just for your site. Pick a cover photo. Turn on Use Descriptions as Captions to show each photo's Immich description as its caption. You can also edit captions and set your own photo order, and those changes are kept the next time you sync.

4. Preview, Build and Publish. Run photogen from the app. It downloads your photos and videos from Immich and resizes them for the web. Later runs only download what is new or changed. Preview the site on your computer, then publish it.

A few things to know

• DD Photos downloads the original files. If you edited a photo in Immich, the site shows the unedited version, and DD Photos warns you about it. We plan to add support for edited photos in the future.
• RAW files are skipped for now.
• DD Photos runs its build tools in Docker, so you need Docker installed. The app's Setup Wizard walks you through it.

Try it

Download the latest release from the releases page. Questions, ideas and bug reports are very welcome, either here or on GitHub.

Thanks for building Immich. It made this a lot of fun to put together! 📸

-Doug Donohoe