gallery-server 🖼️

Beautiful Local Image Viewer

Beautiful and powerful yet simple local image/videos viewer on your PC or mobile.

"Especially handy when you're offline or prefer not to use the internet — maybe for security or privacy reasons — and use your phone to view or download pictures or videos from your computer."

It's a CLI, a server and a web application — all in one.

中文版文档

Install 🆓

No installment required!

Use 🌱

1. Serve the local photos.

bunx gallery-server --folder /path/to/photos

or:

pnpx gallery-server --folder /path/to/photos
npx gallery-server --folder /path/to/photos

For more usage:

bunx gallery-server -h

2. Open http://localhost:xxxx/ in your favorite browser or share with your friends http://a.b.c.d:xxxx?token=${token}.

Enjoy on PC 💻

Enjoy on Mobile Phone 📱

Photos from pixabay API of Yosemite.

Features 🌟

1. 📱 Photos in your PC can be viewed in your mobile phone's browser! So your can download photos on your PC to mobile phone.
2. 🔐 Security on privacy to prevent eavesdropping. API or images without token are forbidden, but you can still share with your friends by sending him the token.
3. 🎭 Light and dark theme.
4. 🎞️ Videos also supported!
5. 🖼️ More than one galleries can be served at the same time.
6. 📚 A lot of gallery features. Check it at react-images.

Technical features

Local image viewer. Serves photos/videos from a folder via Koa, with a React frontend.

• It is both a server and a client application, as well as a command-line application!
• Tech stack:
  • pnpm v9, Node.js v22 (builtin --watch 🎉),
  • ESLint v9, Biome v2 (for formatting instead of Prettier), Bun v1.2 (for test),
  • Vite v7,
  • TypeScript v5, Koa v2.

FAQ 🙋‍♂️

1. Q: Why 403 forbidden？

   {
     "code": 403,
     "message": "Forbidden. `token` required. Please redirect to https://github.com/legend80s/gallery-server#faq for more information."
   }

   • A: You see this message because you are not the gallery owner. Ask the owner for the token and append it to the resource URL.

2. Photos in node_modules will be ignored for performance.

Develop 👨‍💻

1. Install

pnpm i

2. Start API server

pnpm dev:server --folder='/path/to/photos'
# pnpm ds --folder='/path/to/photos'

3. Start client webpack devServer (only when to change the frontend)

pnpm dev:client
# pnpm dc

Notice: Install all the dependencies into ./package.json's devDependencies not ./client/package.json. The package.json in client exits only for scripts。

For example if you want change to another gallery (react-bnb-gallery):

# enter project root not ./client/
cd project_root

pnpm install --save-dev react-bnb-gallery

# start webpack devServer
pnpm dev:client

# start api server
pnpm dev:server -- --folder=/path/to/photos

Publish 📦

pnpm version patch / minor / major

Run tests 🧪

pnpm test

Author 👤

👤 legend80s

• Github: @legend80s

🤝 Contributing

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome!

Feel free to check issues page.

Todos ☑️

• Any port. use unoccupied port.
• Build with remote client to support a wide range of client gallery.
• Use network IP. mimic create-react-app.
• Show help Information on cli -v -h.
• Viewable on mobile.
• Adapt to mobile.
• Image lazy load.
• Security on privacy. only url with token is shareable.
• Port customizable.
• Token customizable.
• Serve multiple folders in one cmd.
• Token can be optional when viewed on owner's browser.
• Electron App.
• npm to pnpm.
• Node.js v16 to v22 (LTS 2025-7-10).
• Koa v2 to v3. No migration because nothing big changed.
• React v16 → React v19. No migration to React.js v19 because react-images and react-photo-gallery are not v19 supported and not maintained.
• Webpack v4 → Vite v7: Performance gain build 26s → 5s.
• Show thumbnail for first render performance.
• Next.js.
• TRPC - share backend request typings with client.
• FastAPI python.
• Save UI state (theme) to server using sqlite.

Show your support ⭐️

Give a ⭐️ if this project helped you!

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