Self-host your photos on Amazon CloudFront and S3: Cheap, fast and simple [OSS noobgallery]

noobgallery is an open source tool at https://github.com/brendannee/noobgallery which I started using after looking at other options that were either too complicated, or just did not create the kind of photo-first experience I desired.

I've used noobgallery to completely rebuild my WordPress based site that was heavy, slow, hard to back up, and also becoming expensive.

noobgallery is a Node.js based project to generate a static photo gallery powered by lightgallery.js. The generated site is automatically deployed to Amazon S3, which allows for a huge amount of cheap storage (around $0.02/GB per month).

Features include:
  • simple photo gallery creation: just create a folder for each gallery, and copy your photos. noobgallery takes care of the rest.
  • responsive layout, supports mobile and desktop
  • slideshow and zoom in/out
  • gallery summary & tags (via optional gallery.json for each gallery)
  • bread crumbs to navigate multple gallery levels
  • about page
  • error page
  • does not upload original images
  • add optional copyright watermark
  • add optional fotomoto store links
  • Adding CloudFront is quite trivial, and with Route 53 you get a free HTTPS certificate.

The CloudFront CDN (Content Delivery Network) and the elegant HTML and JavaScript output of noobgallery produce a photo site that is cross-device and is ridiculously fast to load, world wide.

So if you are looking for a cheap and simple way to host your own photo site, do consider noobgallery.

As a shameless plug, here is my own photo website, automatically generated via noobgallery:

  https://everydayphotos.net/

disclosure: I did not create noobgallery, but I did contribute a couple of features.

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