Luna: Taking My Photos Back - Part 1 : Motivation & Description

Digital Photos are probably the most personal digital-relics from my life.

Tech companies want this foothold, and I'm going to try to opt-out with as few compromises as possible.

From a data perspective, my photo and video collection is the most complex and interesting of data sets that I interact with regularly.

This is an opportunity to explore and to use the data in interesting ways. I can build interesting things on top of it, and use the data to experiment with different approaches, UI patterns, or technologies in a way that is meaningful to me.

The fact that the collection of data is particularly personal means that there's an opportunity to build intensely personal things with it.

The fact that the collection is vast and complicated means that there's an opportunity to build technically interesting things with it.

There is a baseline set of requirements.

• Every photo and video from my phone should be backed up
• Everything should be indexed by date and location
• I should be able to make and add to albums easily
• All my photos should be private by default

I want to share this system with my family as well, so that adds a couple more requirements:

• I should be able to share albums with others on a website
• I should be able to let others add photos to an album
• There should be some way to notify viewers when an album has changed, or they are invited to a new album

Last but not least, I am a sucker for using open source to explore and share ideas. This adds a few more constraints:

• No personal information goes in the code. It must be able to be public.

I'm also going to attempt to use this project as a way to document some of my technical adventures and thoughts on this website.

If you want to follow along, you can do that on this site or on GitHub

https://github.com/issackelly/luna

13th June 2018