DD Photos, a tool for generating and deploying static photo albums.
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Hacker News
May 1, 2026
I first posted about DD Photos 50 days ago[1], when I first open-sourced it. A lot of improvements have been made since then (hero image, site/album passwords, ngnix support, UI refinements, custom HTML/CSS, s3 deployments, and more).However, I feel two significant additions are worth sharing (Docker and Surge).Using DD Photos directly from source is very developer-heavy. You have to clone the repo and install Go, Node, libvips and all the dependencies. It's a lot to get started.I thought why not pre-package everything all set to go? So DD Photos now has "Docker mode". An init command does the scaffolding, installing a 'ddphotos' wrapper script, and then there are a handful of simple commands to build the site.mkdir ~/my-ddphotosdocker run --rm -v ~/my-ddphotos:/ddphotos dougdonohoe/ddphotos initcd ~/my-ddphotos./ddphotos photogen # resize images and create index files./ddphotos run # run dev server at localhost/ddphotos build # build static site./ddphotos serve # serve static site via Apache at Link second barrier is deploying a site. I use AWS s3/CloudFront/Route53 - which again is non-trivial to setup. I then discovered surge.sh, a free and easy way to deploy static sites in minutes. So I added support for it:./ddphotos export --copysurge --domain my-unique-site.surge.sh export/my-photosResult of above: ddphotos-test-docker.surge.sh/Anyway the simplicity of this feels like a game-changer, which is why I wanted to share.Code: github.com/dougdonohoe/ddpho... news.ycombinator.com/item
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