Urocissa is a self-hosted gallery designed to serve massive collections, capable of handling millions of images and videos. It is built using Rust and Vue.
The goal of this project is to efficiently serve one million photos on a 4 GB RAM server, providing smooth scrubbable scrolling, infinite photo streams, and instant search and selection, without waiting for the entire database to load in the browser.
You can explore the features of Urocissa through the following demos:
https://demo.photoserver.tw
Password: password
This demo showcases the typical usage of Urocissa, allowing you to experience its core features and user interface.
https://demo-million.photoserver.tw
Password: password
This demo demonstrates Urocissa's ability to manage 1,000,000 photos, showcasing the power and scalability of Urocissa. Since I don't have access to a million unique images, the photos in this demo are replaced with placeholders.
Both demos are currently in read-only mode, and uploading files or editing tags is not permitted at this time.
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Blazing Fast Performance: Index photos with a pure Rust crate. Instantly serve, search, and filter one million photos in under a second using an in-memory cached database.
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Memory Efficient: Even with the entire database cached in memory, both the standard demo and the one-million-photo demo can run seamlessly on a single server with just 4 GB of RAM.
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Infinite Photo Stream: Experience endless scrolling without pagination. No lazy loading needed. Urocissa uses advanced virtual scrolling to serve one million photos, overcoming the DOM height limit of 33,554,400px (see TanStack/virtual#616).
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Instant Data Search: Use boolean operators such as 'and', 'or', or 'not' to search your data instantly. Find examples of search queries here.
Early Stage Development: The app is still in its very early development phase. Many features are incomplete, and there are no automated tests. Additionally, Urocissa is currently optimized for Chrome and Firefox on Windows and Android, but it may encounter issues for browsers on iOS or Linux. The detailed features can be seen in this table:
Feature | Status |
---|---|
Upload Videos and Photos | ✅ |
Auto Backup Folders | ✅ |
Download Photos and Videos | ✅ |
EXIF Data | ✅ |
User-Defined Tags | ✅ |
Duplicate Handling | ✅ |
Instant Select All | ✅ |
Find in Timeline | ✅ |
Responsive Layout | ✅ |
Shareable Albums | 🛠️ |
Basic Editing | ⏳ |
Multi-User Support | ⏳ |
Docker Installation | ⏳ |
Discovery | ⏳ |
Object/Face Recognition | ❌ |
Geolocation/Map | ❌ |
Android App | ❌ |
External Libraries | ❌ |
Existing Folders | ❌ |
Follow these steps to set up and run the Urocissa app on Linux-based systems. For instructions on setting up the app on Windows, please refer to this guide.
git clone https://github.com/hsa00000/Urocissa.git
This will create a folder called ./Urocissa
.
Make sure the following software is installed on your system:
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ffmpeg: Install via APT on Ubuntu:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y ffmpeg
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Rust: Install Rust using the official installer:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh -s -- -y source $HOME/.cargo/env
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npm (Node.js): Install Node.js (with npm) from NodeSource:
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_18.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt install -y nodejs
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Navigate to the backend directory:
cd ./Urocissa/gallery-backend
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Copy the default config file and fill in the necessary settings:
cp .env.default .env cp Rocket.default.toml Rocket.toml
.env:
PASSWORD=password SYNC_PATH=./upload DISCORD_HOOK_URL=
Explanation:
PASSWORD
: Your password for the app.SYNC_PATH
: List of directories that the app will watch for new or modified photos.DISCORD_HOOK_URL
: (Optional) Fill in your Discord webhook URL to receive error notifications.
Rocket.toml:
port
: Default is4000
. You can change this to your desired port number.
Navigate to gallery-backend
and build the backend using Cargo:
cargo build --release
-
Navigate to the
gallery-frontend
directory:cd ./Urocissa/gallery-frontend
-
Copy the default frontend config file:
cp config.default.ts config.ts
Note: The
config.ts
file contains advanced settings. You can leave it unchanged unless you need to customize it.
In the gallery-frontend
directory, run:
npm run build
Navigate to the gallery-backend
directory and run the following command to start the app:
cargo run --release
You can now access the app via http://127.0.0.1:4000 or http://127.0.0.1:<your_port> if you configured a custom port in Rocket.toml.
Navigate to the project directory and pull the latest updates:
git pull
-
Navigate to the
gallery-frontend
directory:cd ./Urocissa/gallery-frontend
-
Build the frontend:
npm run build
-
Navigate to the
gallery-backend
directory:cd ./Urocissa/gallery-backend
-
Build and run the backend using Cargo:
cargo run --release
After following these steps, your Urocissa app will be updated to the latest version.