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How To Set Up A Photo Library With Raspberry Pi

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2 views6 pages

How To Set Up A Photo Library With Raspberry Pi

Uploaded by

james.perrin69
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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How to Set Up a Photo Library with

Raspberry Pi

Recent I brought a Raspberry Pi 4 and started playing with


it. I first moved my Bitcoin algorithmic trading strategy from
a VPS to the Pi, which dropped the monthly VPS fee from my
credit card bill. My second project is to create a photo library
hosted through HTTPS, where I can share pictures with my
family on the other side of the Pacific ocean. Comparing to
other personal cloud storages, this project come with several
great advantages:
 easy to use (only requires a link and a browser)

 cheap (can use an idle hard drive as storage)

 customizable (easy to change the ascetics and layout)

It is also a great project for one learn about the inner


working of computer networking as well as front-end
developing. So let’s get started.

First we will need a Raspberry Pi 4. I installed the Raspbian


GUI operating system on it which is a pretty neat Linux
environment to work on. Next you will have to set up NGINX
and PHP. NGINX will allow us to host web server on Pi and
PHP is a back-end programming language that is useful in
interacting with the operating system. For this project we
will need to write a PHP script which will go through all
designated folders to grab all images automatically.

Next up we want to set up SSH so that we can access the Pi


terminal through local networks. Then we will use
the rsync tool to synchronize the pictures from my laptop to
the Pi folder. Use the following terminal command.

Here I have a /image folder set up on my Mac desktop, and I


want to sync with the /home/pi/server/image folder on my Pi.
Use cron to schedule this command if needed.
Now that we have all the images sync-ed over to your Pi, we
can start NGINX and host a static website. Here is my setup.
We run our web service on standard port 80 for HTTP and
443 for HTTPS (HTTPS is HTTP with SSL encryption, which
is far more secure)

/etc/nginx/sites-enable/server

{
listen 80;
server_name _;
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;a
}

server {
listen 443;
server_name _;
root /home/pi/server;
index index.php;

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
}

location ~ /.well-known {
allow all;
}
}

/home/pi/server/index.php

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to My Photo Library!</title>
<style>
body {
width: auto;
margin-left: 2em;
margin-right: 2em;
font-family: Garamond, serif;
}

* {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
img {
image-orientation: from-image;
}
.imgbox {
display: grid;
height: 100%;
}
.center-fit {
max-width: 100%;
max-height: 100vh;
margin: auto;
}
li {
list-style-type:none;
margin-right:10px;
margin-bottom:10px;
float:left;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to My Photo Library!</h1>
<div class="imgbox">
<ul>
<?php
$handle = opendir(dirname(realpath(__FILE__)).'/image/');
while($file = readdir($handle)){
if($file !== '.' && $file !== '..' && $file !== '.DS_Store')
{
echo '<img class="center-fit" src="image/'.$file.'">';
}
}
?>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Now open up <local ip address of my pi>:443 on my Macbook


connected to the same WLAN as my Pi, I will be able to see
the webpage I host.
Next we need to configure our router for Port
Forwarding and then set up a Dynamic DNS service. The No-
IP website currently provides free DDNS service. After
setting up DDNS, we can then use the hostname from your
DDNS provider to access the dynamic IP[1]address of our
router, which will be forwarded to the static IP of our
raspberry pi with the port that NGINX used to host the
website. For example, we just need to type https://<my hostname

from ddns provider>:<my router port designated to forward> in the


browser to view the photo library anywhere in the world:)
[1] In my case my ISP uses Carrier-Grade NAT, which
means my public IP is different than my WAN IP. I will
need to configure the DDNS provider to access my WAN
IP, in order for this to work.

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