What is phobox?

Phobox is a small tool to extend your local picture storage with a bunch of connectivity features. It starts a lightweight server process, which you allows to access your pictures over a graphical user interface or a REST-API. Moreover you can organize your files and create collections of the best photographs.

I developed phobox to solve three main problems in my picture workflow:

  • organize new pictures from camera to the correct directories
  • get a simple and fast access to the pictures on my smartphone at home
  • searching pictures by time, name, camera type ….

alt phobox image gallery

What is different to other systems?

This application is niche product with a special use case. I concentrate to the following principles:

  • Phobox have to work with existing directories of photos
  • Phobox doesn’t change the existing directory stucture of photos
  • Phobox doesn’t save pictures in closed databases
  • Phobox has no cloud services -> your files are saved on your harddrive
  • Phobox provides a simple webinterface for accessing the photos on a webbrowser
  • Phobox provides a REST API for advanced use cases
  • Phobox provides information of your photo storage

alt phobox image lightbox

What is the use case for phobox?

  • You want to keep your existing image directories
  • You don’t want to pay for a tool
  • You want organize your photos in a mobile device too
  • You want a simple process to bring your photos from your camera to your storage
  • You want to keep your pictures locally and not in the cloud
  • You want to search for taken images in a simple and fast way

What is phobox not for?

  • If you already organize your photos in lightroom or another paid tool you will not need another one.
  • If you want to do image editing (better use Gimp, Photoshop, Snapseed, Luminar or Lightroom)
  • If you want to organize scanned photos or almost very old pictures (no exif data)

Background

I build phobox to solve a problem which I have with all existing tools. I want to keep my photos on my network storage to access them in my local wifi with my tablet in the couch. Moreover it should be possible to browse the files on computer in the file explorer.

All existing solutions doesn’t fit my requirements or being expensive. So I begun to build a solution to myself and Phobox was born. After a couple of years of development and personal usage I decided to make this project public. Phobox solves the origin problems in my daily photo workflow. I think out there are persons with the same problems, too. Maybe you?!

Phobox is a very special project for me and I will never want to do without it again. But currently the development is completely in my spare time. If you like phobox and you want to support me, please look here.

Nick