HomeGallery indexes your NAS, then lets it hibernate

What it does

HomeGallery is a Node.js web gallery that slurps photos and videos from local disks or NAS mounts, transcodes videos, extracts EXIF data, and builds a browseable PWA. After the initial indexing pass, the original source volumes can go offline; the gallery runs from previews and metadata alone. It offers face detection, reverse image lookup, geo reverse lookups, and a Boolean query language to dig through your backlog without cloud dependencies.

The interesting bit

The software treats your storage as cold rather than hot: it hashes files by content, deduplicates identical bytes, and severs the runtime dependency on the original media. Rename a folder or unplug an external drive and the gallery doesn’t flinch, because it already swallowed what it needed.

Key highlights

• Offline-source friendly: once previews are generated, the original disks can spin down or be unplugged.
• Content-addressed indexing: duplicate files are processed once, and renames don’t trigger re-extraction.
• AI search features (similar images, face recognition, object detection) via an optional public API, or through a self-hosted API container.
• Entire index shipped to the browser as compressed JSON (~12 MB for 100k items), making search feel local.
• Static export mode for building a fully portable site, plus Chromecast streaming and XMP sidecar support.

Caveats

• Explicitly a pet project with no warranty; the author warns that you’re solving your own problems here.
• Strictly single-user with no authentication layer—anyone on your network who hits the server sees everything.
• AI features call a public API by default; keeping previews entirely on-prem requires running the API server yourself.

Verdict

A solid weekend project for the privacy-curious developer who wants Google Photos-style discovery on top of a NAS. If you need multi-user access controls, a support contract, or a zero-config install, look elsewhere.