ARCHIVE — A No-Database Photo Gallery

A PHP photo gallery that treats your filesystem as the database. Drop folders of photos into /photos, refresh, done.

Editorial / curatorial design system: Fraunces variable serif, JetBrains Mono for metadata, warm cream on near-black, film grain overlay, asymmetric grid, custom cursor, and a cinematic lightbox that reads EXIF from your JPEGs.

Requirements

PHP 8.0+
gd extension (for thumbnails) — usually installed
exif extension (for camera metadata) — usually installed
A web server (Apache, Nginx, or php -S for testing)

Quick start

php -S 127.0.0.1:8000

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8000.

For production: drop the whole folder onto any PHP host. No build step. No composer install.

Adding your photos

Each folder under /photos becomes an album. Inside, drop JPGs (or PNG, GIF, WebP).

photos/
  01_istanbul_quietude/
    album.json          ← optional metadata
    frame_001.jpg
    frame_002.jpg
    ...
  02_kirkland_blue_hour/
    ...

Folder naming: prefix with 01_, 02_ etc. to control ordering. The prefix is stripped from the display title. Underscores and hyphens become spaces.

Photo ordering: alphabetical by filename. Same trick — name them frame_001.jpg, frame_002.jpg or 001_morning.jpg to control order.

Album metadata (`album.json`)

Optional. Drop next to your photos to override the auto-generated title and add context.

{
  "title": "Istanbul, Quietude",
  "location": "Beyoğlu — Istanbul, Turkey",
  "date": "April 2026",
  "description": "Notes from a slow week in the upper city."
}

EXIF

If your JPEGs have EXIF (most cameras and phones write it by default), the lightbox panel will show camera, lens, ISO, shutter, aperture, focal length, and capture date. The demo placeholder photos here have no EXIF, so those fields show —. Drop in a real shot from your Lumix G85 and you'll see it light up.

Thumbnails

Generated on first request by thumb.php, cached forever in /thumbs/. Three sizes:

sm — 480px (album cover previews)
md — 1000px (grid tiles)
lg — 2000px (lightbox)

Edit config.php to change sizes or JPEG quality. Delete /thumbs/ to regenerate.

Customization

Site title / subtitle: config.php
Hero text: the five-word title in index.php (The / Archive / of / Quiet / Light). Edit it directly.
Colors and typography: top of assets/css/style.css. The whole palette lives in CSS variables. Try a different accent (--accent) — sage green, gold, or electric blue all work.
Manifesto: bottom of the index in index.php. Three lines of poetry. Make them yours.

File structure

.
├── index.php           — router + views
├── thumb.php           — thumbnail endpoint
├── config.php          — settings
├── lib/
│   └── Gallery.php     — directory scanner, EXIF reader
├── assets/
│   ├── css/style.css
│   └── js/app.js       — cursor, hover preview, lightbox
├── photos/             — your albums go here
└── thumbs/             — generated cache (safe to delete)

Production notes

Make /thumbs/ writable by the web server (usually chmod 755 is enough).
The thumbnail endpoint validates inputs but, if you're paranoid, put /photos/ outside the web root and serve only through thumb.php + a similar serve.php.
For pretty URLs (/album/istanbul-quietude instead of ?album=...), add an .htaccess with a rewrite rule. The current code uses query strings to work without it.

Why no database

Files are the source of truth. Backup is rsync. Drag-and-drop publishing. Trivial to migrate. Trivial to port to a static generator later. The whole "schema" is your folder names. The whole "admin UI" is Finder.

It scales fine to a few thousand photos. Past that, cache the directory scan to a JSON file and rebuild on a cron or on demand.

No database. No tracking. Only light.