Are you using this? If yes, why, if no, why not?

[SmilyOrg]

Hey all! For some reason, I'm still working on this 🤷‍♂️

I realized it's gotten to the point where it probably needs some better documentation so that people know what the hell this even is and how to use it, v0.13.0 is the first step towards that. I hope to improve that a bit and also fix some of the bugs that are annoying me currently and then promote it some more :)

💡 That lead me to thinking that I don't know whether and how anyone is actually using this. I don't have any tracking or analytics beyond container image download counts, so I thought to reach out to you folks through these discussions directly.

So if you're reading this, I'd appreciate it if you left a signal on what is and is not important to you when it comes to this project.

What is stopping you from using it? What do you like the most? What bugs you the most? Where would you like it to go next?

Feel free to just drop any comment here, leave a reaction on an issue (I added a few new ones!) or send me an email (link in profile).

Thanks! 🙏

[MironPascalCaseFan]

Man, this is just an amazing piece of tech. I gathered all my photos and videos from the drives I had, and cataloged them by date using Elodie (an exiftool wrapper).

The next step? View this treasure somehow. Immich and other stuff missed the point for me. I was just looking for a robyst image viewer that reads files exactly how they are in the folder. And then I found this. It outperformed all my expectations. It is blazingly fast and web ui works on mobile too. Just amazing. Thanks for your work.

It is really fast. UI is flawless, no lags, super responsive, really convenient even on mobile. Very minimalistic. Just read only viewing and nothing more. I am planning to do synchronization with my devices my own way. I don’t need Imich. I want to keep my photos and videos in the structure I decide and not be dependent on the app. The only thing I wish it had is some kind of view filter so I can choose to watch only video files, etc.
...
Also, I have some files in MOV containers (iOS writes videos in them) and unfortunately photofield doesn’t pick them up yet.
Same goes for .HEIC (iOS photo format).

[SmilyOrg]

Hi! Thanks for describing your use case! It's very helpful feedback :)

Filtering to video only would be a nice additional search qualifier to add for sure.

On the MOV, maybe you can try customizing the extensions in the configuration.yaml to include it and see if it works for you. Your browser would need to support MOV playback natively for now though.

On HEIC, this seemed difficult to support before, but it seems like ffmpeg added support for it in the meantime, so maybe it's as easy as updating to a newer version and enabling it in extensions now? 🤔

[MironPascalCaseFan]

So, my config now is:

collections:
  - name: Life
    dirs:
      - /media/miron/Expansion/MironLifePhotosVideos/

media:
  ffmpeg_path: /home/miron/realhome/photofield/ffmpeg
  extensions: [
    ".jpg", ".jpeg", ".png", ".avif", ".bmp", ".pam", ".ppm", ".jxl", ".exr", ".cr2", ".dng",
    ".mp4", ".mov", ".heic"
  ]
  images:
    extensions: [".jpg", ".jpeg", ".png", ".avif", ".bmp", ".pam", ".ppm", ".jxl", ".exr", ".cr2", ".dng", ".heic"]
  videos:
    extensions: [".mp4", ".mov"]

I reindexed the collection and it finally found these 2,000 MOV and HEIC files. But they are not showing up in the web UI. They are in the database, but they aren’t displayed

Idk if it matters but this is my ffmpeg version:

And this is what I get if I try to reindex again

photofield version:

photofield v0.21.0, commit 9926c72efc1e15c95f8ccb07ff8cfed1c212295e, built on 2026-01-01T21:49:41Z by runner

[SmilyOrg]

Hmm, interesting! Thanks for the details. I'll try to see what's happening when I get the chance :)

[SmilyOrg]

Hey! I tried some example heic & mov files around a week ago and they seemed to mostly work fine. I believe newer ffmpeg versions (< 1 year old) do improve the support substantially, but I'm not super sure on that.

I got a bit distracted and didn't cut a real release yet, but you could see if this prerelease works better: https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield/pkgs/container/photofield/657892110?tag=v0.22.0-11-g0eda165

[HaydenMaines]

Hi! I've started testing this program out for sorting and accessing large amounts of files quickly. Over several I've amassed tens of thousands of images (reference photos, saved memes, inspiration, etc.) and this program works great for displaying results across all folders. I haven't set up the AI functions yet but that'll be the next project. I love the date filtering functions, but I was wondering if you have or are going to implement a search by filename — sometimes my filenames have contextual clues and it would be really helpful to be able to filter out anything that doesn't have "underwater" or "tumblr_" for instance.
And thanks for this program! It's really cool.

[SmilyOrg]

Hi! Good to hear, thanks for sharing!

Yes, I've thought of it and it's a good idea, I just haven't gotten around to adding it yet! Could you open an issue (feature request) for it?

Thanks!

[HaydenMaines]

Done! Thanks again!