blissd / fotema

Photo gallery for Linux

Fotema

fotema (adj. Esperanto) "fond of taking photos"

A photo gallery for Linux.

Installation

Fotema is available on Flathub.

Building the project

Install flatpak, flatpak-builder, and just.

To build a local development release, run:

just devel

To build a local release, run:

just release

Roadmap

Aspirationally, this is what I want to add to Fotema.

• Machine learning.
  • Face detection and person recognition, supporting features such as naming a face and then generating an album of all faces that are similar. Preferably in pure Rust, but needs be as needs must.
  • Object and animal recognition.
  • Text recognition, supporting such features as copying text out of a photo or searching for photos containing particular text.
• Search by recognized items, such as "all photos of Sven with a dog".
• A dashboard page showcasing people, places, and events.
• Swipe and keyboard support for the photo/video viewer.
• Fewer (preferably zero) Flatpak permissions.

fotema's Issues

Face thumbnails show on "transcode video" view for motion photos

If an iOS live photo must be transcoded and Fotema has also detected faces in the photo component, then the video transcode status page will also display the face thumbnails.

Face thumbnails should be hidden as the iOS live photo can't be viewed until the video is transcoded.

Feature Request: Photos sorting

Currently in all views, photos & videos are displayed in Oldest to Newest order.

It would be awesome if there are more sorting option.

Personally, I would like to see Newest photos & videos first.

Allow choosing a specific photos folder

My Pictures folder has way too much stuff in it, and the app keeps choking on importing all of them. It'd be great if there was a way to choose which folder to look at, to test it with a more limited set.

[Proposal] Better app icon

While the app icon is sufficient to understand what it does and its purpose, it remains only a big symbolic on a gradient, which can look a bit out of place on certain desktop environments.

Many other apps that rely on the GNOME components / libadwaita style use more elaborated icons (colorful, with simple geometric shapes, while having a solid metaphor - you can find guidelines on how to create great icons here).
If you're not feeling comfortable with icon design, don't hesitate to get in touch with GNOME designers here by filling an icon request; I'm sure they'll be glad to help!

This is just a simple feedback from my user experience with Fotema - feel free to reject it, otherwise I'm glad someone could manage to build a replacement for gnome-photos :)

Design a new app icon

Fotema has a pretty generic icon that does not comply with GNOME HIG icon standards. This causes Fotema to fail the icon review step on Flathub which prevents Fotema from being considered as an "app of the day" (I think?), and has raised a number of comments as to its not being good enough.

I agree! The icon should change, but I'm not sure to what. Here are some thoughts on what I like in icons (in no particular order):

1. Pretty. Not too busy.
2. Some colour (preferably colours that work well with the light/dark banner theming on Flathub). Easy to see on a variety of backgrounds.
3. Joyfulness and playfulness. Looking at you YMuse.
4. Iconography that makes me think of photos. I do like the photo app icons that use a Polaroid style photo (like in #83 and Loupe, but I wouldn't say that is a requirement.

Some icons I like from other apps (also in no particular order):

YMuse, KDE Photos, Loupe, Newsflash, Shortwave, Tuba, Iotas.

Some ideas:

1. Something you would actually photograph in a Polaroid photo or a traditional photo frame, like a stylized flower, a man and his dog, a pet by itself, and so on.
2. Something that suggests photo albums. A book of photos? A stack of photos?
3. I see my ideas are pretty derivative of existing photo app icons... so perhaps something entirely new?

Put videos on the map

Some videos (at least on iOS--I don't know about Android) embed a longitude and latitude. This data should be extracted and persisted to a 'videos_geo' database table and used to plot videos on the map album.

Video metadata should be extracted with the ffmpeg-next API, but if that is not possible then using ffprobe is acceptable.

Considered applying the Fotema for GNOME Circle membership?

Hi, I just discovered Fotema on Flathub. And my question is if you have considered applying the app for GNOME Circle membership? I think it may eventually turn in to a very nice modern replacement for or alternative to the old and mostly unmaintained gnome-photos.

I will keep an eye on your app, and once the last quirks are worked out I may end up shipping it as a replacement for gnome-photos.

i18n support.

Hi mate, I am interested in translating this app.

Will it be possible to have pot file in future? Sadly, I lack programming skill to generate POT file by myself.

Cheers.

Images E & W of IDL are not displayed concurrently.

Hi,

Images East & West of International Date Line (IDL) are not displayed together in Places view.

Major focus view E/W of IDL will have images displayed, while in other minor focus view no images displayed at the same time.

Attached screenshot for better clarity around this issue:

1. In, this screenshot only right side (Major area in view) images are displayed
   

2. In, this screenshot only left side (Major area in view) images are displayed
   

Images should be visible on both side of IDL at the same time, like how it is normally displayed in any other Longitude.

Video transcode should run on regular background task queue

Fotema has a background task runner (bootstrap.rs) which queues and starts the various tasks run at startup. Since face detection was added, this task runner has been refactored to allow non-startup tasks to be queued and run, too. However, the video transcode feature was written before this refactor so instead runs parallel to the regular background tasks. This means if a video transcode is started while background tasks are already running, then the transcode runs as the same time and the user sees two progress bars (one for normal background tasks, one for the transcode).

The video transcode background task should be integrated into the bootstrap.rs task runner which will prevent video transcodes running at the same time as over expensive background tasks and also remove the need for a second progress bar in the UI.

Localizations are installed in non-FHS-compliant locations

Fotema currently installs localization files into ${prefix}/i18n directory. Such a location is not compliant with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and as such cannot be properly packaged for Linux distributions. Please fix Fotema to use a standard directory, i.e. a subdirectory of ${prefix}/share.

Photo Library sorting in descending order

When in the Library menu the photos are sorted in acceding order (the oldest dated images are at the top).
It would make more sense to me, to be the exact opposite, the pictures at the top of the Library are the latest ones you took.
Or maybe add an option somewhere to toggle between acceding and descending photo sorting?

"Library" photo thumbnail is in worse quality than "Folders" photo thumbnail

Here are the screenshots which demonstrate the title of the issue.
Open the screenshots & quickly switch between them, to notice the difference.

Thumbnail in "Folders" is a bit larger, so that probably also affects how the thumbnail is going to be scaled.

"Library":

"Folders":

Request: Delete photos

Hi

A photo album tool like this is a really great way of going trough all your photos and deleting duplicates and unwanted photos. Unfortunately it's not possible to delete anything from Fotema yet, so I'd just like to ask to add that feature :) No additional button is needed in the desktop version, using the Delete key on the keyboard is good enough, but some UI is needed for the phone version, I'm sure. Maybe an overlay button in the right hand lower corner would look nice (and there could also be buttons there for rotation)

Thanks! :)

No content is displayed at all

Hi, I wanted to give fotema a try... I like its design and I like that it does not move photos into a closed, app-specific library like some other photo managers do. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work - let me explain. Maybe someone can help me get started?

I am running ubuntu 24.04 with GNOME 46.
I installed fotema 1.7.1 from flathub.

• When I start the fotema app, its main windows is shown.
• A blue headerbar pops up for a short time, but quickly disappears. Something about photos and videos being scanned.
• But no photos or videos are shown.

I then started fotema from the terminal in order to see its logs, using the command from #1, i.e., flatpak run --env=RUST_LOG=fotema=DEBUG,glycin=DEBUG --env=RUST_BACKTRACE=1 app.fotema.Fotema. Still no content shown. Not much info in the logs; fotema wrote the following output:

➜  ~ flatpak run --env=RUST_LOG=fotema=DEBUG,glycin=DEBUG --env=RUST_BACKTRACE=1 app.fotema.Fotema
20:57:21.833  INFO fotema::languages: Requested languages: [LanguageIdentifier { language: Language(Some("en")), script: None, region: Some(Region("US")), variants: None }]

(fotema:2): Adwaita-WARNING **: 20:57:21.996: AdwNavigationPage 0x60d9f03dd990 is missing a title. To hide a header bar title, consider using AdwHeaderBar:show-title instead.

(fotema:2): Adwaita-WARNING **: 20:57:21.996: AdwNavigationPage 0x60d9f02d69b0 is missing a title. To hide a header bar title, consider using AdwHeaderBar:show-title instead.
20:57:21.996  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: start
20:57:21.996  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_scan: Scanning file system for pictures...
20:57:21.999  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: scan photos started
20:57:22.660  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: scan photos completed
20:57:22.660  INFO fotema::app::background::video_scan: Scanning file system for videos...
20:57:22.660  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: scan videos started
20:57:22.911  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: scan videos completed
20:57:22.911  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_enrich: Enriching photos...
20:57:22.912  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: photo enrichment completed
20:57:22.912  INFO fotema::app::background::video_enrich: Enriching videos...
20:57:22.912  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: video enrichment completed
20:57:22.912  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_thumbnail: Generating photo thumbnails...
20:57:22.913  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: photo thumbnails completed
20:57:22.913  INFO fotema::app::background::video_thumbnail: Generating video thumbnails...
20:57:22.913  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: video thumbnails completed in Some(916.463467ms)
20:57:22.913  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_clean: Cleaning photos...
20:57:22.913  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: bootstrap: video cleanup completed.
20:57:22.913  INFO fotema::app: Bootstrap completed.

(fotema:2): Adwaita-WARNING **: 20:57:38.686: AdwNavigationPage 0x60d9f04ae5d0 is missing a title. To hide a header bar title, consider using AdwHeaderBar:show-title instead.

My $HOME/Pictures folder contains about 138.000 files, it is about 114gb in size. Yet fotema seems to quickly scan the folder without finding any content to display.

Any ideas how I could analyze this? What could be the problem? Thanks!

Dates/Timestamps don't use regional formatting

Fotema should format dates and timestamps using regional formatting rules, not with ISO8601 formatting rules.

Fotema crashes on startup

-Using the flathub version
-Ubuntu 22.04

It looks like there is something wrong in metadata.rs

(fotema:2): Adwaita-WARNING **: 14:49:03.500: AdwNavigationPage 0x642bba2a6a50 is missing a title. To hide a header bar title, consider using AdwHeaderBar:show-title instead.

(fotema:2): Adwaita-WARNING **: 14:49:03.500: AdwNavigationPage 0x642bba34c8a0 is missing a title. To hide a header bar title, consider using AdwHeaderBar:show-title instead.
thread '<unnamed>' panicked at core/src/photo/metadata.rs:93:75:
index out of bounds: the len is 0 but the index is 0
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace
Rayon: detected unexpected panic; aborting

Delete cached files when video is deleted

Like with #85, when a video is deleted it doesn't delete any of the files derived from the video. The video thumbnail and video transcode file will remain on the file system and never accessed again. Fotema should do good housekeeping and delete those files when we know they will never be accessed again.

When my regional language is German I still see English text

If I run Fotema with de as the language code it works as expected:

LANG=de flatpak run app.fotema.Fotema

But... if I change my GNOME session region language to German, then it doesn't run with de, but with de_DE, which results in English being used. I would have expected de_DE to fallback to de, but clearly I have something incorrect. I'll see if I can figure the language fallback logic and fix it in a future release.

Feature Request: show file in folder

It would be nice if I could browse to the underlying file in my file browser. Maybe as a link in the info sidebar?

Can't play converted videos without first restarting Fotema

Fotema can convert HEVC videos so the user is able to play them. However, after conversion Fotema will persist in showing the conversion status page of a video instead of allowing the video to be played. Restarting Fotema clears the convert video status page and allows the video to be played.

Fotema does not import images or videos from linked folders.

I have included a folder as a symbolic link in the Pictures folder. Unfortunately, Fotema completely ignores it. The symbolic link points to a Samba share.

Localization crash

$ flatpak run app.fotema.Fotema

thread 'main' panicked at src/languages.rs:67:10: 
Localization files should be present: RequestedLanguagesEmpty 
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

Fotema's min-width is slightly too wide for good mobile support

Hi, thank you for creating this awesome app, it's really delightful!

Unfortunately, it's still a bit too wide for Linux Mobile devices (see screenshots below); the recommended width for these is 360px, as described here: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines/adaptive.html

This also fits the common devices well: https://linuxphoneapps.org/docs/resources/developer-information/#hardware-specs-to-consider

I'll be happy to help with testing 🙂

Screenshots:

Suspend background tasks when device has low power mode enabled

Some background tasks, like thumbnail generation and face detection use a lot of CPU time, and by extension a lot of battery. Fotema should be able to suspect these tasks if the user's device is in low power mode.

Stuck with "Processing Photo Metadata" without showing a thing or finish this step

After I start Fotema, I see this and it wont change ever:

LANG=C flatpak run --env=RUST_LOG=fotema=DEBUG,glycin=DEBUG --env=RUST_BACKTRACE=1 app.fotema.Fotema

20:50:43.006  INFO fotema::app: XDG_PICTURES_DIR is "/home/fabian/Bilder"
20:50:43.011  INFO fotema::languages: Requested languages: []
20:50:43.011  INFO fotema::languages: Requested languages with fallbacks: [LanguageIdentifier { language: Language(Some("en")), script: None, region: Some(Region("US")), variants: None }]

(fotema:2): Adwaita-WARNING **: 20:50:43.116: AdwNavigationPage 0x64416da78460 is missing a title. To hide a header bar title, consider using AdwHeaderBar:show-title instead.

(fotema:2): Adwaita-WARNING **: 20:50:43.117: AdwNavigationPage 0x64416db26450 is missing a title. To hide a header bar title, consider using AdwHeaderBar:show-title instead.
20:50:43.117  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: Start
20:50:43.117  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_scan: Scanning file system for pictures...
20:50:43.119  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: Scan photos started
20:50:43.273  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_scan: Found 13882 photos to add to database
20:50:43.430  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::album: All view is active so refreshing
20:50:43.430  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: Scan photos completed
20:50:43.430  INFO fotema::app::background::video_scan: Scanning file system for videos...
20:50:43.525  INFO fotema::app::background::video_scan: Found 10 videos to add to database
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::months_album: Month is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::years_album: Year is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::album: Selfies view is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::album: Animated view is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::album: Videos view is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::places_album: Places view is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::folders_album: Folders view is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.790  INFO fotema::app::components::albums::album: Folder view is inactive so clearing
20:50:43.802  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: Scan videos started
20:50:43.802  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: Scan videos completed
20:50:43.802  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_enrich: Enriching photos...
20:50:43.839  INFO fotema::app::background::photo_enrich: Found 13882 photos as candidates for enriching
20:50:43.900  INFO fotema::app::background::bootstrap: Photo enrichment started
20:50:44.263 ERROR fotema::app::background::photo_enrich: Failed to update previews: NOT NULL constraint failed: pictures_geo.longitude

I already tried to uninstall and delete app-data, but without any success. This is with the official flathub-flatpak.

Video rotation data should be extracted with ffmpeg-next

Videos contain rotation data (similar to the orientation stored in photo EXIF data) which is extracted and processed by Fotema so videos are displayed the right way up. However, to extract the rotation data I've used the ffprobe CLI tool which must be launched by Fotema for each video that is process because I couldn't figure out how to extract the data with ffmpeg-next.

This is slow and I would like the code for extracting the rotation to be rewritten to use the ffmpeg-next API, just like the other metadata that is extracted.

Read from xdg-videos

Hello, I just discovered your app and I've been liking it!

I have one recommendation, as currently videos are only pulled from xdg-pictures I believe it would make more sense to also pull videos from xdg-videos since that is most likely where a user is going to store that type of content.

Probably don't need to create files for detected faces

When Fotema detects a face it creates two files, one PNG file that is an extracted image of the exact reported bounds of the detected face, and a second PNG file centred on spot between the eyes and is more suitable for a thumbnail.

The PNG extracted for the detected face bounds is then used as an input for the face recognition processing phase to find similar faces. However... I don't think Fotema really needs to extract the detected face to a separate file to make this work. Instead we just need the bounds (which is saved to Fotema's database) and the source image, for which Fotema also already knows.

I think we could both reduce face detection processing time and file storage costs by no longer extracting the face at detection time and instead just using the face detection bounds and original source image for the inputs for face recognition.

Delete cached files when photo is deleted

When a photo is deleted in the file system Fotema will remove the associated entry from its database. However, Fotema will not delete the thumbnail image or, in the case of an Android motion photo, the extracted video component. These files should be deleted as Fotema will never access them again.

Always use Glycin sandbox for untrusted images

Fotema uses Glycin to load images when rendering them in the image viewer. However, when generating thumbnails, Fotema doesn't always use Glycin. Instead, for performance Fotema tries to open an image using image-rs directly, and only uses Glycin as a fallback. I would like to change this so Fotema always uses the Glycin sandbox when opening images in the user's pictures directory.

GitHub Action Flatpak build fails by running out of diskspace

The GHA builds for Fotema are failing with an error that looks like the build is using all the diskspace. I've had a go using some methods for "reclaiming" diskspace in the GHA builds, but they had no effect.

As far as I can tell, GHA runners have 14GB of usable diskspace. Looking at the build directory on my dev laptop, I see Fotema is using about 17GB... which sounds like a lot to me.

I'd really like the GHA Flatpak build to work, either by somehow freeing up more diskspace, or by modifying the build to use less diskspace.

Suggestion: Adding editing tools for photos

It would be great if I could edit my pictures, like paint on the picture or resize it, like it is implemented in the ios photo app.

Since editing photos are unfortunately only present in very few apps on linux, this would be a great addition.

If help is wanted and this suggestion itself would be accepted, I would work on a possible implementation and then provide this as a pull request

Thumbnails are not created

Hi David, thank you for building v1.8.1. where photos without file creation date are now successfully indexed. This is working now. But there is another problem: The thumbnails are not generated.

I installed fotema v1.8.1 from flathub. I first removed all of fotema's files by deleting ~/.var/app/app.fotema.Fotema. I then started fotema as shown in the log.

log.txt

from how I interpret the log, it appears that fotema did find the photos (Found 36995 photos to add to database), but then failed to generate thumbnails for these photos (Found 0 photos to generate thumbnails for)

Feature Request: Exclude a Folder

Currently Library view displays photos from all folders in Pictures directory.

It would be great, if one could exclude a particular folder photos from being displayed in Library view.

Ex. I don't want screenshots to be displayed in Library.
So, I exclude Screenshots folder and photos under it wont be displayed in Library.
If I want to view screenshots, then I can go to Folders view and get into screenshot folder from there.

"Mobile" and "Desktop" face detection options are confusing

In issue #138 user @forteller commented that the Mobile and Desktop face detection options are confusing, and they are quite right. These options should be better explained or renamed to be more obvious as to what they mean.

For reference:

"Enable for mobile" means use two BlazeFace models (I think one trained on a phone's rear camera and another trained on the selfie camers)f to detect faces. BlazeFace is a light weight face detection model designed for mobile devices so is relatively fast, but the trade off is that it misses lots of "obvious" faces, especially if the face is relatively large in the photo.

"Enable for desktop" means use a MTCNN face detection model, which is about four or five times slower then the two BlazeFace models, but produces much better results. As far as I can tell, it matches almost all faces I would expect it to match, but the trade off is that is takes a long time to run over a large photo library.

If you select one model and then change your mind, then you can't easily tell Fotema to reprocess already processed pictures with the new model. This is only really important if you started with the mobile models and then switched to the desktop model to detect more faces. You can ask Fotema to re-scan individual files, but now all previously processed files.

Some options:

1. Drop the choice selection and just use the MTCNN/Desktop model for better, but slower, face detection. And maybe figure out GPU acceleration?
2. Drop the MTCNN model and figure out how to tune the faster BlazeFace model for more face matches?
3. Add better explanations of the different options.

Please use XDG thumbnail specification

Please add support for the Thumbnail Managing Standard. This would make it possible for Fotema to use the same thumbnail directory as other programs on the system, both saving a lot of time on having to generate thumbnails twice, and a lot of space on having to store two sets of thumbnails.

Issues with face detection

Hi. First: Thank you so much for making this! I've been looking for an application to view all my photos on a map for a long time, and not really found anything viable until this. And it looks great too! Fantastic work!

I also love the face detection feature, but have some issues with it that I wanted to open an issue about. I hope it's ok that I address them all here in one issue at first, let me know if you want me to split them up.

1. To turn on face detection you have to choose for desktop or for mobile. This for me is confusing. What does it mean, why do I have to choose? The first button "Enable for mobile", so I'm like "does that mean if I've taken the photos with a mobile phone, or if I'm doing this on a mobile phone? Can I even use this application on a mobile phone?" then I see the "Enable for desktop" button, and I guess that means the buttons are about where I'm using the app, not how the pictures was taken. But it's still confusing. I feel like there should be some sort of explanation here. What happens if you press the wrong button?
2. After turning it on, for me it took a long, long time. I started yesterday, it ran for a couple of hours, and the progress bar barely moved. Trying again today it seems like it had to start all over from the beginning again. I let it run for 3-4-5 hours, and the progress bar only got to about 1/4. And I couldn't let it run anymore. After closing the app and restarting it the progress bar then starts from the beginning again. But looking at photos, the application has detected some faces. So it seems to me that the progress bar should continue from where it stopped, not start from the beginning, after restarting the application.
3. Even though some faces has been detected, and are marked as such when I look at specific photos, the People pane is still just the information about the feature. I would think that it should rather warn me that the detection process has not finished, but still show the photos that it actually has found?
4. When clicking on a face icon to set a name to a found face, I think that your last used X number of names should be shown in the pop up menu. Also, "Set name" should be lower down than "Ignore", since I'm certain it will be used more, and therefore should have easier access.
5. Also maybe in that popup menu there should just always be an item for tagging that face as "me"?

Thanks again! I hope this is useful in some way.

Clicking on menu button in sidebar causes it to close in the mobile view

In the mobile view (when the window is below a certain width), clicking on the menu button in the sidebar makes the popup appear, but also makes the sidebar close. Video of the issue:

2024-05-31.11-45-44.mp4

Running Fotema 1.7.0 from Flathub.

Feature Improvement: Put "..." animation on the banner to tell when Fotema is caching images etc

How the animation works:

1. There is one period for the first second the banner is displayed.
2. Then there are two periods for the 2nd second.
3. Then there are three periods for the third.
4. Then it resets to one period, and the cycle continues.

I want this feature because currently, it feels like nothing is happening or the caching/ loading is stuck if you don't look at the progress bar on the sidebar that shows if it is progressing or not (I don't know whether it shows for every operation for which the banner appears).

Feature Request: Disable hidden pictures display

Current Behavior: Photos prefixed with . are displayed by default in Fotema.

Request: An option so as to disable display of hidden photos.

EXIF orientation breaks image width/height

Fotema uses CSS to rotate images so they align with their EXIF orientation data. However, when rotated with CSS the images don't have the proper (rotated) width and height, which manifest as images either having some cropping, or appearing too small for the view port.

This can possibly be fixed by bumping to Glycin 2.0 (beta at time of writing) which can apply EXIF transforms when opening an image.

Feature Request: Cycle pic with arrow keys

Feature request for the ability to change next/previous pic with left & right arrow key.

Currently, arrow keys moves focus between left, right, back & info icons.
To change pic, one has to select left or right UI arrow and press Enter.