Your photos, on your own network. Fotoloka is a self-hosted photo and video
backup service. A Mac, a Windows PC or a Raspberry Pi in your home becomes the place your
family's photos live — a central, private library with no cloud subscription behind it.
Phones back up over Wi-Fi automatically; any browser in the house can browse the whole
collection.
Nothing is uploaded to us. There is no Fotoloka cloud, no account and no analytics. Your
photos go from your phone to your computer and nowhere else.
Fotoloka has two halves. The server runs on a computer you already own and
holds the library. The clients — the Android app, and a browser client
the server hosts itself — talk to it over your home Wi-Fi.
Install the server on the machine that will keep the photos. It runs
quietly in the background and starts again by itself at every login.
Point it at a disk. The laptop's own drive to begin with, or an external
USB drive if your library is bigger than your laptop.
Open a client. The Android app finds the server on your Wi-Fi by itself
— no IP addresses to type. From any other device, open
http://<server-ip>:8080/app/ in a browser.
The server needs a Java runtime, version 21 or newer. Everything else is in the download.
One thing to know up front: the machine has to be awake to answer. Laptops sleep aggressively
when idle, and a sleeping server is the usual explanation for one that seems unreliable
— so
setting it not to sleep on mains power is part of
installing it, not an optimisation.
Download the server
Fotoloka Server 3.0.1
One download for every platform — macOS, Windows, Linux and the Raspberry Pi —
with an installer for each. Unpack it, run the installer for your machine, and the server
is up.
Step-by-step instructions for each platform, including how to keep the library on an external
drive, are in the server setup guide.
The Android app
The app backs up your camera roll in the background whenever you are on your home Wi-Fi, and
is the fastest way to browse the library from a phone.
The Play Store listing is not live yet. This page will carry the link as soon as it is.
You do not need it. The browser client the server hosts is a complete client, so a household
on iPhones — or one that would simply rather not install anything — can run
Fotoloka entirely from a browser. The one thing only the app can do is automatic camera-roll
backup, which needs software running on the phone that holds the photos.
What it does
Backup that looks after itself
Auto-discovery
The app resolves your computer's address on your home Wi-Fi by itself, over mDNS/Bonjour.
There is no IP address to copy or type, and it keeps working when your router hands the
machine a different one.
Home Wi-Fi lock
Background backup and server discovery run only on the network you nominate, so nothing
drains the battery hunting for a server while you are out.
HEIC converted on the phone
iPhone-style HEIC/HEIF images are converted to high-quality JPEG before upload, carrying
the EXIF across — capture date, GPS and camera model — so dates and places
survive the trip.
Free up space, safely
Reclaim phone storage by removing local copies of photos the server confirms it holds.
The check is a live question put to the server, never a guess from the app's own cache,
so it will not delete your only copy.
Import from an external drive
Copy folders of old photos straight into the server's import folder. It scans them,
reads the EXIF, files them by date, builds thumbnails and indexes the lot.
Browsing
A chronological timeline
Opens straight into a continuous grid of everything, newest first, with date headers.
Filters that drill down
Narrow by year, then month, then day, alongside your own tags and a photos/videos switch.
The filter icon fills in while a filter is on, so the gallery always says whether you are
seeing everything.
Shared trip albums
Albums cut across family members. Everyone adds their own photos to the same album, and
it plays back as one timeline with each contributor named.
Slideshow
Play whatever is on screen — the whole library, one year, one tag, one album —
full screen, at 3, 5, 8 or 15 seconds a photo. Every photo appears once before any
repeats. Pause on a photo and you get the same actions as the viewer.
Video, streamed over the LAN
MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, 3GP and WebM back up, sync and play across the house.
Works offline
With the server switched off, the gallery, the filters and the albums keep working from
the phone's cache. Only changes need the server, and the app says so when you try.
Living with it
A browser client, not a preview
http://<server-ip>:8080/app/ on any computer, tablet or phone gives you
the whole application: browse, filter, slideshow, upload, tag, albums, trash and family
members. Nothing to install.
Albums on the television
Open http://<server-ip>:8080/tv/ in a Smart TV's own browser and your
shared albums appear on the big screen, driven entirely by the remote. Off by default.
Trash with 30 days to change your mind
Deleting moves a photo to Trash with a countdown, and it can be restored at any point
before the server purges it. Deleting on the server never touches the copy on your phone.
Recent activity
Every write — upload, deletion, tag, album change — is logged with who did it
and when, and shown as a chronological list.
Optional password
Set one on the server and every client must present it.
Your data stays yours
The photo files, the thumbnails and the index database all live in one folder that
you choose. That makes a backup a single command:
And it makes moving to a new computer a matter of plugging the drive in and running the
installer again — the server finds the existing library and carries on. The
server setup guide covers backup and disaster recovery
in full.