User guide

This page assumes the server is already running — if it is not, start with the server setup guide. There are three ways to use Fotoloka, and you can mix them freely in one household:

• The Android app — automatic camera-roll backup, and the fastest way to browse from a phone.
• Any browser — the complete client, on a laptop, an iPad or an iPhone. Nothing to install.
• A Smart TV — shared albums on the big screen, driven by the remote.

Everything below happens on your home Wi-Fi. There is nothing to sign up for and no password unless you chose to set one on the server.

The Android app

The Play Store listing is not live yet. This page will carry the link as soon as it is.

First run

1. Open the app while connected to your home Wi-Fi.
2. It finds the server by itself. A green dot in the top bar means connected, grey means not — tap it to retry.

   If the dot is grey more often than not, and goes green the moment you touch the computer, the computer is going to sleep rather than the app misbehaving. See Stop the machine going to sleep.

3. If the server has a password, the app asks for it, and checks it before saving.

Getting around

Every screen is reached from the hamburger menu in the top bar: Gallery, Albums, Recent Activity, Trash and Sync Settings. There is deliberately no bottom bar — in a photo browser those pixels are better spent on photos.

Filtering is the exception. It acts on the gallery, so it lives on the filter icon in the gallery's own top bar: a Year → Month → Day drill-down, your tags, and a photos/videos switch. The icon fills in while a filter is active, so the gallery always tells you whether you are seeing everything.

Family members

Tap the initials avatar at the top-right of the gallery. The menu lists everyone in the household — switch to one to browse their timeline — and is also where you register a new person, rename the one you are on, or delete it.

• A profile is just a name. Spaces, capitals and accents are all fine, and renaming moves nothing on the server.
• Deleting works only while a profile holds no photos or videos, including anything still in its trash or waiting in its import folder. If it still holds something, the app says how much and nothing is deleted. Its entries in Recent Activity are kept either way.

Setting up the home Wi-Fi lock

1. Open Sync Settings from the menu.
2. Under Home Wi-Fi lock, tap Set home network and enter your network name, for example MyHomeWiFi.
3. Automatic backup and server discovery then run only on that network, which is what keeps the app from draining the battery hunting for a server while you are out. Leave it blank to allow any network.

Granting the location permission is what lets Android tell the app which network it is on; without it the lock cannot be enforced and backup proceeds anyway.

Reclaiming space on the phone

1. In Sync Settings, tap Check for reclaimable space. The server has to be reachable.
2. The app asks the server which photos it holds, and offers to remove only those local copies — a live question, never a guess from its own cache, so it will not delete your only copy of anything.
3. On Android 11 and later the system shows its own confirmation before anything goes.

Importing photos from an external drive

1. On the server machine, copy folders of old photos into Pictures/FamilyPhotoBackup/import/<your name>/. The folder is named after your profile, so look for your own name.
2. In Sync Settings, tap Scan import folder.
3. The server walks the folders recursively, reads the EXIF, and files everything into the library by date.

Recent activity

Open Recent Activity from the menu for a chronological log of every write anyone has made on the server — uploads, deletions, tags, album changes — each with the person's name, a description and a timestamp.

Slideshow

Hit play in the gallery's top bar and whatever you are looking at becomes a full-screen slideshow: your whole library, or just the tag, year or album you narrowed it to. Albums can also be played straight from the album list.

• Every photo appears once before any repeats, then the order reshuffles.
• Speeds of 3, 5, 8 or 15 seconds, with skip and pause. The screen stays awake while it plays.
• Pause on a photo and you get the viewer's actions — details, add a tag, share, download, remove from album, move to trash — with anything trashed or removed dropping out of the running show.
• It plays the whole feed on the server, not only what your phone has synced, so a shared album plays everyone's photos. If the server is unreachable it plays what the phone has cached and tells you that is what it is doing.
• Videos are skipped: a slideshow runs on a timer and a clip does not.

Browsing with the server off

With the server switched off, the gallery, the filters, the date drill-down and the albums all keep working from the phone's cache. Only changes — deleting, tagging, album edits — need the server, and the app says so when you try.

Using it from any browser

Open http://<server-ip>:8080/app/ on any machine on the home Wi-Fi — a laptop, an iPad, an iPhone, a desktop. Nothing to install.

This is the full application, not a viewer. If nobody in the house has an Android phone, this is Fotoloka.

1. First visit. If the server has a password, it asks once and remembers it in that browser. On a brand-new server it offers to add the first family member, so a household can set itself up here without ever touching the app.
2. Getting around. The hamburger menu holds Gallery, Favourites, Albums, Trash and Import folder. The gallery's top bar carries slideshow, sort, filter and the profile avatar — the same order and the same icons as the Android app, so the two are one thing to learn.
3. Filtering. The filter icon opens media type, a Year → Month → Day drill-down and your tags. What is applied appears as removable chips under the bar. Picking a tag or a date shows it oldest-first, as on the phone; clearing puts the ordering back.
4. The big screen. The slideshow button plays whatever is on screen — the whole library, one year, one tag, one album. Space pauses, arrow keys step, Escape leaves, and the speed control offers the same four durations as the app. This is what the browser client was built for: a photograph at a size worth looking at.
5. Selecting photos. Every tile has a circle in its corner. Pick some and the top bar becomes a selection bar with Favourite, Album, Tag and Trash — plus Un-album and Cover while you are inside an album.
6. One photo. Click a tile for full screen, where you can favourite it, tag it, change the date taken, or trash it. Your own tags are listed along the bottom and each can be clicked off.
7. Videos play here too. Open a clip and press play, and it plays with your browser's own controls — pause, seek, volume, full screen.

   One limit is worth knowing, and it is your browser's rather than Fotoloka's: the server streams your file exactly as recorded and never re-encodes it, so a clip plays only if the browser can decode it. Recent iPhones and many Android phones record HEVC (H.265), which desktop Chrome and Firefox generally will not play — the clip downloads and then refuses, and the page tells you that is what happened. Safari usually plays HEVC; the Android app always does, because the phone decodes it in hardware. Anything recorded as H.264/AVC plays everywhere. Set your phone's camera to its "most compatible" / H.264 option if you want browser playback for everything.

8. Albums with several contributors get a contributor filter in the top bar naming everyone who has added photos, so you can see just one person's. It appears only when more than one family member has contributed — with one, there is nothing to narrow.
9. Adding photos from this machine. The + button opens the file chooser and uploads what you pick, with progress under the bar. Keep browsing while it runs.
10. Adding photos already on the server. Import folder in the menu names your own drop folder — import/Naveen/, say — so you can copy a decade of holidays off an external drive straight into it and press Scan now. The server does the work; this only asks it to start and reports what it found.
11. Trash is kept 30 days. Select and put back, or delete for good. Empty trash removes everything and cannot be undone.
12. Family members. The avatar at the top-right switches between them, and adds, renames or deletes them. Renaming moves nothing — photos, albums and the import folder stay exactly where they are.

What is not here, and why: automatic camera-roll backup. That needs software running in the background on the phone that holds the photos, which a web page cannot be. Upload from a browser is deliberate — you choose the files. Everything else the Android app does, this does.

A note on the password: the browser client is behind the same password as every other client, and it stores that password in the browser it was typed into. On a shared computer, use a private window.

Albums on a Smart TV

Turn the server into a photo frame for the living room. Any television's browser can open http://<server-ip>:8080/tv/ — Samsung, LG, Android TV, a Fire Stick's browser, or a laptop plugged into the HDMI port. Most sets let you bookmark that as the browser's home page, so the family only ever has to open the browser.

It is off by default. See Watching albums on a Smart TV for how to switch it on, and for what it exposes — that page is deliberately not password protected, and it is worth two minutes of your time before you enable it.

Using the remote

The album list leads with Shuffle all albums — random photos from every album at once, for when you just want the photos on rather than a particular album. The Red button starts it from anywhere on that list.

What it looks like

• Slides advance on their own at 3, 5, 8 or 15 seconds, crossfade, and loop at the end, so it can be left running all evening.
• Photos are never cropped. The space a photo does not fill is a softly blurred wash of the photo itself rather than a black bar.
• Each slide is captioned in the top corner with the album, the date and who added it — Goa: on 1 May 2024 by mom — which ▲ turns off.
• Videos play with sound, and the show moves on when the clip finishes.
• Your speed, shuffle and caption choices are remembered on that television.