Gallery Delivery

Self-hosted photo gallery delivery for photographers.

Gallery Delivery is a standalone PHP app for private client galleries with password protection, previews, and ZIP downloads. It is designed for simple file upload deployments.

Gallery Delivery originally started as a small personal project built for my own photo delivery workflow. It went through several private iterations before being cleaned up and published as an open-source project. Public releases therefore start in the 0.x version range.

Current public release: 0.2.5

• PHP 8.2+
• no database
• no framework
• no Composer required for normal usage
• Apache and Nginx support
• upload-and-run deployment

• private password-protected galleries
• per-gallery UUID links
• optional gallery names
• per-photo downloads
• full gallery ZIP download
• lazy ZIP rebuild (rebuild only when needed)
• JPG, PNG, WebP uploads
• generated JPG previews (GD optional)
• encrypted admin-visible gallery passwords
• gallery enable/disable
• gallery password rotation
• auth-version invalidation on password change
• gallery unlock session TTL
• file-based persistent rate limiting (admin + gallery unlock)
• multi-disk storage support
• cross-disk gallery lookup by UUID
• duplicate UUID conflict detection across disks
• cached storage stats for dashboard performance
• lightweight sidecar live stats
• global background (file or URL)
• per-gallery custom background URL
• Apache/Nginx hardening examples

Upload the downloads directory to your web root, for example:

/var/www/html/downloads/

Set storage via config.php and/or environment variables.

Default:

/mnt/ssd/photos/downloads

The storage path must be writable by PHP.

Open:

https://your-domain.com/downloads/

Complete the setup form to initialize admin access.

Default mount:

/downloads/

Main routes:

/downloads/admin
/downloads/<gallery-uuid>
/downloads/<gallery-uuid>/photo/<photo-id>
/downloads/<gallery-uuid>/full.zip

• PHP 8.2+
• writable storage directory
• Apache or Nginx

Required PHP extensions:

• fileinfo
• openssl

Recommended:

• zip
• gd
• mbstring

The active storage disk determines where new galleries are created.

Existing galleries remain accessible by UUID even after changing the active disk.

Dashboard listing scans configured storage disks and can detect duplicate UUID conflicts.

ZIP files are not rebuilt after every upload/delete.

Flow:

photos changed -> ZIP marked outdated
Download all -> ZIP rebuilt if needed, then downloaded

ZIP build uses lock files and atomic rename to avoid partial archives.

• Photo downloads can use client-side progress UI.
• Large ZIP downloads are kept browser-streamed (no full ZIP Blob buffering in JS memory).
• Server-side download authorization remains enforced.
• HTTP Range requests are supported in PHP download responses.

• Keep gallery storage outside public web root.
• Do not expose storage via direct web alias/symlink.
• Keep app/ and deploy/ blocked from direct HTTP access.
• Keep internal lock/tmp/metadata files inaccessible via web server.

See:

• .htaccess
• deploy/nginx.conf.example

gallery.json from existing installations is loaded and normalized with defaults where possible.

New fields are added naturally during normal write operations. Existing UUID links remain unchanged.

Back up both:

• application files
• storage directory (photos + metadata)

GPL-3.0