Your server, your disks
Photos, faces, search and everything else live on hardware you own, in folders you can read without us.
Photostead · a photo library for your household
A home for
every photo.
Photostead keeps your family’s photos and videos on your own server, not someone else’s cloud. It’s fast and calm to browse, finds anything you can describe, and comes with an app that backs up your iPhone while you sleep.
Explore the live demo
Coming soon for iPhone
FreeYour serverNo adsNo tracking
100,000+items in one library, and the timeline stays smooth
0 bytessent to us. Your photos stay on your own server
Byte for byteoriginals are never changed, whatever you do in Photostead
Every facerecognized at home, on your hardware
01 — The library
Every moment, in the order it happened.
A justified grid keeps each photo’s true shape. Glide through years with the scrubber, zoom the grid with a pinch, and open anything in an instant, full screen, in light or dark.
- Look-alikes, stackedBursts, RAW+JPEG pairs and near-duplicates fold into one, best shot on top.
- Albums, inside albumsPlus smart albums that fill themselves, and the real folders on your disks.
- Dates you can trustEach photo keeps the local time where it was taken, wherever you are now.
02 — Search & Ask
Describe it. There it is.
Search by what’s in the picture, by words written in it, or by the prompt that made it. Or just ask a question. It all runs on your server, so nothing leaves the house to answer it.
The results above are from the demo library, found the way the demo finds them
03 — People, pets & memories
Name a face once.
Every photo follows.
Face recognition runs on your own hardware, keeps lookalikes apart instead of lumping them together, and recognizes the dog too. Every morning, Photostead brings back a day from years ago.
June36 items
Leo33 items
Maya21 items
Sam18 items
Rosa12 items
Pepper10 items
Miso5 items04 — Made with AI
The prompt stays with the picture.
Photostead reads how an image was made, from ComfyUI, Automatic1111, Forge, Midjourney, Content Credentials and more: prompt, model, LoRAs, seed and settings, one click to copy. A prompt library and a model catalog grow on their own, and the characters you invent get their own space, apart from your family.
AI-generated
Cinematic still of the same character as the reference image (Nova, an explorer in her thirties with a sleek silver bob haircut, warm brown skin and freckles, wearing a burnt-orange retro-futurist flight suit with round mission patches), standing on a ridge of red Martian dunes at dusk beside a six-wheeled rover, two small moons in a butterscotch sky, wide cinematic shot. Keep her face, hair and suit identical to the reference.
- Model
- Nano Banana 2
- Character
- Nova · 6 images
- Size
- 2,752 × 1,536
A picture from the demo library, shown with the prompt it was made from, as Photostead shows it.
05 — The household
Everyone’s photos. One home.
Each person keeps a private library, and a shared space gathers what you choose: by hand, or automatically, by who’s in the photo. Share an album with a link or a personal invitation, with no sign-up for the people you send it to.
- Auto-share rules“Photos with the kids, from this day on” goes to the household by itself.
- A vault behind a PINKept out of the timeline, search, memories and sharing.
- Links that behavePasswords, expiry dates, and location stripped from shared copies.
EverythingMineHome
Photostead for iPhone
Your camera roll,
home by morning.
Originals back up in the background, newest first, and only what your server doesn’t have yet. At home the app goes straight to your server; away, it reaches it through Tailscale. Then browse everything, with the gestures you already know.
This iPhone newest first
Your Photostead
Backed upByte for byte, to your own server: at home on your Wi-Fi, away through Tailscale.
- Originals, as they arePhotos, videos and Live Photos, the photo and its clip. Edits made in Photos stay on the phone.
- Carries on without youiOS keeps sending after you leave the app, and gives Photostead time to back up more, often overnight.
- Wi-Fi unless you say soBackups wait for Wi-Fi, unless you turn on cellular data in Settings.
- The whole library, with youBrowse the timeline, albums and people, and search or ask, all from your server.
Coming soon to the App Store
Privacy
Private by design,
not by promise.
We never see your library, because it never comes to us. There’s no Photostead cloud to sign up for, to trust, or to leak.
AI that works at home
Search by meaning, faces and reading text in pictures all run locally. A GPU helps; it isn’t required.
No cloud in the loop
Search, Ask and face recognition are answered by your own server. Nothing about your library is sent to an AI service.
No ads. No tracking.
The app and this site carry no analytics, advertising or tracking code. There is no account with us to make.
A vault for the private ones
Behind a PIN, and kept out of the timeline, search, memories and sharing until you open it.
Originals untouched
Files stay byte for byte as they arrived. Favorites, albums, tags and descriptions live in Photostead, never written into your files.
Runs on what you have
One container.
Your hardware.
Photostead runs as a single container on a home server, NAS or spare computer, with its database built in. Point it at the folders you already have; it indexes them in place, read-only if you like.
Photostead is in early access: we’re setting households up one at a time. Write to us and we’ll help you get yours running.
Your devices
- Photostead for iPhone
- Any web browser
- Links for family and friends
Photostead server
- Unraid, Docker or any Linux box
- Postgres included, nightly backups
- Search, faces and text, on the CPU
- At home, or anywhere with Tailscale
Optional GPU worker
- A gaming PC that lends its GPU
- Faster indexing of search, faces and text
- Start it when you like, stop it anytime
See it with
a real library.
The demo is the real Photostead, running in your browser on a sample household: three years of trips, birthdays and everyday moments.
Open the live demo
Coming soon for iPhone