Pic-O - A Lightweight Photo Sharing Platform

Pic-O is a simple, elegant, and self-hosted photo publishing platform built with Laravel 12 and Bootstrap 5.x.
It’s designed for photographers, families, and self-hosters who want an easy way to organize and share their photo collections without the complexity or overhead of full-fledged photo management suites.

Unlike heavy solutions that try to automate everything, Pic-O keeps things simple:
you create albums, fill them with your favorite photos, and publish them beautifully.

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Why Pic-O?

Modern gallery tools often aim to do too much: commenting, device syncing, editing, and even AI retouching.
Pic-O focuses on doing one thing exceptionally well: Make your photo archives effortlessly viewable and shareable.

It’s built for simplicity, privacy, and performance, and designed to look great on any screen.

• 🪶 Lightweight -- built on Laravel: fast to deploy, simple to maintain
• 🖼️ Organized your way -- easily create and managed dynamic albums
• 🔗 Share securely -- login-based access and private, tokenized share links
• 💫 Beautiful viewing -- animated masonry grid with slideshow and photo details on demand
• 📱 Mobile friendly -- smooth navigation and management from any device
• 🐳 Easy to host -- ships with a ready-to-use Docker container for quick setup

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Philosophy

Pic-O is built on a few core principles:

• 🖼️ Your photos are yours -- we just help you show them off
• 🛠️ Open source and community-driven -- licensed under MIT for everyone to use and improve
• ⚡ Performance, usability, and privacy -- should be defaults, not options

If you value clarity over clutter, ownership over cloud dependency, and beautiful simplicity,
Pic-O might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

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Setup

Pic-O can be up and running in just a few minutes. You have two simple options depending on your environment and preferences.

Option 1: Run with Docker Compose (Recommended)

The repository includes ready-to-use docker-compose files that build both the application and the database containers in one step.

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/Xirt/Pic-O.git
cd Pic-O

This will:

• Clone the Pic-O repository to a new directory named "Pic-O"
• Navigate to the new directory containing the Docker Compose files

Note: You can modify ports, volumes, or environment variables in the docker-compose.yml and .ENV file in the "Pic-O"-directory to fit your environment.

2. Launch the stack

docker compose up -d

This will:

• Build and start the MariaDB database container
• Build and start the Pic-O app container
• Expose the app on http://localhost:8080 by default

3. Verify installation

Once the containers are running, verify everything is working by opening your browser and visiting:

http://localhost:8080

You should see the Pic-O setup screen allowing you to create an initial admin account. Once created, you will be redirected to the login screen.

Option 2: Use the prebuilt Docker image

If you prefer a faster, ready-made deployment, you can use the published image on Docker Hub.

1. Create new database

Create a database for Pic-O in MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or alike.

2. Run the Pic-O container

Modify below command to connect to the created database and ensure the photo and storage paths exist. Afterwards, run the command from the terminal.

docker run -d \
  --name pico_app \
  -p 8080:80 \
  -v /path/to/your/photos:/var/www/resources/photos:ro \
  -v /path/to/your/app-storage:/var/www/storage/app:rw \
  -e DB_CONNECTION=mysql \       # e.g., mysql, postgresql or mariadb
  -e DB_HOST=<db_host> \         # hostname or IP of your database
  -e DB_PORT=<db_port> \         # usually 3306 for MySQL/MariaDB, 5432 for PostgreSQL
  -e DB_DATABASE=<db_name> \     # your database name
  -e DB_USERNAME=<db_user> \     # database username
  -e DB_PASSWORD=<db_pass> \     # database password
  -e APP_HOST=<host_or_domain> \ # URL of your Pic-O instance
  xirtnl/pic-o:beta

This pulls the latest version of Pic-O and mounts your local photo directory inside the container.

3. Verify installation

Once the containers are running, verify everything is working by opening your browser and visiting:

http://localhost:8080

You should see the Pic-O setup screen allowing you to create an initial admin account. Once created, you will be redirected to the login screen.