photos.kennethreitz.org

A personal photography portfolio that organizes your work by the gear, places, and subjects that define it. Powered by EXIF metadata and AI. Codename: ExifTree.

Live: photos.kennethreitz.org

Features

• Browse by gear — Every camera and lens gets its own page with infinite scroll
• AI-powered metadata — GPT-4o-mini generates titles, descriptions, and tags for every photo
• Tag cloud — Thousands of AI-generated tags with word cloud discovery
• Cities — GPS coordinates are reverse-geocoded to browsable locations, grouped by country and state
• EXIF everywhere — Camera, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, date taken
• Photo manager — Bulk select, visibility controls, faceted filtering by camera/lens/year
• Search — Full-text across titles, AI descriptions, and tags
• Infinite scroll — Shuffled, session-stable ordering across all pages
• Collections — Organize photos into curated sets
• Keyboard navigation — Arrow keys between images, O for original download

Stack

• Django 6 + django-bolt (async ASGI server with API)
• PostgreSQL on Fly.io (also used as Celery broker)
• Celery for async image processing and AI description generation
• Tigris (S3-compatible) for image storage
• HTMX for infinite scroll, vanilla JS where needed
• OpenAI GPT-4o-mini with structured output for image metadata

Management Commands

manage.py import_folder /path/to/photos     # Bulk import from disk
manage.py import_flickr <username>           # Import from Flickr
manage.py ai_describe                        # Backfill AI descriptions
manage.py ai_describe --tail                 # Watch and describe new images
manage.py geocode                            # Reverse geocode GPS to cities
manage.py cleanup                            # Run cleanup rules
manage.py dedupe                             # Remove visual duplicates
manage.py reprocess                          # Re-process stuck images

Development

brew install redis
brew services start redis
cp .env.example .env  # Configure DATABASE_URL, AWS keys, etc.
make run

Deployment

Deployed on Fly.io with two processes (web + worker).

fly deploy