Barebones alternative to Instagram
I’m not really on Instagram. I have an account, but I don’t really use it. I thought to myself, “How hard would it be to make a little website that I can easily post photos to from my iPhone?”. It wasn’t that hard. Here is an overview of what I did:
- Setup Apache on a spare server
- On DNS server, setup AAAA record for the web server’s ipv6 address.
- Setup Postfix and Dovecot on the spare server
- On DNS server, setup MX record to point to spare server
- On spare server, setup procmail to process incoming e-mails. I’ll replace procmail at some point as it is no longer maintained.
- With procmail recipe, identify messages from me that contain a photo and pass the email to a processing script written in Python
- In processing script, strip out EXIF info and save photo. Also save metadata (e-mail subject is caption, body is description)
- After processing, kick off another Python script to rebuild the photos site. Script creates thumbnails for photos and assembles dead simple HTML pages that have 10 photos a piece.
- On iPhone, setup a new e-mail account with credentials from the spare server.
- From iPhone Photos app, select a photo and e-mail it to the special account on the spare server so that it will be posted.
Voila! You can see the result at https://stu.photos