March 10, 2026
Pixels, petty wars, and page loads
Show HN: DD Photos – open-source photo album site generator (Go and SvelteKit)
Fast, ad-free photo albums spark cheers—Windows rants and “no Hugo” shade ensue
TLDR: A coder launched DD Photos, a fast DIY photo website that needs no server, winning fans who hate slow, bloated apps. The comments split between praising the simple, static approach, roasting Windows Photos, and tossing playful shade at Hugo—while others asked whether it scales to giant albums.
A fed‑up photographer built DD Photos, a do‑it‑yourself site that turns folders of pictures into a clean, fast photo album with swipey galleries, captions, and shareable links—no server or database, just static pages. The post hit Hacker News, and the crowd arrived with feelings. The loudest cheer? Speed and simplicity. One user torched the default Windows Photos app as “sluggish to death,” threatening to nuke their install and go Linux, which had the thread nodding like, same. Another fan applauded the choice to skip a heavy backend and keep it read‑only and fast.
But the real spice? A drive‑by trophy for “not using Hugo,” a popular website generator. A commenter joked this looked over‑engineered compared to the old days of Jekyll templates, then doubled down by congratulating the project for not picking Hugo. That little jab birthed a mini culture skirmish: modern stack lovers vs. old‑school static site purists.
Practical voices asked if this neat, static approach can handle huge albums and long viewing sessions. Meanwhile, a veteran of ThumbsUp said they’d try DD Photos because captions had been a pain elsewhere. Bonus points from privacy hawks: the tool strips hidden photo data like GPS when creating lightweight WebP versions. Between the anti‑bloat rants, “no Hugo” shade, and nostalgia for Yeoman/Jekyll days, the vibe was clear—keep it fast, clean, and drama‑free… even if the thread wasn’t.
Key Points
- •DD Photos is an open-source static photo album generator built with Go and SvelteKit.
- •Users curate photos elsewhere, export folders as albums, and run a Go tool (photogen) to create WebP images and JSON indexes.
- •The site provides responsive grids, a PhotoSwipe lightbox, captions via photogen.txt, permalinks, keyboard navigation, and theme toggling.
- •The generator extracts EXIF data, strips metadata from outputs for privacy, and performs concurrent resizing with goroutines and WaitGroup.
- •Deployment produces a static site (HTML/CSS/JS) requiring no server code or database, suitable for Apache or AWS S3 hosting.