the:chris:walker ↩

It's been 3 years...

Apr 27, 2017

It’s my daughter’s birthday today. She is now 3 years old.

Un - Be - Lieveable.

So Happy Birthday Florence! It’s crazy you are 3 already and such a gorgeous little girl. I love you.

But I realised today that I started OPFS 3 years ago too, just before you was born.

OPFS is my vision for archiving my photos/videos in a cloud-independent way.

I love Google Photos and have all my photos there. But I don’t want that as the source of truth. I want to backup a copy. Of course this can be done easily, but then I just have a big disk full of photos. Again not too much of an issue, unless you want to find anything.

So enter OPFS, with it the vision that I will be able to have all my photos in google photos, but also keep synchronized a local copy indexed by OPFS, content-addressable so it’s dedup’d (and I can re-import with no fear of duplication). Format is less condusive to searching by hand, but the machine readable indexes (that is, JSON files) could be indexed/searched easily by many FOSS.

OPFS stores its data (the images/videos) in a content-addressable blob store, the index data in another (or the same one). Both of these store can be sync’d with any tool, FOSS or otherwise (I recommend syncthing).

Because I use Google Photos I intend to implement a sync daemon that downloads/imports new stuff and also checks/creates Collections - read Albums that match the Google Photos albums.

I also want to be able to connect multiple google accounts, because Rosie’s photos should be there too.

I have implemented Google Account OAuth for it, so Photos are private by default but can be made public if wanted, or shared with specific people via a shared collection.

Most of the backend functionality is built, the UI is a major WIP, because I keep getting distracted by new tech…

But shit. 3 years I have been working on this. I should have something to show for it by now.

Maybe in another year or two.

thechriswalker lives in Exeter, UK with his wife: Rosie, son: Orson and daughter: Florence. He likes bacon, drinks too much coffee, doesn't like spiders and enjoys solving problems. He'll use Vi over Emacs and doesn't usually talk about himself in the third person.

Code Monkey by trade, I like writing daemons and systems software. Preferably in Go. I've written a bunch of variable-quality stuff, all of which lives on Github.

If you want to get in touch, throw me an email.

Also, I am definitely now a qualified professional wood-hole-was-used-to-create-fire-recognitionist, which is totally a thing and will likely make me a billionaire in the future. So if you have some wood with a hole in it and want to know if that hole was created in the process of attempting to light a fire, then I'm your man.