PhotoHub

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PhotoHub is the desktop application of the photo domain. It is a pure client of morfPhoto: it never reads the photo files, never runs ExifTool, never touches SQLite. It finds morfPhoto on the LAN by its morfBeacon capability (photo_index) - no hard-coded address - and talks to its /api/v1 HTTP contract.

Typical deployment architecture

Windows workstation                 Linux ARM64 (Raspberry Pi)
───────────────────                 ──────────────────────────
C:\Users\frede\Pictures\  ←── Samba/SMB ───→  /mnt/photos/   (read-only mount)
                                               morfPhoto       (indexer, HTTP API)
PhotoHub  ──────────────────── HTTP /api/v1 ──→ morfPhoto

• Photos stay on Windows, never moved or modified by morfPhoto.
• morfPhoto mounts the Samba share read-only and never writes to Windows folders.
• PhotoHub runs on Windows and uses a path mapping system (File > Path mapping…) to translate local Windows paths (C:\Users\frede\Pictures\…) into Linux mount paths (/mnt/photos/…) before sending them to morfPhoto's API.

Setting up network access (assistant)

Network sharing is the step that most often trips people up: the Windows account name differs from the profile folder, the IP is unknown, mount syntax is unfriendly. The Network access assistant (File > Network access assistant…) does it for you, since PhotoHub runs on the very PC that holds the photos:

1. It auto-detects the PC name, the LAN IP and the Windows account.
2. It creates the read-only Windows share of the photo folder in one click (a UAC elevation prompt appears).
3. It generates the Raspberry Pi commands (mount, then fstab to make it permanent), pre-filled with the right values, ready to paste.

The only thing left to type is the password: your Windows sign-in password (or your Microsoft account password if that is how you sign in). A PIN does not work for network access, and Windows rejects an empty password. The share stays read-only: morfPhoto can never modify your photos.

What it does

• Discovers morfPhoto by capability on the local network (UDP heartbeats).
• Manages the watched folders: declare a folder, enable/disable it, remove it (a soft retire that preserves history - files are marked missing, never deleted).
• Drives indexing: trigger an incremental or full pass and follow its state.
• Shows the library at a glance: photos present, cameras, lenses, active folders, missing files, and the result of the last indexing pass.
• Path mapping (File > Path mapping…): automatically translates Windows paths into Linux server paths. Configured once, persisted in Windows preferences (registry).
• Network access assistant (File > Network access assistant…): creates the read-only Windows share and generates the Pi mount commands (see the dedicated section above).
• Optional enrichment: if a service announces the photo_analytics capability (morfAnalytics), a button opens its advanced Photo analysis. No hard dependency: PhotoHub works fully on its own.

morfPhoto refuses (403) any folder outside the allowed roots declared in its own configuration; PhotoHub simply surfaces that message.

Build

Needs Qt 6 (Widgets, Network). No other dependency.

cmake --preset mingw        # or linux / linux-arm64
cmake --build --preset mingw

Run

./build-mingw/PhotoHub.exe   # Windows ; ./build/PhotoHub on Linux

Start it on a network where a morfPhoto instance is announcing itself, and it appears in the source list automatically.

License

GPL-3.0-only - © 2026 morfredus (Frédéric Biron).