Announcing xpoz: An API and a web viewer for Apple's Photos.app

Let’s kick off the new year with something positive! I’m happy to announce

xpoz: An API and a web viewer for your Apple Photos.app albums.

This is the result of some hacking around with Photos.app I did earlier in 2020. After figuring out how things worked more or less, I decided to have a go at writing an API that would expose all the stored metadata and possibly serve the images as well.

This did align nicely with my determination to learn at least two new technologies in 2020, as I wrote the thing in Rust, Svelte and using GraphQL, none of which I had any exposure to previously.

Although this began as a research project out of having nothing better to do during lockdown, I do find use for it today. I’m running a release build of xpoz on a home Linux box and it is serving images from a local Photos.app library backup.

Feel free to have a look at it on GitHub. There’s no pre-built binary yet, so you’ll have to compile from source. I’m planning on adding a few more features to it, including ssl support, video playback and a couple other improvements. Feedback is more than welcome!