A minimal, clean photo gallery for the cloud

As an avid photographer, I have a rather spontaneous tendency to share my photos with relatives & friends so they will get some idea of the what/when/where of my whereabouts; eventually satisfying their thirst for possible destination in their upcoming vacation.

I wanted to use something already existing, yet, in most cases, the price to pay for that freedom is usually hurting on many levels:

1. the real cost of the service (maintenance, downtime, availability, etc.)
2. the actual limitations of the service, including API documentation.
3. the open-ness of the service

Given these few, yet impacting variables, I decided to make my own. I started this project eating rotella. So there it was: licorice.

One last yet considerably important point: licorice should cost as little as possible to run. My target is to be able to run licorice for a year out of the free tier of my personal AWS account (excluding the domain name price) and to be installable in a few clicks (with a little help from AWS CloudFormation).

First things first, a diagram:

All of licorice relies on the following technologies and services:

licorice
---
  AWS CloudFormation

licorice-lambda-node:
---
  AWS Lambda (NodeJs + async/aws-sdk/gm/crypto)
  Amazon DynamoDB
  Amazon Simple Storage Service (s3)

licorice-web-template
---
  Amazon CloudFront
  Amazon Route 53
  AWS Identity & Access Management Roles
  Amazon Cognito

and works very well with Adobe Lightroom, which i use both on pc and mac.

Actually, this is not my first attempt to work with Lightroom and the cloud: lightroom sync with s3 windows macos

I'm polishing licorice so to release it; patience my friend !

So far, here's the release structure:

/
README.md                   # this file
licorice-assets             # cfn assets
licorice-lambda-node        # licorice lambda code in node.js + modules (ready for lambda)
licorice.png                # this lovely diagram above, much nicer than my ascii skills