Muleline: Self Hosted Photos

MACCAM LLC | GritWerk

In-app purchases

About this app

Your photos. Your files. Your server.

Muleline is a self hosted photo and file platform built to replace bloated self hosted stacks. One Python process, one SQLite database. No PostgreSQL cluster, no Redis, no separate machine learning microservice required on the server.

This app is the mobile client. To use it, you run your own Muleline server, on a home NAS, a spare machine, or a small VPS. Setup is one Docker command or pip install muleline, and takes about five minutes. Full instructions are at muleline.win.

WHY SELF HOST YOUR PHOTOS

Cloud photo apps trade your privacy for convenience, and most start charging once you pass a free storage limit. Muleline gives you the same convenience, auto backup, face recognition, instant search, without handing your library to a company you don't control. Your photos live on storage you own.

PHOTOS AND FILES IN ONE APP

Auto backup from your phone on your own schedule
Chunked, resumable uploads that survive a dropped connection
SHA256 deduplication, so the same photo never uploads twice
Full EXIF data: camera, lens, GPS, date, aperture, shutter speed
Albums, shared links, and a real file manager, not just a photo grid
Trash and recovery, so a deleted photo is never gone for good
Map view, categories, and full text search across your whole library
Family support for shared libraries across a household
Dark mode

AI THAT RUNS ON YOUR HARDWARE

Face recognition finds and groups people automatically, using HOG and dlib detection with clustering
Tag a person once, and Muleline recognizes them in every future photo
CLIP powered semantic search finds photos by what is in them. Search "dog on the beach" or "sunset over mountains" and get exactly that, no manual tagging needed
All of it runs on your own server. Nothing is sent to a third party AI service

STORAGE, YOUR CHOICE

Muleline is not locked into one storage provider. Point it at local disk, Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO, Google Drive, Dropbox, or any WebDAV or SFTP server. Switch backends without losing your library, or run more than one at the same time.

OPEN SOURCE, NO LOCK IN

Muleline is MIT licensed. Read the code, self host it, modify it, or install it as a Python package inside your own app with pip install muleline. There is no paid tier blocking core features and no company that can shut off the service.

WHO IT IS FOR

Home lab owners, developers, and anyone who backs up family photos and wants to actually own the result. If you have outgrown a free cloud storage tier, or you are tired of paying rent to access your own photos, Muleline gives you the same experience on infrastructure you control.

Requires a self hosted Muleline server, free and open source, Docker or pip install. Full docs and quick start guide at muleline.win.

What’s new

Cloud backup and sync for your self hosted server.