ImageStoria
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A private home for photos and videos

Nothing is ever cropped.

Every picture is shown whole, in its own shape. Originals are never changed. And the files live in storage that belongs to you.

Start free trial Try the demo

Free trial, then a small monthly price. Or run it yourself, free for personal use.

Thirty photographs, thirty shapes. Tall, wide, square, panoramic. Each one whole.
A tall waterfall drops from a green cliff into a pool below.
Seljalandsfoss
A wide waterfall falls between mossy green cliffs onto a dark gravel riverbed.
Skógafoss from the river
A white church with a red roof stands above a field of purple lupins with sea stacks in the distance.
The church above Vík
A person in a wool jumper walks away along a black sand beach towards misty sea stacks.
Walking at Reynisfjara
A green headland and dark sea stacks under a pink evening sky seen from above.
Late light over Reynisdrangar
A blue river winds through a narrow canyon with steep moss covered walls.
Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon
Blue and white icebergs float in a glacier lagoon under an overcast sky.
Ice on the lagoon
Clear chunks of ice rest on black sand with waves breaking behind.
Diamond Beach
A chestnut Icelandic horse with a long mane stands in a grassy valley.
Icelandic horse
A jagged mountain ridge rises behind a wide flat of black sand under grey cloud.
Vestrahorn across the sand
An empty two lane road dips and rises towards a wall of red cliffs.
Road into the canyon
A woman in a brown hat seen from behind looks out over a wide desert plain.
Looking out over the canyons
A freestanding sandstone arch stands on a slickrock bowl under a fiery orange sunset sky.
Delicate Arch at sunset
The underside of a stone arch glows orange above a deep canyon at sunrise.
Sunrise through Mesa Arch
Two huge sandstone arches join overhead with a tiny figure standing beneath them.
Double Arch
A long row of red sandstone fins and spires sits below snow capped mountains.
Fins below the La Sal mountains
The Milky Way stretches across a starry sky above a long thin rock arch.
Milky Way over Landscape Arch
A dirt road winds across red desert seen from a high ledge with a balanced boulder below.
Dirt road from above
A sandstone monolith shaped like a temple catches warm light on a wide desert plain.
Evening in Cathedral Valley
A shaft of sunlight falls through a narrow slot canyon onto glowing orange sandstone.
Light beam in Antelope Canyon
A five storey pagoda rises above an old cobbled street with a lit lamp under an orange evening sky.
Yasaka pagoda at dusk
Two long rows of glowing white paper lanterns hang under a wooden roof.
Lanterns at Yasaka Shrine
A red shrine gate with lit lanterns stands at the top of stone steps under a deep blue sky.
Fushimi Inari before sunrise
A paved path curves through a tunnel of bright orange torii gates.
Under the torii gates
A woman in a kimono with a white parasol walks away down a quiet street of wooden townhouses.
Quiet street in Gion
A wooden temple stage stands above a hillside of red maple trees at sunset.
Kiyomizu-dera above the maples
A dirt path bends through a tall bamboo forest with light filtering from above.
Bamboo grove
A mossy stone lantern stands beneath branches of yellow and orange maple leaves.
Stone lantern under the maples
A small covered boat crosses green water framed by bright red maple leaves.
Boat on the Hozu river
Two people in kimono walk along a leaf covered path under orange and red maple trees.
Maples by the path

What it is built on

Six promises, kept in every corner of it.

Most photo apps cut your pictures into squares, keep them on their disks and read them with their machines. This one was built the other way round.

  1. Whole pictures

    The grid gives every picture the room its shape asks for. A panorama stays a panorama. A tall portrait keeps its head and its feet.

    No square tiles, no cut corners, anywhere. Not in the library, not in a story, not in a reel.

    A white church with a red roof stands above a field of purple lupins with sea stacks in the distance.

    The dashed square is all a square grid would keep. Point at it to get the rest back.

  2. Untouched originals

    The file you upload is stored exactly as it arrived. The editor has light, color, curves, grading and 78 looks, and it never writes over anything.

    An edit is a new copy that sits beside the original.

    A chestnut Icelandic horse with a long mane stands in a grassy valley.A chestnut Icelandic horse with a long mane stands in a grassy valley. With the look Teal shadows.A chestnut Icelandic horse with a long mane stands in a grassy valley. With the look Ember.A chestnut Icelandic horse with a long mane stands in a grassy valley. With the look Silver retained.

  3. Your own storage

    Your library lives at yourname.imagestoria.com. The pictures themselves are stored in your own DigitalOcean Space: your bucket, your keys, your bill.

    They sit there in plain folders with their own file names, so they are yours whether or not you stay.

    your-space/
  originals/2026/11/…/IMG_4032.HEIC
  display/2026/11/….webp
  thumbs/2026/11/….webp

    The first line is your file, byte for byte.

  4. Your own AI

    Captions, search by meaning, faces and places come from a small worker program on a computer you own. Or, if you prefer, from a cloud AI provider you choose, with your own key.

    It is off until you turn it on, and nothing is shared between libraries.

    A freestanding sandstone arch stands on a slickrock bowl under a fiery orange sunset sky.

    A freestanding sandstone arch stands on a slickrock bowl under a fiery orange sunset sky.

    archrockcloudsutaharches

    Blue is what a machine read. Amber is what a person said.

  5. Stories and reels

    Put pictures in order with your words between them. Read a story as a page, play it full screen with music that comes with the app, or turn it into a reel: one video file, tall or wide.

    Share a story with a link when you want to. The link opens that story and nothing else.

    A red shrine gate with lit lanterns stands at the top of stone steps under a deep blue sky.Fushimi Inari before sunrise

    In a reel the picture floats whole over a blurred copy of itself.

  6. People and roles

    A library is private. Nobody gets in unless you invite them, and each person gets a role and their own switches for upload, edit, tag, comment and download.

    • OwnerEverything, including people and settings
    • EditorAdds, edits copies, tells stories
    • CommenterLooks, likes and comments
    • ViewerLooks

See everything it does

The viewer

Look closer.

A round magnifier follows your pointer across the whole picture. Click, and you are walking around the original at full size, in the same window.

Move over the picture. On a phone, drag a finger across it.

A small covered boat crosses green water framed by bright red maple leaves.

A story

Five days on the Amalfi coast

Positano, Amalfi, Atrani and a day up in Ravello. Lemons everywhere, boats in the bay, and more stairs than we counted.

Pastel houses climb a steep hillside above the sea with pink bougainvillea in the foreground.
Positano from the road
Three small white boats sit on deep blue water seen from high above.
Three boats
The lights of a cliffside town glow above a calm sea under a pink and blue dusk sky.
Positano at blue hour
Rows of blue and white beach umbrellas line the sand beside turquoise waves seen from above.
Umbrellas on Spiaggia Grande
Two scooters are parked in front of yellow and faded pink house walls.
Yellow wall, two scooters

Stories

Tell it in order.

A story is a set of pictures with your words between them. A trip, a year, a weekend in the kitchen. Start one by place, by day, or picture by picture.

  • Read it as a page. A title, your text, and every picture whole.
  • Play it full screen. Ten pieces of music come with the app, or add your own.
  • Make it a reel. The story as one video file, tall or wide.
  • Share one story with a link. It opens that story and nothing else. Delete the link and it ends.

Open a story in the demo

More about stories and reels

The hosted way

Three steps to a library of your own.

Pick a name

It becomes your library's address. Try one.

Claim it

Small letters, numbers and hyphens.

Connect your Space

Create a Space at DigitalOcean and paste its key. We check it works before anything is stored. The guide takes ten minutes.

Upload

Drop files or whole folders on the page. Dates, places and cameras are read from the files. Then invite the people you want in.

See it work in the demo

Pricing

One plan. Everything in it.

The whole app, for you and everyone you invite. Pay by card, by the month or the year. Or with USDC, by the year.

Monthly

$0.00

One library

What you bring

A DigitalOcean SpacePaid by you, to DigitalOcean. 250 GiB of storage is included.
about $5a month
A worker or an AI keyOnly if you want pictures read. A computer you already own will do.
optional

We do not sell storage and we do not mark it up. How pricing works

Or run it yourself

The app is source-available. One Docker image and Postgres, free for personal and other non-commercial use.

Self-hosting

Straight answers

The questions worth asking.

If yours is not here, the help pages go deeper.

Where are my photos?

In your own DigitalOcean Space, a storage bucket that you create and that DigitalOcean bills you for. The original files are stored there exactly as you uploaded them, beside smaller copies made for fast viewing.

They are not on our disks. Our servers run the app and keep your library's database: titles, tags, comments, stories and captions.

What can you see?

We will be plain about this. The app runs on our servers, so your pictures pass through them when you upload, to make the viewing copies. To do that we hold a key to your Space. It is sealed before it is stored and no page ever shows it again.

We do not look at libraries. The admin panel shows counts and sizes, never pictures or titles. But this is not end-to-end encryption and we will not call it that. If you want no one else's server involved at all, run the app yourself. It is the same app.

What happens if I stop paying?

When a paid period ends you get a few days of grace. After that the library is paused: nobody can open it, and nothing is deleted. Your files stay in your Space, which was never ours. Pay for a new period and the library opens again as you left it.

Can I leave and take everything?

Your files are already with you. They sit in your Space under originals/year/month/ with their own file names, and any tool that reads S3 storage can download them. There is nothing to export and nothing to ask us for.

What you wrote about them (titles, tags, stories, comments) lives in the library's database. There is no export button for that yet. Write to us and we will send you the database file, which the self-hosted app can open. More about leaving

Why do I need my own Space, and what does it cost?

Because then the pictures are yours in the plainest way: in an account with your name on it. You can look at the files without us, back them up without us, and leave without asking.

At DigitalOcean a Spaces subscription is about $5 a month. That includes 250 GiB of storage and about 1 TiB of transfer, which is room for many tens of thousands of photos. More storage is about 2 cents a GiB a month. DigitalOcean's price list is the one to trust.

Is there a phone app?

No. ImageStoria is a web app, and it is built to work well on a phone. You can add it to your home screen, where it opens full screen like an app. There is nothing in the App Store or on Google Play.

What is the AI doing?

If you turn it on, it writes a caption for each picture, names the scene and the things in it, makes search by meaning work ("a dog on a beach"), groups faces for you to name, and suggests a place for pictures that have none.

It runs in one of two ways. A worker is a small program on a computer of yours that asks your library for pictures to read. Or you give your library a key for a cloud AI provider you choose: Claude, OpenAI, Google, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible address. Faces and search by meaning need a worker. What a machine said is always shown in blue, and a person's correction always wins.

Can I pay with crypto?

Yes, with USDC on Ethereum, Base or Solana. USDC pays for the yearly plan: you sign one transfer from your own wallet for twelve months. Nothing renews by itself and we never hold a key of yours. To pay by the month, use a card, through Stripe. How billing works

Is it open source?

It is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial licence. You can read the code, run it and change it for personal and other non-commercial use. You may not sell it or offer it to others as a hosted service. The code is on GitHub.

Give your pictures the whole frame.

Start free trial Try the demo

Free trial, then a small monthly price.

Bunches of orange, yellow and purple carrots with green tops lie on a market stall.
Carrots at the market
Piles of beetroot and carrots are stacked on a market table.
Beetroot and carrots
A hand pours coffee from a glass jug into a speckled cup held in the other hand.
First coffee
Two hands shape a round of bread dough on a floured worktop.
Shaping the loaf
Hands hold a ball of dough on a floured dark surface next to eggs and a rolling pin.
Dough, eggs and a rolling pin
Fresh cut tagliatelle and a folded sheet of pasta lie on a floured board beside a knife.
Fresh tagliatelle
A hand stirs sliced tomatoes and onions in a black frying pan on the hob.
Tomatoes and onions in the pan
A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in.
Everyone at the table
A table from above with a pan of food, wine glasses, a candle and hands holding cutlery.
Seconds