Filesystem Apps - Own Your Own Data
In the past few years, I've built a few applications that I call "Filesystem Apps".
A Filesystem App is an application that presents a specific and useful interface to a directory or directory hierarchy. The directory structure and the files it contains are the entirety of the long-term state of the application. For example, if you keep your photos organized into directories representing albums, perhaps you could imagine a file viewer tailored for this purpose.
This is in contrast to most applications that store their state in proprietary databases or in cloud services. Those services and apps will be obsolete one day - then what do you do with all the time you've invested in their platform? You have to repeat it with the next thing or work to extract your data from application A and translate it to the format that application B requires. What a drag!
Filesystem Apps keep your files under your control. When implemented well, Filesystem Apps retain or even improve the end-user's control of their own data. Source data should be able to be mounted read-only in application containers. If you want to allow write access, native metadata management (e.g. modifying EXIF data to set title or description) should be preferred over metadata sidecar files. When metadata sidecar files are unavoidable, they should follow simple conventions with future application in mind. They should be in YAML format for simple human and machine parsing. This should lead to emergence of metadata standards.
Filesystem Apps will not appeal to everyone. The people who are most interested are those who want to retain control of their source data, regardless of future application. They appreciate the security that Filesystem Apps can offer, keeping their data fully within their control but presenting an ideal experience to interact with those files. A Filesystem App power user will appreciate the ability to use standards-compliant metadata mechanisms and/or a text editor as a CMS, with instant updates.
Filesystem Apps are delivered as Docker images or over the AWS Marketplace in the future. When run as a Docker image, simply run make and follow the prompts to configure your source directory to mount in the container. When run from the AWS Marketplace, you just need to configure the S3 bucket to act as your source data.
Photodirs
Photodirs is a Filesystem App centered around browsing images and videos as well as serving images with dynamic resizing and video transcoding. It combines a modern web interface to your media files, organized by their directory hierarchy. To capture metadata around the directory title, description, thumbnail images, etc. an album.yml file may be placed any directory. Photodirs is also a full-featured photo hosting solution, with dynamic resizing and video transcoding. It has native HEIC, RAW, and wide-ranging video format support. Metadata such as title and description are read from the media files themselves, keeping annotations and titles inside the original files for future use.
Photodirs is always watching for changes to its source directory, so putting new images online is as simple as creating a folder and copying in some images or video files. There are no other actions to take.
To get started, clone the repository and run make to configure the source directory and choose options, like read-only or read-write.
Esstraba
Esstraba is a Strava archive export viewer. Strava allows you to download a .zip file containing every activity's GPS data and attached media. Point Esstraba at that .zip file, and it will deliver a fast-filtering view of every activity, leading to a detail page showing stats, media, and an interactive 3d route map.
Strava allows you to re-download your .zip archive once per week, so keep that in mind.
Musics
Making music is a hobby of mine. As with any art, it's not done until it's shown to the public. As part of the music-making process, I like to listen to my work-in-progress in different places and situations, like the car or in different headphones. Uploading those songs to services like SoundCloud or Bandcamp takes time, so I had the idea to just build a web frontend to the directory where I render my work-in-progress music to. This would let me open it using any web browser anywhere in the world. I think providing that look into work-in-progress is an interesting thing for an artist to ponder.
Musics also supports an album.yml file in any directory to provide a custom title, description, artwork, and track listing for the album.
Musics isn't just for musicians. I also have a directory hierarchy of .wav and .mp3 files of other peoples' music that I've downloaded or ripped from CDs, and Musics lets me listen to my catalog anywhere.
steinkamp.us
My blog platform is somewhat filesystem-based. The posts are written in Markdoc, an extension of Markdown created at Stripe. Each post is in its own .md file in the source code repository. This makes writing posts a breeze in my favorite text editor, and revision history is stored in GitHub. This approach maximizes portability through the Markdown standard files that can easily be used with future content systems.
What's Next?
What other filesystem apps can you think of? Let me know here!