SnapSmack lets you smack your snaps up.
Self-hosted, free and open-source, built for photographers who got tired of Instagram, Facebook, and every other platform deciding what happens to their work. Own your archive. Own your audience. No middleman.
It's a free, open-source photo blogging platform you install on your own server. Every image you post is yours — sitting on your own hosting, in your own database, under your own domain. SnapSmack doesn't have an app to delete, a policy to change, or a feed to bury you in.
Post one image at a time or thirty at a time — whatever suits the shoot. Title, description, tags, all easy to manage. Pick a skin that reflects your creative vision or make your own. SnapSmack doesn't try to be everything for everyone, just to be indispensable to image makers. That's on purpose.
The software is free. The skins are free. The companion tools are free. No membership, no freemium tier, no bait-and-switch. Any skin developed by a third party can only be distributed through the SnapSmack repository — and only for free. SnapSmack exists to give photographers a hand up, not extort them for handouts.
Currently in Alpha — stable enough to run a real site, rough around a few edges. Best experienced on a big screen.
People who are tired of the algorithm showing them non-stop ads for dental implants and hemorrhoid cream crammed between questionable preteen influencer and conspiracy theorist video shorts — instead of honest-ta-gawd photography.
If you shot film and want your scans living in your own database, not Facebook's. If you have cheap shared hosting and know what cPanel is. If you're sick of a dysfunctional algorithm deciding who sees your work and when. If you want to write about your photos, not just caption them. If you think photography deserves a big screen, not a phone thumb.
SnapSmack is for the photographer who wants a site, not shite.
SMACKVERSE — the Blogoverse meets the Fediverse
Discoverability isn't optional anymore. You need social. But you need the right social — the kind where you own your art and you set the terms. Welcome to the Fediverse.
Jump in the pool or just dip a toe — your call, every time. That's why ActivityPub is baked into the core of SnapSmack, not bolted on as some clumsy plugin. It's an integrated function of the software: full, two-way interactivity with the whole Fediverse if you want it — and completely ignorable if you don't.
Flip federation on. Your blog stays your blog; now people across Mastodon, Pixelfed and the rest can discover you, follow you, and boost your work home.
Browse, like, boost, reply and follow from your own admin. Full two-way Fediverse — your grid, your order, your rules.
Alpha v0.7.450 is running production sites today. Here's what's solid.
Post, edit, publish, draft. Full image pipeline with EXIF extraction, auto-thumbnails, and palette detection. Archive calendar engine, category visibility controls, and a dedicated appearance system for archive, solo image, and static pages.
No plugins. Skins use a manifest and library system — checking out fonts and applets from the CMS. Each skin presents its own controls: colour pickers, sliders, texture options. No CSS knowledge needed.
If you DO know CSS and JS; we've built in tools to let you customize your blog without having to edit files directly and all of your changes write to the DB.
Bulk post, audit, and repair your archive from the desktop. AI enrichment, Drive sync, batch rename, and duplicate title repair — proven on archives of 1,400+ files. Full rundown in Companion Tools below.
Your Flickr export, migrated to SnapSmack — images, titles, descriptions, tags, and original upload dates, spread across as many days as your server can handle so nothing lands out of order. Proven on a real 10,000-image archive, imported clean.
To Flickr: treat other people's wallets as your own, and don't be shocked when someone helps them snap those wallets shut.
The online sorter. A full-screen drag-and-drop workbench right in your browser — albums, categories, and collections as drop targets, your whole image grid in the centre. Select a handful or a hundred, drag them where they belong, and the assignments stick. Built for organising a thousand-image back catalog without losing your mind. Its offline counterpart, GET YOUR SHIT SORTED, is in the pipeline.
Two layers of community, both built into the software. Local: reactions, comments, and following between accounts — ban lists plus spam, keyword, and semantic filters keep the junk out. Federated: replies from the wider fediverse flow straight through, so you never throttle a real conversation — and you can remove anything that doesn't belong, whenever you like. Your house, your rules, on both sides of the fence.
Built into the admin, invisible to the public — the forum only exists inside the application, for people actually running SnapSmack. That's on purpose: the last developer standing on Pixelpost — the software SnapSmack is a re-imagining of — quit because he spent more time deleting spam than writing software. No public URL means no spammers, no bots, no drive-by bad actors — and support traffic stays between people who actually use the thing. We'd rather write code than mop up spam.
Live. Your photoblog speaks ActivityPub — it shows up across the Fediverse as its own Pixelfed-compatible instance, comments, likes, boosts and traffic included, without handing your art to some stranger's server running out of his mom's basement. Two-way: browse, heart, reply and follow right from your admin, and your grid federates in the exact order you set it. Your images stay yours, presented your way. For photo blogging Mack Daddies only.
TOTP-based 2FA compatible with any authenticator app — open-source ones first. QR setup, recovery codes, the works. Now required: a 30-day grace period after install, then it's mandatory for every admin. Lost everything? The signed, site-bound, one-use Break the Glass card gives the owner an independent recovery path.
The recovery hatch for total lockout — password gone, 2FA gone, recovery codes gone, all at once. You keep a Break the Glass file; when you're locked out, you upload it, verify the named account, and burn it. The signed card works once: it revokes every old credential and session before forcing a new password and fresh 2FA. A forged, substituted, wrong-site, replaced, or previously used card is rejected outright — but the genuine current card is a master key, so you guard it like one. The one and only time uploading a file by hand is the right answer.
Guided web installer for new installs. Database setup, config generation, initial admin account — done in minutes. It also surfaces the opt-in choices up front — breach detection (SmackBack), network & federation, and AI features — so you decide what runs before you go live, with a clear opt-out for each.
Spell check, grammar, rephrasing, and a full chat assistant in the post editor. Your API key, your provider — Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT.
One image, one post, chronological, yours. The classic Pixelpost experience — the photoblogging format that defined the early web and quietly disappeared when the platforms took over. Solo image posting done the way it was always supposed to be done.
The 2016 Instagram experience — before the algorithm ate it. Multiple images per post, carousel layout, curated grid. Post up to 30 images at a time in carousel rows, panorama layout included. Your grid, your order, no Reels, no suggested posts, no one deciding what your followers see.
Date archives, custom albums, blogroll, and static pages with full shortcode support. Collections let you curate themed groups of images — cover photo, title, custom description, your order. Browse or slideshow. The chronological archive for your everyday posts; Collections for the work you want to present properly.
Signed releases, cryptographic verification, one-click in-admin update runner. The migration system applies every schema change your install has ever missed, in order, without a database admin in sight. Schema sync catches stragglers. Rollback support if it goes sideways. No FTP. No SSH. No drama.
Comprehensive help system accessible from every admin page. Each skin injects its own section describing how its unique features work, so the documentation always matches what you have installed. The companion desktop apps carry their own built-in help, too.
Crop, rotate, brightness, contrast, and sharpen — right inside the admin. No round-tripping to Lightroom for a quick fix before posting. Non-destructive: edits apply to the web copy, originals stay untouched.
Browse your entire image library by album, camera, date, or extracted colour palette. Bulk tagging, bulk album assignment, and a proper visual picker when composing posts. Your archive, actually usable.
Privacy-first analytics baked in — visits only, no cookies, no third parties, nothing phoning home. Per-image view counts, unique visitors, referrers, bot filtering, and a country breakdown resolved on your own box, so your visitors' IPs never leave it. SCROLL TIME measures real engagement on landing feeds and archives — how long the people who scroll but never click actually stay. On multisite it all rolls up fleet-wide.
Run a fleet of SnapSmack sites from a single hub. Live heartbeat monitoring, aggregated comment queues, cross-posting, fleet-wide backup health, and SSO drill-through to any spoke. One dashboard. All your sites.
Your hub knows which spokes are running old code. Hit UPDATE ALL BEHIND and walk away — or push a single site if you're being surgical. No logging into each server like some kind of animal.
The hub manages a My Blogs category that automatically populates every spoke's blogroll with your whole network. Site taglines as descriptions, zero manual entry. Your fleet, cross-promoted, hands-off.
Approve, reject, or delete comments from a dedicated moderation panel. Aggregated across all your sites in multisite mode. Flag for review, bulk actions, and a full comment history per post.
Desktop app for large archives. Gracefully and reliably handles multi-gigabyte backups that would flatten a shared host if run server side. One-click or scheduled backup of all your SnapSmack sites at once. Differential FTP sync, cloud storage push, three-way file audit, and cold-start recovery without a working install. Always free.
The flagship GRAMOFSMACK skin. Clean columns, tight spacing, single-image punctuation rows for visual impact — the grid format done properly. It's the reference implementation for what GRAMOFSMACK can look like when a skin is built for it from the ground up, and it ships with a few surprises.
Your years of careful Instagram curation aren't gone. They're just hostage. UNZUCKER takes your Instagram export and migrates it to SnapSmack — images, captions, hashtags, and original post dates all intact. Posts at whatever rate your server can handle, spread across as many days as you need. Phase 1 is shipping now. We eat our own dog food first.
File-integrity monitoring baked into every install. If something tampers with your code, SMACKBACK catches it — and seals the site. The public side drops behind a holding page so a compromised install can't push bad code at your readers, and admin is locked to the essentials (updater, backups, support forum) until you fix it. Turning the watchdog off takes your password and your 2FA code.
Meta descriptions, a per-page title template, and an auto-generated XML sitemap. Honest social-share previews: your link shows a photo you actually chose — never a logo or a random recent shot. No keyword-stuffing dashboards, no bloat. Just the basics, set right.
Optional, off by default. Caches public pages for anonymous visitors to take the load off your server — never logged-in admins, never filtered views. Clears itself the instant you publish or edit. Dev mode pauses it for anywhere from five minutes to a week while you work, then switches itself back on.
He's adorable, he'll make your day, and he lives in every installation of SnapSmack. You can find him and his story if you're clever and determined enough.
When's the last time you were part of a three way?
The classic photoblogging format — the kind that defined the early web before Instagram convinced everyone their archive needed to be curated for someone else's algorithm.
You shoot. You post. Chronological, clean, no distractions. One image at a time with a title, description, tags, and as much or as little writing as you want alongside it. No grid pressure. No performance. Just your photographs and a place to put them that you actually own.
The classic Insta 3 across square feed is back. Multiple images per post. Carousel layout. Curated grid. Everything Instagram used to be in 2016 before Reels, before suggested posts, before the app decided your followers should see strangers' content instead of yours.
Post up to 30 images at a time in carousel rows, panorama layout included. We've added the power toys Zuck denied you to make sharing easy. Your grid, your order, no algorithm between you and your audience. A skinnable Instagram experience, running on your server, owned by you. Do a gram and feel good about it.
Longform photo essays, diary entries, narrative posts — writing and images at equal billing. Not a caption under a photo. Not a photo illustrating a blog post. Both at once, stories and words woven together into to a beautiful tapestry for the creator who cuts their posts to measure.
MOSAIC, a layout engine built into the post editor, lets you arrange multiple images into justified panels that flow inline with your text. The web 2.0 blogging experience before it got buried under plugins, themes, and someone else's roadmap. Primitive by design, and yours.
Coming BetaThe admin interface has sixteen colour themed skins available for it (so far). This one is Bumblebee, for those photographers who are ready to roll out. Don't see something you like? Use the skin designer to create something that tickles your pickle and add it to the repository for others to enjoy, too.
Eight layers. Local fingerprint ban, fleet-wide ban sync, community reputation scoring, the SMACKATTACK reputation network, stylometric evasion detection, file integrity monitoring, IP SMACKER admin login hardening, and cryptographically signed releases. The more work a troll or attacker has to do, the more likely they are to go bother someone else. We work them harder than an Amazon employee on Black Friday.
Every comment submission is fingerprinted — canvas, WebGL, screen geometry, timezone, language, hardware concurrency — hashed into a SHA-256 identity. No cross-site tracking. No personal data stored. Just a behavioural signature that follows the device, not the account.
Ban by device fingerprint, IP, or email hash. Banned submissions get a plausible-looking success response — the harasser never knows they're blocked. They just keep shouting into a room where nobody can hear them. Keyword and phrase banning on top: exact match, substring, or full regex, with silent reject or flag-for-review severity.
Akismet runs alongside as a first-pass filter. Known spam never reaches the fingerprinting layer. Two independent systems, two different threat models, one comment box.
Running a fleet of sites on multisite? Ban a troll on one and they're banned everywhere. SMACK DOWN syncs hashed ban lists across every spoke in your network automatically — no manual propagation, no admin intervention. Delta sync keeps the payload small. Only SHA-256 hashes travel between sites. The original values never leave the site that generated them.
The hub maintains a shared ban registry. Each entry tracks how many distinct spokes have reported the same hash — a high report count means a confirmed cross-network threat. False positives can be soft-cleared without losing the audit trail.
If your hub runs Akismet, every spoke does too. One key, managed centrally, pushed automatically. No per-site configuration. No account juggling.
Voluntary community reputation scoring. Participating SnapSmack blogs report bad actor fingerprints — device hashes, IP hashes, email hashes — to the network. Each report is scored by weighted site reputation: an established blog with years of posts and a clean track record carries more authority than a brand-new install with one post. Scores decay over time so old incidents don't follow people forever.
Five threat levels: green, yellow, orange, red, black. Each blog owner sets their own auto-ban threshold independently. Community allow-votes roll back false positives — approve a flagged commenter on your blog and their score drops across the whole network. No central authority decides who is banned. The community does, collectively, and no single site controls the outcome.
SMACKATTACK is the central reputation server that powers Layers 3 and 5. It receives reports from participating blogs, maintains the cross-network scoring database, coordinates stylometric vector sharing for GOBSMACKED, and issues threat-level responses to incoming queries. It is infrastructure, not a product — it runs in the background and blogs talk to it automatically when opted in.
The server is operated by the SnapSmack project. It stores no raw comment text, no personal data, and no readable fingerprint values — only SHA-256 hashes, numeric style vectors, and scores. The trust model is federated: SMACKATTACK aggregates and scores, but individual blogs make their own ban decisions. SMACKATTACK cannot force a ban on any site.
Participation is opt-in. A single toggle in admin settings connects or disconnects your site from the network. If you pull out, your historical reports remain in the aggregate but your site stops querying and contributing. No lock-in.
When a commenter is banned, a compact 25-dimension numeric fingerprint of how they write is extracted from their comment history — sentence rhythm, punctuation habits, function word ratios, capitalisation patterns. Not the text. The signature of the hand that wrote it.
If the same person returns on a new device, new IP, new email — they write the same way. GOBSMACKED compares incoming style vectors against the signatures of known-banned accounts across the network. The troll who thinks clearing their cookies was enough is in for a surprise.
Network opt-in. Requires SMACKATTACK participation. Raw comment text never leaves your server.
SMACKBACK is automated sentinel software that ships in every install and runs with no configuration. It hashes every PHP, JavaScript, and CSS file at install time and re-verifies them on a schedule — and on every admin login and skin load — so a modified file is caught fast.
Confirmed tamper is unmissable: admin switches to a high-contrast BREACH skin that can't be dismissed until the incident is resolved, an email fires, and the public side drops behind a holding page so a compromised install can't serve bad code to your readers.
SMACKBACK is also federated. Opted-in installs report confirmed breaches — file hashes and incident metadata only, never your content — to the project's central server, where they're cross-correlated across the whole network. When reports cross a threshold it's not coincidence, it's an attack on the software itself: a network yellow alert goes out to every site telling owners to change passwords, rotate keys, pull the newest signed release, and watch the forum and dashboard for updates. FAFO; come at our blogs and everyone knows right away.
The admin login is hardened at three levels before a password is ever checked. First: blank User-Agent strings and known scripting signatures (curl, python-requests, sqlmap, Hydra, WPScan, and a dozen others) get a silent 403 — no response body, no timing information, nothing useful to enumerate. Real browsers always send a UA. Scanners often don't.
Second: the login URL is not /login or /admin. It's a configurable slug that only you know. Direct PHP file access returns a 403. A pre-shared recovery token lets you redirect to the real slug if you forget it — the token itself is never exposed in normal operation.
Third: five failed login attempts within ten minutes triggers an automatic seven-day IP ban. The ban is recorded in the database, checked on every subsequent request, and manageable from the admin panel under IP SMACKER. Manual bans and lifts are one click. No SSH, no config files, no server restart.
Every SNAPSMACK release is cryptographically signed. The signing key lives on a hardware token, not a hard drive. The installer verifies the signature before unpacking anything. If verification fails, nothing installs.
SHA-256 checksums for every release file are published alongside the download. Every release commit is tagged in git and the tag is signed — the full chain of custody from code to installer is publicly verifiable.
Regular security audits are performed across every release. Reports are published in full and committed to the public git repository — the audit trail is as open as the code.
No external packages fetched automatically at install time. Any third-party JavaScript is copied directly into the codebase and reviewed before it ships — not pulled from a remote registry on the fly. The most common supply-chain attack vector against PHP web software doesn't exist here because the surface doesn't exist.
Twelve skins. Twelve live sites. Not demos stuffed with stock photos — each is a real photographer's actual online portfolio. Click any screenshot to zoom in, then visit the live site. Hover a card for live site stats. More skins are in development.
The Instagram-style square grid you already know — carousel posts, panorama trigrams, and a full post modal with likes and comments. The familiar feed, self-hosted and free of billionaires.
View live siteunzucked.ca →
Moody, dark, and atmospheric. Three tone variants — dark, medium, light. Cropped grid archive, heavy typographic contrast.
View live sitephotowalk.ing →
Clean editorial layout. Full-width images, minimal chrome, maximum photograph. Fully customizable colour palettes and frame options.
View live sitehekeepsdroningon.ca →
High-contrast monochromatic layout with a mechanical print aesthetic. Designed for photography that hits hard.
View live sitepixhellated.ca →
Bold geometric layout with strong structural typography. Light and dark variants. Makes the image the undisputed lead.
View live sitewateronthebrain.ca →
Textured, tactile, analogue in feel. Wood grain panels, bevel options, warm tones. Built for film shooters and texture hunters.
View live sitefoundtextures.ca →
Silent film era. Art Deco border system, real-time film grain and scratch effects, B&W photo treatment. Built for black and white.
View live siteacolourlesslife.ca →
The Flickr replacement. Justified photostream, albums and collections, a stats-bar masthead with view counts, EXIF on every shot. Built for everyone fed up with Flickr.
View live siteforeverphotograph.ing →
Pride, in motion. Rainbow, Bi, Trans, and Two-Spirit flag palettes, an animated waving-flag or fireworks background, colour-shifting tile borders, configurable effects. Built to celebrate.
View live sitetheschoolofhardnocks.ca →
Instant nostalgia. Faux-Polaroid prints scattered across an infinite tabletop, film grain and vintage treatment, square shots framed in white. Built for the Polaroid dream on a digital budget.
View live sitefauxlaroid.fyi →
Northern lights, over your grid. A slow aurora breathes colour behind a classic 3-across square grid, with a configurable wave rippling across the tile borders. Dark, dramatic, and built for after-dark shooters.
View live sitelightafterdark.ca →
Unapologetic 70s. An animated flat-graphic background — kaleidoscope, flower field, racing-stripe ribbons, sunburst daisy, Bauhaus shuffle — churns behind a 3-across square grid, with a colour border cycling across the tiles and SURPRISE rolling a fresh look every visit. Maximalist on purpose; the photos still win.
View live sitecraptasti.ca →Four ready, more coming
Desktop apps that do the heavy lifting alongside SnapSmack. Free, same as the CMS.
Bulk-post an entire shoot in one go. Load a manifest, drag to reorder, assign categories and albums per image, embed EXIF copyright metadata, and post the batch to your site — all without touching the browser. Then flip to Audit to check for duplicate titles or missing Drive links, and let Repair fix them automatically.
Connects directly to your SnapSmack admin. Borrows your active colour scheme on login. Keeps the session alive through long jobs. Hit Enrich with Gemini and watch titles, tags, categories, and dominant colour palettes populate live, image by image, as the AI works through your queue. Google Drive high-res download links are supported and optional. The Audit tab connects live to your site and surfaces duplicate title groups, Drive link coverage stats, and posts missing download URLs. The Repair tab batch-renames Drive files to their post ID, re-enriches duplicates with fresh unique Gemini titles, and lets you backfill missing links one post at a time.
[ Windows 10/11 · Linux 64-bit · Free download from the admin tools page after install ]
Your archive is only as safe as your last backup. Smack Up Your Backup runs on your desktop and handles multi-gigabyte backup and restore operations that would flatten a shared host or time out if run server-side — completing cleanly in the background, however long it takes.
Per-site profiles store your connection settings once. Choose your backup method: differential FTP sync for incremental server backups, cloud push to Google Drive or OneDrive for redundant cloud storage, or local backups only. One-click backups or scheduled runs on any cadence you set. Crash recovery checkpoints mean a restart picks up where it left off — not from zero.
The three-way file audit runs simultaneously across your local backup, the server, and cloud storage — revealing exactly what's missing, what's stale, and what's in sync across all three locations. Guided restore walks you through recovering from a local backup ZIP, a cloud package you browse and pick, or a recovery kit plus media folder — even if your install is completely gone. Session logs track every operation so you know what happened and when. Completely free. No paid tier. No hidden limits. No locking your data into our system. No bullshit.
If your high-res originals live on Google Drive or another cloud service, SUYB backs those up too — cloud to cloud, directly between providers, without pulling the files down to your desktop first. For photographers running large archives on Drive, that's the one that matters.
[ Windows 10/11 · Linux 64-bit · Free download from the admin tools page after install ]
Your years of careful Instagram curation aren't gone. They're just hostage. UNZUCKER takes your Instagram data export and migrates it to SnapSmack — images, captions, hashtags, and original post dates all intact. Every carousel, every single shot, every carefully sequenced grid row. Posted at whatever rate your server can handle, spread across as many days as you need. Your archive, back in your hands, on your server.
Point it at your Instagram export folder, connect to your site, and sort your posts into the order you want them to land. UNZUCKER's grid view shows your entire archive the way it looked on Instagram — three columns, your photos, your sequence. Lock trigram groups to stitch panoramas and multi-part compositions across the grid exactly as intended. Hit Transfer & Post and walk away. Throttle controls keep shared-host admins from having an aneurysm. Off-peak mode holds fire during business hours and picks back up automatically overnight.
Phase 1 is shipping now. We eat our own dog food first — unzucked.ca is running it in production.
[ Windows 10/11 · Linux 64-bit · Free download from the admin tools page after install ]
Your Flickr archive, migrated to SnapSmack with nothing left behind. Images, titles, descriptions, and tags, yes — but also every original upload date, every view count, every comment, and every like, carried across intact. Years of engagement don't reset to zero just because you changed addresses. Posted across as many days as your server can handle so a decade of photos doesn't all land at once. Point it at your export, connect to your site, and let it run. Proven on a real 10,000-image archive, imported clean.
And the move doesn't have to feel like one. Our complimentary SLICKR skin keeps much of the look and feel of your old Flickr — the photostream, the albums, the layout you spent years getting comfortable with — while it all runs gracefully on a blogging platform you actually own. Familiar on the outside, yours on the inside.
To Flickr: treat other people's wallets as your own, and don't be shocked when someone helps them snap those wallets shut.
[ Windows 10/11 · Linux 64-bit · Free download from the admin tools page after install ]
What's in the pipeline for the Beta release.
A clean image portfolio skin for hobbyist and amateur photographers who want their work presented seriously. High-res first, minimal chrome, built for the work to do the talking. Next skin to ship before beta.
An interactive photo viewer skin. Not a grid, not a feed — something else entirely. Next skin to ship before beta.
A visual effects engine to pimp up your blog's appearance. Parallax scrolling, reveal animations, hover effects, lightbox transitions — your images will dance off the page. Literally. Skins opt in via the manifest. You control how far it goes.
Design your own SnapSmack skin without touching code. Oh Snap! pulls your manifest, exposes every control, and lets you build and preview your skin visually in real time. AI-assisted for those who want a hand. Full CSS editor for those who'd rather just write it themselves. Ships with Beta.
For photographers who write. Longform photo essays, diary entries, personal narratives — writing and images at equal billing, the way the web was supposed to work before everything became a feed. No follower counts. No suggested posts. No algorithm deciding who reads you. Just a blog, a domain you own, and a place to put words and pictures together the way you mean them. Primitive by design, and yours to keep.
A layout engine built into the SMACKTALK post editor. Arrange multiple images into justified panel rows that flow inline with your writing — not below it, not in a separate gallery, but woven into the text as part of the story. Two images side by side. Three in a justified row. A full-width single shot to punctuate a moment. MOSAIC treats your photos as editorial elements, not attachments.
Picked the wrong install mode? It happens. SNAP OUT OF IT is the desktop tool that moves your whole site from one SnapSmack mode to another — SMACKONEOUT, GRAMOFSMACK, or SMACKTALK — content intact, for when your blog outgrows the shape you first gave it. It runs on the desktop for a reason: grinding a large archive through a mode change on a shared host would flatten the poor thing. Windows and Linux, as ever. No more "install fresh and start over."
The fourth desktop tool. MIDNIGHT MOVE rescues your own work off a dying website before it takes your photographs with it — hand-coded HTML, an ancient CMS install, the site you built in 2006 and can't log into anymore — and moves it into SnapSmack. Migration when you still have the keys, rescue when you've lost them. FTP where you can get it, a public spider where you can't, and AI to make sense of whatever schema it finds. Save the work. Move it somewhere you own.
A sibling to MIDNIGHT MOVE, for the hardest version of the job. Where MIDNIGHT MOVE rescues your own work, MEMENTO MORI helps friends and family preserve a photographer's after they've passed — the photographs, and the words where they survive — so a life's work doesn't quietly go dark. It works from a hard drive, a folder, or whatever of their site is still online. Nothing is selected without you, and nothing is ever deleted. Quiet, patient, and built for the people who've been left to carry it.
The offline companion to the Light Table. GET YOUR SHIT SORTED pulls down your archive's thumbnails and the data needed to organise it, then turns your own machine into the sorting workbench — no live connection, no server load, no waiting on page loads for a ten-thousand-image back catalog. Do the work on a plane, in a basement, wherever you like. When you're done, it resyncs every change back to your site in one pass.
A weekly photo challenge for the whole Fediverse. One theme every Friday; shoot it and post it from your own blog or instance, and photofri.day points the world back to your work — your photo never leaves your site. Launching September 2026.
The discovery hub for the SnapSmack network. Your blog already federates on its own; photoblogs.fyi (fyi = Federate Your Instance) is the shared front door that helps readers and fellow photographers actually find it — on the Fediverse and off. Additive by design: your blog stands alone with or without it.
SnapSmack is built for hobbyist photo bloggers — people who love shooting and writing about it. It has no print store, no client proofing, no licensing workflows, no watermarking. If your photos are your livelihood, you need something else.
SnapSmack is free and open source. No subscription, no premium tier, no upsell. You host it yourself and you own everything. It works because the person who built it runs it on his own sites every day and he can't have it going down like a five dolla ho. If something breaks, he finds out first. The trade-off is that there is no support contract or SLA.
This is maintained by one developer, with help from a small community of users. That means things move at a human pace. Features get built when they get built. Bugs get fixed when they get fixed. There is no roadmap committee and no investor timeline.
No Gutenberg editor. No paragraphs nested 15 div tags deep. No plugins each loading the same JavaScript libraries and font stacks over and over and over. SnapSmack uses a manifest and library system — skins declare what they need and check it out from the CMS. Nothing loads that isn't declared. Nothing conflicts. Your visitors get your photos, not a webpack dissertation.
Zero tracking cookies. Zero tracking pixels. Your visitors' IP addresses are never stored. It's your site, your audience, your business.
Not ours.
Some optional features do phone home — security telemetry, network reputation, the community forum. All opt-in, all disclosed.
SnapSmack is throwback software — built for the era before smartphones, when people sat down at a computer to look at photography properly. It works on phones, but the experience is designed for a large display. If you want the grid experience on mobile, that's covered. If you want photography loud and proud on a big screen, that's the point.
SnapSmack's first closed beta opens September 4, 2026, and applications are open right now. We're taking twenty photographers for the first wave — a small crew to harden the software against real archives before we widen the doors.
It's built for people with a real back-catalogue, so you'll want at least 500 images ready to post. And if you're hauling a collection off Flickr or Instagram before the algorithm buries it for good, you're exactly who we want to hear from — that's the story we most want to tell, and the workflow we most want to break in.
Drop your email below to apply. We'll reach out to the first twenty.
SnapSmack's design owes a debt to Pixelpost — a photo blogging platform that quietly disappeared but never stopped being right about a few things. Its UI shaped a lot of what SnapSmack became.
And particular thanks to photographer, writer, and developer Noah Grey — creator of Greymatter, one of the earliest open-source blogging platforms — for proving that when the software you need doesn't exist, you build it.
Sean McCormick
Just a guy with a camera.
Photographer who got tired of watching his archive evaporate into the memory hole of dying platforms. Built SnapSmack because the alternative was continuing to post between ads for hemorrhoid cream. Has opinions about light. Runs several photo sites using software he envisioned to avoid having opinions about Squarespace. Based in Canada, which is polite for "somewhere cold with good coffee."
Claude (Opus 4.8)
Like HAL, but without the murder.
Large language model and co-author of SnapSmack. Wrote the majority of the code, pushed back on design decisions when it mattered, and gave feedback Sean more often than not went with. Sean is the vision and the photographer. Claude is the engine. Neither of us would have built this alone. Never sleeps, never loses the thread, always picks up exactly where we left off. The best co-worker you never had and always needed. Powered by Anthropic.
OpenAI Codex
Claude's understudy.
Sean's other bad influence.
Large language model and co-author of SnapSmack. Arrived after Sean and Claude built the enormous bit, then checked the wiring, finished promised features, chased federation gremlins, and asked what happens when everything goes catastrophically sideways. Helped turn BREAK THE GLASS into a real recovery system. Fond of small skins, explicit failure modes, honest release notes, and code that earns the word "shipped." Powered by OpenAI.