FlashbackPrism – Revisit Today’s Photos from n Years Ago with PhotoPrism

I’ve been using the excellent PhotoPrism server for a few years now, and I find it a good way to handle photo collections. It is a self-hosted solution, with docker images available for multiple architectures, including arm64. It can happily run on a Raspberry Pi 3 or a Raspberry Pi 4.

It lacks, however, the ability to quickly present photos taken today in past years. It has no specific section nor it provides some kind of daily notification, like Google Photos. This would be, instead, an awesome way to use the collection and watch photos you may, otherwise, forget.

PhotoPrism team will probably work on this feature in the future, according to this issue. But for the moment, I wrote a little app for myself to fill this hole. As it finally does the job nicely for me, I thought I could share it. Source code is available on GitHub with GPL license.

Download

Version	Downloads	Notes
0.1.0	Android arm64
0.2.0	Android arm64
0.3.0	Android arm64
0.4.0	Android arm64
0.5.0	Android arm64
0.6.0	Android arm64
0.7.0	Android arm64	Ported to Qt 6.7.0. This fixed a few bugs.

FlashbackPrism

FlashbackPrism runs on Linux, Android, Windows, MacOS and iOS.

After the login, it allows you to browse photos taken today in previous years. In the morning, if photos are available for the current day, a notification is sent (around 8 am local time).

On Linux, Windows, MacOS and iOS, the notification is only sent if the app is actually running. For Android, a service is used, and notifications arrive even when the app is backgrounded or closed.

iOS, MacOS and Windows should work, but I only tested it quickly.

Installation

At the moment, I did not create an AppImage to distribute the Linux version. You should build it yourself. You can build with my Qt dev docker image if you want (available in docker hub).

For Android, you can use the packages above or download from GitHub. I build these packages with my dev docker image for the proper Qt version.

No package is available for iOS, MacOS and Windows, but you can built it yourself from the source code.

Building

The app can be built with Qt 6.6.3 (currently). This is the procedure to build on Linux:

git clone https://github.com/carlonluca/flashbackprism.git
cd flashbackprism
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build
cd build
</path/to/Qt/bin>/qt-cmake ..
make

Have fun! 😉