Catation - an experiment in IPFS photo sharing

TODO: GPLv3 (because gowut also)

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⚠️⚠️⚠️ IMPORTANT NOTE: ⚠️⚠️⚠️ Catation is a one-off experiment built over a hackathon at WPEngine, with explicitly no official plans for maintenance or support from WPEngine. The project is released for free under GPL as an act of gratitude towards the FLOSS community. You are more than welcome to fork it & develop further on your own, as long as you adhere to the GPL license terms. The project is a quick & dirty prototype, thus it may and does use various horrible & amazing shortcuts and is certainly not ready for production-like use. ⚠️⚠️⚠️

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Catation is an experimental app for easy sharing of photo albums with non-tech people, using IPFS. The pitch tagline is "Dropbox for IPFS", or: "Easily share your cat & vacation photos with your family & friends!" (* dog photos are encouraged as well)

Running

1. Go to https://pinata.cloud, create an account and copy your new "API key" and "Secret API key" into environment variables:

   $ export PINATA_API_KEY=...
   $ export PINATA_SECRET_API_KEY=...
   

2. Go to https://bit.ly, create an account and copy your new "API key" into an environment variable:

   $ export BITLY_API_KEY=...
   

3. Start Catation GUI:

   $ go run ./cmd/gui
   

4. Scroll down and select checkboxes for the photos you want to share.

5. Click [Upload] button.

6. Observe the terminal window, and wait till a bit.ly URL shows up:

   2020/11/18 11:02:23 index.html --> /ipfs/QmXp2vE9rzPnUGucfB7zZ7pfa9uPYNjMTstmcuiFPBoYhz
   2020/11/18 11:02:23 Pinning /ipfs/QmXp2vE9rzPnUGucfB7zZ7pfa9uPYNjMTstmcuiFPBoYhz containing "index.html"
   2020/11/18 11:02:32 pinned 1/2: images/cat-2.jpg
   2020/11/18 11:02:36 pinned 2/2: images/cat-1.jpg
   2020/11/18 11:02:40 UPLOAD SUCCESSFUL! ---> /ipfs/QmXp2vE9rzPnUGucfB7zZ7pfa9uPYNjMTstmcuiFPBoYhz
   2020/11/18 11:02:40 Waiting for remaining images...
   
   
   >>>>>
   >>>>>     https://bit.ly/2K8R2Bd
   >>>>>
   

7. Copy this link and share the album with your friends and family!

Internal architecture details

The main technical idea & workflow of the app is:

1. You pick a set of photos using a (cross-platform) GUI interface (./cmd/gui)
   • The gui app wraps all the following steps, you don't need to run them manually - they're listed just to explain the architecture & data flow.
2. The app creates a simple HTML "album" of the images (./cmd/builder)
3. The photos & the album are uploaded to local in-memory IPFS node (./cmd/uploader)
4. The photos & the album are pinned using a freemium Pinata service (./cmd/pinner)
   • This makes the photos available for download even when you close your computer/laptop.
   • NOTE: This currently requires passing a Pinata token through environment variables: PINATA_API_KEY and PINATA_SECRET_API_KEY
   • TODO: Also support pinning using a Raspberry Pi you own, and/or pinning services other than Pinata.
   • TODO: Allow setting the tokens via GUI & somehow make it easier & more user-friendly
   • TODO: Give the user some way of deleting old photos from the pinning service?
5. A link to the album at the public IPFS gateway is shortened using a free URL-shortening service bit.ly (./cmd/shortener)
   • This results in a short, publicly browsable link to the album, for easy sharing with non-techie friends & family, e.g. over a text message.
   • NOTE: This currently requires passing a bit.ly token through environment variable: BITLY_API_KEY
   • TODO: Also support pinning using URL-shortening services other than bit.ly.
   • TODO: Allow setting the token via GUI & somehow make it easier & more user-friendly

The result of this process is a short URL, that you can easily share with your friends & family, to give them access to selected photos. The use of the pinning service provides a way to keep the album browsable even when you close the computer from which you uploaded the photos.

Final note: Please have fun with it, hopefully at least as much as we had when creating it! :)