Images. Together. At the Edge.
You both take photos. You want to blog the day before bed. But at night the day is split across two phones, and merging and sifting through them is the worst part of the trip. imaedge is one link both phones can dump their originals into, fix the timestamps on, and review side by side.
The trip in four acts.
If you've ever tried to keep a shared photo album on the road, you know all four of these. We did. That's why imaedge exists.
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Apple and Google leave you stranded.
Apple shared albums compress the images. Google Photos wants everything synced. We needed one temporary place where several phones can send originals without turning the whole phone into the source of truth.
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One of us spends the night uploading.
Once everything has been collected on one phone, that person uploads it into WordPress, picture by picture. Later the same originals become a printed photo album. Twelve days in, that's a job. It used to be me, every single time.
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Your German mobile provider loops through Frankfurt.
A 6 MB original from a Mexican beach café takes a minute over the roaming SIM that backhauls to Germany. The screen sleeps, the upload dies, the progress bar lies. Tomorrow morning we start again.
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A screenshot from this morning lands at the end.
Screenshots carry the timestamp of when they were saved, not when the thing happened. So the snapshot of the bus ticket sits a week after the bus ride. Manual reordering, every single time.
Four small certainties.
A list of accounts, sign-in flows and ZIP exports we deliberately do not have. What is left is the part that matters.
One URL, many phones.
Share the link with anyone in earshot. Whoever has it can add, sort, retry, export. No accounts, no admin roles, no permission dance.
Resumable on bad WiFi.
Files queue locally, hash in the browser, upload in 1 MiB chunks and resume after every drop. Close the tab whenever.
Original bytes, untouched.
No re-encoding, no EXIF stripping, no surprise compression. The byte stream from your phone is the byte stream in storage.
Names, not names.
Every device gets a quiet animal handle.
Quiet questions.
Who can see a collection?
Anyone with the link. There are no accounts and no admin roles. The link is the only key. Collection pages are noindex, never linked from anywhere, and never appear in any list.
What happens to my original files?
They are stored unchanged. No re-encoding, no EXIF rewrite, no compression. We hash the file in the browser before upload, and again on the server after assembly. If the hashes disagree, nothing is finalised.
Why not Apple or Google Photos?
Apple shared albums compress images. Google Photos expects a sync workflow. imaedge is for the narrower job: collect original files from several phones, use them in WordPress while travelling, and keep them ready for a later photo album.
What if I lose signal mid-upload?
Files are queued in your browser first. Each is chunked and uploaded as 1 MiB pieces. After a drop, the client asks the server which chunks already landed and resumes only the missing ones. Close the tab and it picks up where you left off.
How do I get the photos out?
Every collection has an /export
page, a plain HTML index that lists every image in current order with a direct link to each original. Same permission as the main link. No separate token, no ZIP.
Can I host it myself?
Yes. imaedge is open source, so you can run your own instance if you want.