Hey r/PHP

I built a small self-hosted web app for my family to store and share private memories — YouTube links (mostly unlisted), photos, and Google Photos albums — all in one place with proper access control.

Why I built it: We were spreading family videos across WhatsApp groups, shared Google Drive folders, and random YouTube playlists. Nobody could find anything. I wanted one clean catalog that everyone in the family could actually use.

What it does:

• Add YouTube videos with auto-filled metadata (title, thumbnail, description) via YouTube Data API
• Organize everything into events (birthdays, trips, holidays) with their own media galleries
• Fine-grained access control — each video/event/photo can be shared with everyone, specific people, or kept private
• Invite-only registration via 6-digit codes — no strangers can sign up
• "What's new" notifications — a bell icon showing everything added since your last visit
• Thumbnail uploads for events and media cards — auto-resized, EXIF-corrected; no full photo storage, your albums stay in Google Photos
• Dark/light theme, "Remember me" sessions
• Video participants — tag family members (or just names for non-members)
• Comments on videos and events
• Mobile-friendly via Bootstrap 5

Tech stack: PHP + MySQL (PDO), Bootstrap 5, no frameworks, no Composer, no Docker. Runs fine on any shared hosting.

Demo: https://serwer440097.lh.pl GitHub: https://github.com/alexfreecode/family-video-archive

It's a small project, but it solved a real problem for my family. Happy to answer questions or take feature suggestions.

The code is fully open source under MIT license — contributions welcome. It's intentionally dependency-free so anyone can deploy it on the cheapest shared hosting.