AnalogDB

The collection of film photography

About

AnalogDB provides a large collection of curated analog photographs to users through a REST API interface. Beyond just returning photos, AnalogDB enables discovery of similar images, adds keyword labels, extracts dominant colors, and allows for filtering, sorting and searching across all images.

Design

AnalogDB makes use of several technologies and services to enable a full featured product.

Data is scraped from reddit and ingested with a python scraping service built on top of praw. In addition to scraping, this service is responsible for transforming raw images, extraction of keywords and colors, uploading to AWS S3, and creation of resources through the backend api. Images from S3 are served from CloudFront CDN for quick and reliable delievery.

The core backend application is written in Go and makes use of chi as the HTTP router. It exposes handlers that are responsible for parsing authentication headers, filtering incoming requests, querying databases, and returning JSON responses. Upon upload, all images are transformed with the ResNet-50 CNN to create embeddings which are stored in a Weaviate vector database. The backend is packaged as several docker containers and hosted on a VPS.

The frontend web application is built with Next.js, making use of server-side rendering and incremental static regeneration for quick loading pages. Zustand is utilized for state management. All styles are built from scratch with CSS Modules.

API

Full documentation for the API: https://api.analogdb.com/

Example

curl https://api.analogdb.com/posts

{
   meta:{
      total_posts:5842,
      page_size:20,
      next_page_id:1684684780,
      next_page_url:"/posts?sort=latest&page_size=20&page_id=1684684780",
   },
   posts: [
      {
       id:7378,
       title: A Forest on the Coast | Portra 400 | Canon 1V | 50mm,
       author: navazuals,
       permalink: https://www.reddit.com/r/analog/comments/13p9lme/a_forest_on_the_coast_portra_400_canon_1v_50mm/,
       upvotes: 89,
       unix_time: 1684804283,
       nsfw: false,
       sprocket: false,
       images: [
       {
         resolution: low,
         url: https://d3i73ktnzbi69i.cloudfront.net/505e03d0-e6c2-4596-97d2-77d6831e802c.jpeg,
         width: 477,
         weight: 720,
       },
       {
         resolution: medium,
         url: https://d3i73ktnzbi69i.cloudfront.net/0149e7c5-cefe-4cfa-a731-c7696c067d98.jpeg,
         width: 716,
         height: 1080,
       },
       ...
       ],
       colors: [
       {
         hex: #5d5933
         css: darkolivegreen
         percent: 0.33687689
       },
       {
         hex: #c6c5b1
         css: silver
         percent: 0.24639529
       },
       ],
       ...
       keywords: [
       {
         word: portra
         weight: 0.2
       },
       {
         word: forest
         weight: 0.2
       },
       ...
      ],
    },
    ...
  ]
}

Deploying

There are prebuilt docker images at evanofslack/analogdb:latest

Please see docker-compose.yaml for an example compose deployment with necessary variables and services.

Developing

Docker and docker-compose can be utilized for a consistent development experience.

To spin up the backend and database:

docker-compose -f docker-compose-dev.yaml up

To run backend unit tests:

go test ./...

To serve the frontend locally:

cd web && npm run dev

Contributing

All contributions are welcomed and encouraged. Please create a new issue to discuss potential improvements or submit a pull request.