Before the cloud made photo sharing trivial, I built and ran my own. A self-hosted photo sharing platform — because the alternative was trusting a third-party service with personal photos and hoping they’d still be there in ten years. The project covered web development, storage management, user authentication, and the perpetual question of how to organize and display a growing photo library in a way that’s actually useful. Running your own infrastructure for something this personal teaches you things about backups, uptime, and data ownership that you never think about when someone else is hosting it.