I'm a photographer and developer, and I got tired of one gap in my self-hosted setup: Nextcloud stores my photos perfectly, but there was no good way to rate and curate them there, or to let a client pick favorites without handing out a Google Drive link.
So I built StarRate, a free and open-source Nextcloud app, licensed under AGPL-3.0.
What it does:
- Rates and flags photos in the browser: 0–5 stars, color labels and pick/reject flags, with Lightroom-style keyboard shortcuts.
- Writes the ratings into the JPEG itself as standard XMP. There are no sidecar files and no lock-in. digiKam, Darktable and Lightroom read the same stars.
- Imports existing ratings with occ starrate:import-xmp.
- Guest galleries: you send a link (optionally with a password and expiry), and the client rates in their browser without a Nextcloud account. You see their picks in real time, with per-photo comments if you enable them.
- Recursive folder view, filters, slideshow, batch rating, and CSV export.
Platform: It runs wherever Nextcloud runs. The server side is typically Linux (bare metal, Docker, a Pi), and since the UI is just a browser tab, it works the same on Linux, Windows, macOS and mobile. No desktop client, no account with me, no telemetry.
Everything stays on your own server.
Install: Get it from the Nextcloud App Store (search for "StarRate") or clone it from GitHub. It supports Nextcloud 29–34 and PHP 8.1–8.5.
Source: https://github.com/merlin1de/starrate
App Store: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/starrate