What is PixelHop?
Sharing a photo
- Drop, paste or link an image and you get a short, readable link.
- Photos taken on a phone carry their exact GPS location and camera details. PixelHop removes that hidden data before anyone can see it, without re-compressing your picture.
- Several files at once become an album.
Editing a photo
- The built-in studio compresses, resizes, crops and converts.
- It also blurs faces, reads text (OCR) and removes backgrounds.
- All of it runs in your browser, so the photo stays on your device until you choose to upload it.
Running it yourself
- PixelHop is a single ~16 MB program, with the database built in.
- Copy it to a server, start it, done. No PHP, Python, MySQL or cron jobs.
Good for you if you:
- share screenshots and photos on chats, forums, Discord or GitHub;
- want a ShareX destination you control;
- care about what your photos give away.
Features
- 📍 Location removed, quality kept.
- Strips EXIF, XMP and IPTC from JPEG, PNG and WebP by rewriting the file container, never re-encoding the pixels.
- Sideways phone photos are turned upright first.
- 🔗 Every link you need.
- Readable ids like
beach-sunset-x7Kp2Q.
- A direct link, Markdown, HTML, BBCode and a QR code.
- Open Graph tags so previews look right on Discord, X and WhatsApp.
- 🎬 Videos & PDFs too. Screen recordings, phone videos and PDFs get a page, a preview and a link. Videos are stripped of their location and shrunk to 720p in the background; PDFs are compressed. Big files upload in resumable pieces.
- 🧾 Reports / tickets. Give an upload a ticket number and a note, and get one link for everything plus a ready-to-paste list for WhatsApp or LINE.
- 🗂️ Albums. Upload several images and share one gallery link. Edit the title, description, cover and order afterwards, or make an album from any selection.
- 🔒 Private or password-protected. Per image: unlisted (default), only you, or behind a password. Locked files can't be hotlinked.
- 📈 View stats. Views per day and the sites that link to your image, without tracking visitors.
- 📐 Resize on the fly.
/i/photo.jpg?w=800&format=webp makes and caches any size.
- 📱 Installable app. Add PixelHop to your home screen and share photos to it from any app. iPhone HEIC photos are converted automatically.
- ⏳ Self-destruct. Delete after 10 minutes, an hour, a day, a week or a month.
- 🙋 No account needed.
- Guests get a private delete link for every image, also remembered in their browser.
- Accounts add a gallery with search, sorting, renaming, bulk delete and a storage quota.
- 🎨 Photo studio.
- In the browser: compress, resize, crop, convert (JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF), adjust and rotate, blur & pixelate, color palette, QR code generator, OCR in 30 languages, several at once (tesseract.js) and background removal (@imgly). Nothing is uploaded unless you press Upload result.
- On the server, for signed-in users (optional
tools/ai-server.py): background removal in about a second (rembg), automatic face blur (OpenCV), magic eraser (LaMa) and HD upscale 2× (Real-ESRGAN). One image at a time, daily limits, nothing stored.
- 📦 Batch. Resize, convert, watermark, remove backgrounds, blur faces or upscale a whole set, then download one ZIP or upload one album.
- 💧 Watermark & compare. Put your name or logo on images, and hold a button to compare with the original.
- 🌍 Explore, oEmbed & sitemap. A public feed of images people chose to show, embeds for WordPress/Discourse/Notion, and a gallery API for other sites.
- 🪪 Public profiles. A name, @username, photo, bio and website. Image and album pages (and their link previews) say who shared them;
/u/username shows only the images you pick. Can be switched off.
- 📋 Copy all links. After a bulk upload, on albums and in your gallery: every direct link, page link, Markdown, BBCode or HTML in one click.
- 👤 Own accounts, or HEL.ink sign-in (optional add-on). PixelHop has its own sign-up, passwords and Google sign-in and needs nothing else. Only if you also run HEL.ink can you set
HELINK_URL and HELINK_SSO_SECRET to let people use one account for both; leave them empty and PixelHop never contacts HEL.ink.
- HOP App Protocol. With HEL.ink sign-in on, PixelHop also serves the signed admin API under
/hop/* (health, manifest, stats, user 360 and actions, profile and account events pushed by HEL.ink, content and report moderation, settings, search, metrics, audit trail). Calls are signed with the same HELINK_SSO_SECRET; HOP_ADMIN_CLIENTS (default imperium,helink) lists the app slugs allowed to call it. Every change made this way is kept in the hop_audit table.
- 🔌 API & ShareX.
- A REST API with
Bearer keys.
- The settings page makes a ready-to-use
.sxcu file for ShareX.
- ShareX configs made for PixelHop 2 keep working.
- Signed webhooks when you upload or delete.
- A command-line uploader in the same binary:
pixelhop push *.png --format markdown.
- 🛡️ Moderation. A report button on every image, a report queue, hide/delete, IP bans, account lock/suspend, warning pop-ups, and an announcement bar, all handled through the HOP control center (signed admin API) or the CLI.
- 🔐 Safe by default.
- Argon2id passwords and Google sign-in.
- CSRF protection and a strict Content Security Policy.
- SSRF-proof "upload from link", a decompression-bomb guard, rate limits, and trusted-proxy-aware IP handling.
- Hashed API keys and session tokens.
- 🏠 Self-hostable.
- One static binary, a Docker image, or a systemd unit.
- Store images on disk or any S3-compatible bucket: AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Contabo.
Install
Binary (Linux, macOS, Windows; amd64 and arm64 on the Releases page):
curl -L -o pixelhop https://github.com/navi-crwn/pixelhop/releases/latest/download/pixelhop-linux-amd64
chmod +x pixelhop
PIXELHOP_BASE_URL=https://img.example.com ./pixelhop
Docker:
docker run -d --name pixelhop -p 8080:8080 \
-e PIXELHOP_BASE_URL=https://img.example.com \
-v pixelhop:/data ghcr.io/navi-crwn/pixelhop:latest
From source (Go 1.27+):
git clone https://github.com/navi-crwn/pixelhop.git && cd pixelhop
make build && ./pixelhop
Open http://localhost:8080 and create an account. The first account becomes the admin. You can also make one from the command line: pixelhop user add [email protected] --admin.
Everything is in .env.example. The ones you're most likely to change:
| Variable | Default | What it does |
|---|
PIXELHOP_BASE_URL | http://localhost:8080 | Public address of the app (sign-in, upload, dashboard) |
PIXELHOP_LINK_URL | PIXELHOP_BASE_URL | Another host for shared links (image and album pages, direct files). Point it at the old address after a move, so old links keep working while the app lives at the new one. That host must also reach PixelHop |
PIXELHOP_DATA | ./data | Database and (local) images |
PIXELHOP_MAX_UPLOAD_MB | 20 | Per image |
PIXELHOP_MAX_MEDIA_MB | 100 | Per video or PDF, for signed-in members |
PIXELHOP_GUEST_MAX_MB | 20 | Per file of any kind, for guests |
PIXELHOP_GUEST_UPLOADS | true | Allow uploads without an account (also a switch in the control center) |
PIXELHOP_TRUSTED_PROXIES | — | cloudflare, or IPs/CIDRs of your reverse proxy |
PIXELHOP_STORAGE | local | local or s3 |
S3_ENDPOINT, S3_BUCKET, S3_ACCESS_KEY, S3_SECRET_KEY | — | For S3-compatible storage |
S3_PUBLIC_URL | — | CDN address of the bucket; image links redirect there |
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID, GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET | — | "Sign in with Google" |
HELINK_URL, HELINK_SSO_SECRET | — | Sign in with a HEL.ink account (same secret as HEL.ink's PIXELHOP_SSO_SECRET) |
HELINK_API_ADDR | — | Optional host:port to reach HEL.ink directly (e.g. 127.0.0.1:443 on the same server) for password checks |
|
deploy/nginx.conf is a reverse-proxy example. Set PIXELHOP_TRUSTED_PROXIES=127.0.0.1 so PixelHop believes nginx's X-Forwarded-For; add cloudflare if Cloudflare is in front.deploy/pixelhop.service is a hardened systemd unit; deploy/pixelhop-ai.service runs the optional AI tools (pip install "rembg[cpu]" opencv-python-headless onnxruntime, plus the LaMa and Real-ESRGAN x2plus ONNX files).- Back up by copying the data folder (or
sqlite3 data/pixelhop.db ".backup copy.db" while it runs).
How to use it
- Open the site, then drop, paste (Ctrl+V) or link an image.
- Optional: pick Delete after, and whether the file name goes in the link.
- The link is copied for you. Open it for the direct link, embed codes and QR code.
ShareX: go to Settings → API keys, create a key, then press Download ShareX config with this key. Double-click the file.
Command line: the same pixelhop binary uploads to any PixelHop server.
pixelhop login --server https://pixel.hel.ink --key ph_yourkey
pixelhop push screenshot.png photos/*.jpg --expire 7d --format markdown
Phone: open the site, choose Add to Home Screen, and PixelHop appears in your share sheet.
API
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ph_yourkey" -F "[email protected]" https://pixel.hel.ink/api/v1/upload
| Endpoint | What it does |
|---|
POST /api/v1/upload | Upload files (file, repeatable) or links (url); options expire, slug, album, title |
GET /api/v1/images | Your images (page, limit, q, sort) |
GET · PATCH · DELETE /api/v1/images/{id} | Read, rename ({"title": …}), show on your profile ({"listed": true}) or delete one |
PATCH /api/v1/images/{id} | Also alt and visibility (unlisted, private, password + password) |
GET /api/v1/images/{id}/stats | Views per day and referring sites |
GET · POST /api/v1/albums, GET · PATCH · DELETE /api/v1/albums/{id} | List, create, edit (title, description, cover, order, add, remove) and delete albums |
GET /api/v1/users/{username}/images | Public: someone's profile images |
GET /oembed?url=… | oEmbed for image pages |
GET /i/{id}.jpg?w=&h=&fit=&format=&q= | Resized copies, made once and cached |
GET /api/v1/me | Your account and storage use |
GET /api/v1/stats | Public totals |
POST /api/v1/tools/{remove-background,faces,erase,upscale} | Server AI tools (signed in; file, plus mask for erase) |
GET /tools/qr.png · /tools/qr.svg | QR code for text (size, level, fg, bg) |
Every answer looks like {"success": true, "data": …} or {"success": false, "error": "…"}. The full reference is at /docs on any PixelHop server.
Upgrading from PixelHop 2
PixelHop 2 was a PHP app with MySQL, a Python venv and cron jobs; its code lives on in the v2.3.0-php tag. One command brings everything over:
pixelhop import --images /var/www/pichost/data/images.json \
--mysql "user:pass@tcp(127.0.0.1:3306)/pixelhop" --copy
- Users keep their ids, roles, quotas and passwords (PHP's argon2id hashes are verified and upgraded on next sign-in). Google accounts stay linked.
- Images keep their ids. With
--copy they are downloaded into PixelHop 3's storage with fresh thumbnails; without it they are served from the old buckets.
- Links keep working:
/{id}, /i/2026/08/27/{id}_original.webp, /auth/google-callback (set GOOGLE_REDIRECT_URI), and ShareX configs posting to /api/upload.php.
Why the rewrite? Read AUDIT.md.
Project layout
cmd/pixelhop/ the command: serve, user, import
internal/app/ web server: pages, API, uploads, admin
internal/db/ SQLite schema, migrations and queries
internal/imaging/ type sniffing, metadata stripping, thumbnails
internal/storage/ local disk, S3 (own SigV4 signer), legacy URLs
internal/netsafe/ SSRF-safe fetching for "upload from link"
web/ templates and static files, embedded in the binary
docs/ the GitHub Pages website and README images
make test runs the tests; npm run readme-images re-renders the README pictures from the website.
FAQ
Yes. Editing happens on your device with Canvas and WebAssembly. The first time you use OCR or background removal, the browser downloads the open-source models from jsDelivr. Your image is not sent anywhere unless you press Upload result.
Yes, both are switches in Admin → Settings.
PixelHop runs on a 512 MB VPS or a Raspberry Pi. It uses a few tens of MB of memory at rest. Big uploads are decoded a few at a time, so bursts can't exhaust memory.
The HOP family
PixelHop is part of the HOP family of privacy-respecting, self-hostable open-source apps.
Credits & license
More by the same author: Amnesia (a Mac that forgets at logout).
