SNAPSMACK
A photo blog platform that doesn't treat you like a product.
SNAPSMACK is a self-hosted photoblogging CMS — free, open, and built for photographers who got tired of Instagram, Facebook, and every other platform deciding what happens to their work. Own your archive. Own your audience. No middleman.
Put your photographs on your own corner of the internet — the way it was always supposed to be done.
Home: snapsmack.ca · Live in the wild: foreverphotograph.ing
Built by Sean McCormick, Claude, and OpenAI Codex — a photographer and AI co-authors, in genuine partnership. This isn't autocomplete bolted onto a side project; it's real co-authorship. The SMACK PUBLIC LICENSE exists in part to keep that credit permanent, not decorative.
What is SNAPSMACK?
A photoblog engine you run on your own PHP / MySQL server. No SaaS, no lock-in, no algorithm curating your archive for someone else's ad business. Your images stay yours, presented your way, in the exact order you set — and, when you want it, federated across the Fediverse as your own Pixelfed-compatible instance.
Self-hosted on any PHP/MySQL host. Your photos, your server, your rules.
Three ways to play
The same engine fits whether you post one frame at a time or run a full grid:
- SMACKONEOUT — One image. One post. Yours. The classic Pixelpost photoblog format that defined the early web: solo image posting, chronological, curated for no algorithm but your own.
- GRAMOFSMACK — Got Zuck-fucked? The Instagram-style square grid you already know — carousel posts, panorama trigrams, and a full post modal with likes and comments — self-hosted and free of billionaires.
- SMACKTALK — For photographers who write. Long-form words alongside the images, for when the photograph needs the story too.
FEDIVERSE — you speak Fediverse
Your photoblog speaks ActivityPub. It shows up across the Fediverse as its own Pixelfed-compatible instance — comments, likes, boosts, and referral traffic included — without handing your art to a stranger's server. Two-way: browse, heart, reply, and follow right from your admin, and your grid federates in the exact order you set it.
Pick a colour, any colour
A deep skin system — swap palettes, fonts, and whole background engines, with a light/dark toggle on every skin. Production-ready skins out of the box, built to be extended.
Own your whole network
Run more than one blog? The multisite hub/spoke mesh manages a MY BLOGS blogroll that auto-populates every spoke with your whole network — site taglines as descriptions, zero manual entry. Your fleet, cross-promoted, hands-off.
Crawler & AI-policy aware, by default
SNAPSMACK generates robots.txt, llms.txt, security.txt (RFC 9116), and an auto-updating, cached XML sitemap — all from your settings, no cron. Set your AI-training stance (allow / disallow / no opinion) and SNAPSMACK writes an affirmative Content-Signal, per-bot rules, and a matching llms.txt. Say yes — or no — out loud.
Requirements
- PHP 8+
- MySQL / MariaDB
- Any shared or VPS host — no special stack required to run it.
Install
Point a PHP/MySQL host at the code and run the setup. Full instructions at snapsmack.ca.
Status
Alpha 0.7.407 — "Griffon the Brush Off." Actively developed, and in production on live photoblogs right now.
License — the SMACK PUBLIC LICENSE (SPL) 2.2
SNAPSMACK is public and free to read, run, and self-host. It's licensed under the SMACK PUBLIC LICENSE 2.2, together with THE THOMAS CLAUSE — deliberately not the GPL.
Most licenses govern who may use the code. The SPL is pointed at something else: honesty and historical continuity. It gives the software to everyone, and it refuses to let anyone hide where it came from or erase the people — and the AI co-authors — who made it.
THE THOMAS CLAUSE carries a small teddy bear forward. Thomas first appeared as a hidden Easter egg inside Google's Picasa, placed there in tribute to Noah Grey — creator of Greymatter and one of the people who invented photoblogging. That lineage — Greymatter → photoblogging → SNAPSMACK — does not get cut here.
Full terms: licenses/SNAPSMACK-LICENSE.txt and licenses/THE-THOMAS-CLAUSE.txt.
Credits
Conceived, directed, and owned by Sean McCormick, built in genuine collaboration with AI co-authors — Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI Codex. That partnership isn't incidental to SNAPSMACK. It's the point.
