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Image backend

The image backend is Everlock's HTTP-facing media library.

It lets you host one or more image instances from a single Everlock process, route them by hostname, store the original media inside Everlock-managed storage, and expose them through the built-in HTTP frontend.

Under the hood it embeds apimeister-photos (informally ami), a standalone, Immich-compatible media engine. Everlock wraps that engine in its own host routing, user model, versioned storage, and AI runtime — see The apimeister-photos engine for what the upstream project is and how it is configured.

What it is for

Use the image backend when you want Everlock to hold and serve media such as:

  • personal or team photo libraries
  • gallery-style collections behind authentication
  • image stores that should stay inside the same user and grant model as the rest of Everlock
  • media libraries that benefit from local AI caption generation

How it fits in the system

The image backend owns the media domain logic:

  • image instances and their storage
  • metadata and derived work
  • authorization on http/image/<instance>

The HTTP frontend owns:

  • host routing
  • HTTP auth mechanics
  • request and response transport details

If AI captioning is available, the image backend reuses the shared everlock-ai-runtime rather than loading a second model.

Multi-instance and addressing

Two things make the image backend more than a single gallery:

  • Multiple instances — one process can host many isolated libraries, each with its own store, vhosts, access grants, display name, and AI languages. See Running multiple image instances.
  • Two ways to reach them — public instances are addressed by DNS hostname with automatic ACME certificates; private ones are announced on the LAN over mDNS with no DNS server at all. A single instance can carry both kinds of vhost.

Typical operator flow

  1. enable the backend
  2. create an image instance
  3. assign one or more vhosts (public for ACME, .local for mDNS)
  4. grant readers or writers access
  5. upload and browse media through the HTTP surface

For a local walkthrough, start with Getting started: Image backend.

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