Hüpattl! SoftwareUnterlumen — Trying Out Ways to Install It
Until now, installing Unterlumen meant opening a terminal, telling macOS to trust a downloaded file, running -desktop-install and answering three questions. ffmpeg and exiftool you had to find yourself. That is fine for me, but not for someone who just wants to look at their photos. So with versions 0.14.0 to 0.14.2 I am trying out several ways to install it. They are experiments: I want to see which ones people actually use, and which ones trip them up.
Download and double-click
Every release now carries Unterlumen.dmg — one app for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, to drag onto Applications — and Unterlumen-Setup.exe for Windows, which installs for your user without administrator rights, with a Start menu entry and an uninstaller. Neither is signed with a paid developer account, so macOS asks once to Open Anyway and Windows once to Run anyway. Whether that one click scares people off is part of the experiment.
One line in a terminal
For those who do not mind pasting one line:
curl -fsSL https://huepattl.de/unterlumen/install | sh
on macOS and Linux, and in PowerShell on Windows:
irm https://huepattl.de/unterlumen/install.ps1 | iex
The script downloads the newest release, checks it against the release's checksums, installs ffmpeg, exiftool and cwebp — with Homebrew, apt, dnf, pacman or winget, or from their makers — and opens the app. There is no warning to click away, and running the same line again is the update.
Set up in the app
Whichever way you install it, Unterlumen now asks for your photo folder on a setup page when it first starts, instead of in the terminal. If helper programs are missing, Install the missing ones fetches them from inside the app. Wherever it asks for a folder, the installed app opens your system's own folder dialog, which knows your NAS and external disks.
On a NAS
Unterlumen has run in a container for a while. What was missing was a way to get there without knowing Docker. A new page asks which NAS you have — Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, Unraid, Portainer or plain Docker — where your photos are, who owns them and which port to use, and writes the compose.yml and the steps for that NAS. It all happens in your browser; nothing is sent. The container now keeps its libraries in a volume, so they survive an update.
With Portainer there is a shorter way: enter https://huepattl.de/unterlumen/portainer.json under Settings → App Templates, and Unterlumen is one of the templates.
I wrote the steps for each NAS from their documentation and tested the result with Docker, Podman and Portainer, but not on every one of those systems. If a step does not match what you see, I would like to know.
Both at once
This is the setup I use myself: Unterlumen on the NAS, so the photos are there on the phone, and on my computer, where I cull and publish. Both show the same photo folder. Each keeps its own catalog, but the destinations and galleries are shared through a folder named .unterlumen-shared inside the photo folder, so I can publish from either. Until now that needed the same command-line option on both sides. Now the NAS shares in its Settings, and the computer — a Mac, a Windows PC or Linux, with the photo folder opened as a network drive — finds the shared galleries when you choose that folder.
Which one?
The install section of the product page puts the three cases side by side — one computer, a NAS, both at once — and lists the steps for each system. The manual way, the binary and -desktop-install, still works as before.
Tell me on GitHub which way you took and where it got stuck.