However, I feel two significant additions are worth sharing (Docker and Surge).
Using DD Photos directly from source is very developer-heavy. You have to clone the repo and install Go, Node, libvips and all the dependencies. It's a lot to get started.
I thought why not pre-package everything all set to go? So DD Photos now has "Docker mode". An init command does the scaffolding, installing a 'ddphotos' wrapper script, and then there are a handful of simple commands to build the site.
mkdir ~/my-ddphotos
docker run --rm -v ~/my-ddphotos:/ddphotos dougdonohoe/ddphotos init
cd ~/my-ddphotos
./ddphotos photogen # resize images and create index files
./ddphotos run # run dev server at http://localhost:5173
./ddphotos build # build static site
./ddphotos serve # serve static site via Apache at http://localhost:8000
The second barrier is deploying a site. I use AWS s3/CloudFront/Route53 - which again is non-trivial to setup. I then discovered surge.sh, a free and easy way to deploy static sites in minutes. So I added support for it:
./ddphotos export --copy
surge --domain my-unique-site.surge.sh export/my-photos
Result of above: https://ddphotos-test-docker.surge.sh/
Anyway, the simplicity of this feels like a game-changer, which is why I wanted to share.