Installation of PicApport on a Raspberry Pi 4 or higher
In order to be able to use PicApport for larger photo stocks with several 10,000 photos, we recommend a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 4 Gigabyte main memory.
Of course PicApport also runs on older RasPi’s (see. Installation of PicApport on a Raspberry Pi 3) but it’s really fun with a Raspberry Pi 4.
Even with over 100,000 photos, the performance and user experience of PicApport on a RasPi4 is more than sufficient.
This manual describes how to install PicApport 8.1 or higher on a Raspberry Pi version 4 or higher.
Equipment
We have created the following description for PicApport 8.x on a Raspberry Pi 4 with the following features and tested it over a longer period of time:
| Number of photos | more than 102.000 |
|---|---|
| CPU | Raspberry Pi 4 |
| memory | 4 GB |
| SD card | 256 GB (as fast as possible) |
| operating system version | Linux raspberrypi 4.19.75-v7l+ #1270 SMP Tue Sep 24 18:51:41 BST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux or newer |
| Java Version | openjdk version „11.0.3“ 2019-04-16 |
Environment (if installed with .deb)
| Path to .picapport | /opt/picapport/.picapport More details see: The directory structure of the PicApport Server |
|---|---|
| Path to photos | /srv/photos |
| Required permission for PicApport Server process (Deamon) | root permission |
On our own behalf
The Contecon team has invested a lot of time and ambition into the development of PicApport as an operating system independent photo server. We are sure that there are better ways to install PicApport on Raspbian or Linux. We would be very happy about suggestions or ideas to create a better .deb package.
Installation
Raspberry Pi Installation
For beginners we recommend Raspbian as operating system for a quick success. Of course other distributions are also supported, depending on the performance of your Raspberry you should choose a simple system.
- Installation of the operating system (if not already done)
- see: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/
- We recommend the following builds to do this on https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
because it contains a Java Runtime.- Raspbian [Buildname] with desktop and recommended software
- or Raspbian [Buildname] with desktop
- Login to the Raspberry PI (See also: https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/quick-start-guide/)
- Open an SSH client such as putty
- Connect to the IP address of the Raspberry PI (normally the router should know it).
- Login with user pi and password raspberry
- Afterwards the Raspberry PI setup can be executed with sudo raspi-config (see: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/raspi-config.md)
PicApport Installation via .deb-Package
- Preparation
- If Java is not yet installed, please install an Open-JDK version 11 or higher.
- Install Screen with the command sudo apt-get install screen
- Download the PicApport package.
- Change to the home directory of the user pi using cd ~
- Download the package PicApportpi.deb into your home directory from the PicApport download page: https://www.picapport.de/en/photo-server-download.php
- Installation
- Install the package using console command: sudo dpkg -i picapportpi.deb
- Install the package using console command: sudo dpkg -i picapportpi.deb
- Start PicApport
- You can start PicApport with the following command: /etc/init.d/picapport start
- The first start of the server can take 2-3 minutes. Each further start does not take longer than one minute.
- The application can be accessed via a web interface.
- PicApport starts automatically when the Raspberry Pi is started.
PicApport Installation without .deb-Package
see: Installation of PicApport under Linux step 2.
If this type of installation is selected, it is recommended to adjust the StartPicApport.sh as follows:
Important! the Raspi requires 4GB main memory for the memory configuration specified here.
#!/bin/bash
java -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m -Dstorage.diskCache.bufferSize=256 -Duser.home=/opt/picapport -jar /opt/picapport/picapport-headless.jar
- Path to PicApport configuration: /opt/picapport/.picapport
- The language can be changed in the /opt/picapport/StartPicApport.sh file. (-Duser.language=de)
- PicApport looks for photos in /srv/photos. To change the setting, see PicApport-Server Guide
- The server starts on port 80. To change the port, the file /etc/rc.local must be edited, and all occurrences of 80 must be replaced by the desired port.