For artists
Drag a folder onto the page and it uploads in the background. Files group into posts, and you pick the cover. The common actions — upload, find, comment, approve — are a click or two away. The point is to stay out of your way.
Open source · Self-hosted · Federation built in
Artist Alley
Self-hosted asset management for how studios produce, review, and archive work.
One binary, one database, one storage volume — everything from first concept to final delivery, in one place.
Built for the people who touch every asset
For review
Open a post to comment inline and scroll through its assets. The review canvas lets you zoom, pan, and step through frames one at a time. Assets move through workflow states, and every change is logged.
A place to produce and archive, not just store files
The whole pipeline in one place
Concept, modeling, rigging, animation, cinematics, finals — in one self-hosted app, instead of spreading the work across chat, shared drives, and file-transfer links.
Not only for studios
The same model fits any team that catalogs things with media attached — museums, libraries, galleries, archives. Tuned for production work, but general underneath.
Small core, optional extras
One binary, one Postgres database, one storage volume — local disk or any S3 bucket. No message queue or microservices in the core. Heavier features — image similarity, transcription, Blender thumbnails, AI editing — run as separate containers you add only if you want them.
See it in motion
Demo content: CC0/CC-BY/CC-BY-SA sources — see the project's demo-dataset attribution (ADR 0058).
What's in the box
From first upload to final archive, in one place.
One viewer for everything
Images, video, audio, 3D, documents, and more — previewed in the browser, built for review.
Find anything fast
Full-text search across every asset, post, tag, and field — plus search by image.
Built to federate
Connect two studios and share assets, comments, and approvals directly. No service in the middle.
Reads IIIF
Serves the IIIF standard, so deep-zoom and archive viewers work with your collections.
Your metadata, your workflow
Custom fields with full history, and review states with an audit trail.
AI when you want it
Image search, transcription, and AI editing you can add on — never forced into the core.
It federates
Sharing work between separate studios usually means paying for a hosted service or sending a download link. Artist Alley can do it directly: each studio runs its own instance, pairs with partners, and shares assets, posts, comments, brand kits, and workflow events.
It uses ArchivePub — the ActivityPub data model with extensions for asset sharing, workflow state, and access-controlled brand workspaces. The spec is open, so any tool can implement it; we ship the reference implementation.
Open source. Free to self-host.
Put the binary on a host, point it at Postgres, and go. A commercial license is available if you need one.