Google+, Instagram, EyeEm  – services for instant photo sharing – are plentiful. However, the broad choice of photo sharing services doesn't mean you can't build your own photo-sharing solution. In fact, if you are not fond of the idea that third-party services harvest and datamine your accounts, as well as use your photos for their own purposes, then going the DIY route makes a lot of sense.

Privacy concerns, however, are just one reason for deploying a home-brewed solution. By building your own instant photo-sharing application, you can focus on the features that are important to you, leaving out all the unnecessary embellishments. Creating your own app is also an excellent opportunity to master some basic scripting skills and write code that you can later reuse in other projects.

Building your own instant photo-sharing system doesn't have to be as daunting as it may sound, provided you are interested in creating a utilitarian solution rather than an Instagram killer. In this article, I'll guide you through the process of building a no-frills instant photo-sharing system that uses existing software and requires only a minimum of scripting. Creating and setting up the entire solution shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, which makes it a perfect project for a rainy weekend.

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