Sean Herbert

Sean Herbert

Senior PHP, WordPress & C#/.NET Developer

Years Experience
15+
WordPress Sites
800+
WooCommerce Sites
350+
Client Satisfaction
100%
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Case study · 2026

PixelVault

A self-hosted, privacy-first photo and video organizer.

C#.NET 10ASP.NET CoreTailscaleffmpeg

Overview

PixelVault is a photo and video organizer designed around one rule: everything stays on the owner's own hardware. There is no cloud account and no third-party storage. It is delivered as an ASP.NET Core service with web, desktop and mobile clients.

The project is private, so this page describes the design rather than linking to a public repository or demo.

What it does

  • Albums, hierarchical tags, ratings and captions for organizing a large library.
  • Perceptual-hash duplicate detection, so near-identical copies are found even when files differ.
  • Non-destructive editing: originals are preserved.
  • Photo and video support, with ffmpeg handling video processing.

Security and privacy

  • Signed media URLs, so media cannot be fetched without a valid link.
  • Argon2id password hashing and mandatory TOTP two-factor authentication.
  • A PIN-gated private area for sensitive items.
  • Secure remote access over Tailscale, so the service does not need to be exposed to the public internet.

Technology

The server is built with C# on .NET 10 and ASP.NET Core. Clients for web, desktop and mobile all talk to the same service, which keeps the library logic in one place.