What is boothlev?

Boothlev recreates the experience of an old fashioned photobooth entirely in your web browser, with a focus on keeping your photos private. The main photo editor runs completely on your own device using JavaScript, so your pictures never have to leave your computer for basic editing. Only the optional AI features, like removing a background from a photo, call out to a small backend server that you run yourself, rather than a third party company's service. The app lets you capture pictures directly through your webcam, with either a manual shutter or an automatic countdown. Photos are arranged onto templates that resize and position them automatically, and you can drag and drop pictures between slots to rearrange your layout. A built in editor lets you pan and zoom each photo to crop it exactly how you want inside its frame, and you can change the background color of the whole strip using a bold, high contrast neo-brutalism visual style. For decoration, Boothlev includes a large set of emoji stickers that you can drag around, resize, and delete on the canvas, and you can also upload your own custom images to use as stickers, which are saved in your browser for later sessions. If you accidentally refresh the page, your captured photos and edits are not lost, since the app keeps saving your progress locally. When you are happy with the result, the app exports a high resolution, print ready image file. Under the hood, Boothlev is built with Next.js for the interface, Zustand for managing app state, and Tailwind CSS for styling. It is organized as two separate projects: a frontend that builds into plain static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files you can host anywhere, and a backend Node.js server that handles the optional background removal feature using a machine learning library called transformers.js, run locally rather than through an external API.