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LibrePhotos: A Self-Hosted Google Photos Alternative

386 points by hanklazard 6y ago

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
Amazing, I was looking for a replacement (I have a beefy home server)
ax0ar 6y ago
I wonder how this will perform when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos.
- deanclatworthy 6y ago
  There was a fantastic article by one of the frontend engineers at Google about how they built the UI for photos to be scalable: https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 There's no reason why the lessons learnt here couldn't be incorporated into an OS project.
  - mceachen 6y ago
    That article addresses how to do a "scrubbable" infinite scroll for their timeline view. Rendering correctly-scaled images is a different issue: Google Photos renders the image to the precise viewport dimensions (which is why it takes sometimes a couple seconds to render). When I designed PhotoStructure, I knew I wanted everything to show instantly, so resizing is done to several common viewport sizes at import time (and these sizes are customizable). When you're browsing your library, your browser fetches the smallest variant that will still show with high quality based on native display resolution.
- ddalex 6y ago
  My personal photo archive is 100k+ I'll test this out and report back.
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    I would love to hear your update. I have 80k+ and also need a solution for many pictures.
    - ddalex 6y ago
      The problem with this thing is that it doesn't work. So having played with this for several hours today * installation was ok, but I had to reach out to the discord channel to be able to configure it properly * started to index the photos; at 16480 photos (After about 1h) it stopped progressing with no error message * for the photos that are listed as indexed, when going to the gallery, there are no thumbnails * it appears that there is no metadata being indexed for those photos either In short, this is not ready for prime time yet I currently run PhotoStructure what works ok with indexing, but has other gaps (no tagging, face recognition, etc..)
      - mceachen 6y ago
        The next release (alpha build will drop in a week or two) will include keyword, album, and person tag imports from Google Takeouts, Lightroom, Picasa, and digiKam. See: https://photostructure.com/about/2020-release-notes/#vnext https://photostructure.com/about/2020-release-notes/#vnext Local face recognition, if it doesn't make it into this release, will be in the following release: most of the detection, aggregation, and backend storage is already implemented in my feature branch. Please vote for features you want on the new forum! https://forum.photostructure.com/c/feature-requests/7/l/latest?order=votes https://forum.photostructure.com/c/feature-requests/7/l/late...
        ddalex 6y ago
        Thanks for pointing these out! What I'm looking for is Lightroom-album style tagging (keyword and star-rating) that I can apply to photos manually - I dont' have my archive tagged in anywhere, and I need to do that somewhere I'm thinking about biting the bullet and import everything in Lightroom just to get tagging :(
- Jnr 6y ago
  Sadly it won't. I have been following it since release of OwnPhotos. Back then it was a messy university project of the original developer mixing different tech to achieve the goal. It simply stopped working with bigger sets of images. I tried this fork as well, it has the same problem. Normally I would provide some pull requests but in this case the code base seemed too much hacked together from random things. What doesn't work is the backend indexing part.
- kn100 6y ago
  I tested it a few months ago hosted on my desktop (Ryzen 2600 6 core CPU, 16gb of RAM) with my entire photo library of around 100k photos - or about 60gb of data, and the performance was better than I expected. The ML image classification stuff it does took a few hours for sure, I left it go overnight, but then in the morning the ability to filter for specific classifications or jump to a specific date was pretty much as fast as you'd expect it to be (almost instant). This was using the default SQLite config. The one thing I wished was that the ML Classification stuff it did was better - because it was nowhere near as good as what Google does with Photos, and nowhere near as useful for that reason. I still deeply miss Google Photos. For context, my setup is pretty old fashioned these days. I plug my phone in, and use Shotwell to import the photos into my local photo library. Duplicati does a backup of all my photos once a week to Backblaze. Photoprism reads from my local copy and allows me to effectively browse my photos at home.
ripvanwinkle 6y ago
I am looking for a solution like this, can folks with experience comment on their experience with this(LibrePhotos) NextCloud or alternatives. Aspects that I think are important include the community of maintainers in addition to the current state of functionality
- edoceo 6y ago
  I'm currently working to use more NextCloud. My prime objectives are for notes/b9kmark keeping and photos/media. So far the setup was pretty easy on my VM but I kicked the tires with their VM image first. And so far the Android app is doing mostly OK. There is a lot to get into. And extensions out the wazoo. I've not had to work with any community (yet) cause so far, it's just work - or there is some config I need to tweak (docs are great!) With their VM and docker images tho, super easy to kick tires.
- HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
  I've used Nextcloud. Auto-upload from your phone is nice, but I haven't found a way to share arbitrary groups of photos except by copying them into a folder and sharing the folder. Also, thumbnail generation is slow and I haven't put in the time to try to speed it up. I haven't used PhotoPrism, but wanted to toss it out there as an alternative.
  - hkt 6y ago
    https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/previewgenerator https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/previewgenerator This builds the thumbnails in the background. I think it used to get triggered on upload but says it needs a cronjob now. Works OK on a folder of 40GB of photos. What I still find irritating about photos in nextcloud is I keep mine in high resolution but nextcloud won't downscale them to fit the viewing device screen, so I use 20mb a photo with all the UX impairment one might imagine when actually a few kB would do. It'd be nice if it cached light, fullscreen versions and offered a "view in full resolution" button.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
s_gourichon 6y ago
Listed on https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleries https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho... though that does not mention the advanced capabilities like face recognition. How does it perform with huge collections? https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly claims staying fast even with 4+TB 500,000 photo collection.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
technojunkie 6y ago
This looks and feels very promising, nice. Is there any documentation on the difference between this fork and the original project? https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos
- sammorrowdrums 6y ago
  Appears there have been a bunch of fixes. There are also 217 forks of OwnPhotos. https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos/compare/dev...LibrePhotos:dev https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos/compare/dev...LibrePhoto... I don't know if the original repo and LibrePhotos will permanently diverge (that appears to be the intention), but I like you am a bit confused at the necessity for a permanent fork and I'd like to know more too before committing to a version.
  - technojunkie 6y ago
    Wow, I didn't know Github had that feature, thanks for the link! Maybe the two repo authors can come together and sync the projects since both are so closely related. Nonetheless, I hope there will be more information via a changelog or an outline with differences and intentions. It's one of the more impressive projects I've seen to replace Google Photos so I hope there's a lot of transparency!
    - derneuere 6y ago
      Hey, here is a dev from LibrePhotos. The original project is abandoned and pull request do not get merge anymore. That's why we started with a new fork.
  - dastx 6y ago
    My understanding from the reddit post was that it was forked due to the original seemingly being abandoned.
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      Given the last commit on ownphotos is from 2019, that seems likely and reasonable
ashton314 6y ago
Darn. Doesn’t look like it runs on ARM. No Raspberry Pi. I can appreciate that it is difficult to port things. On a side note: I’m eager to see how much support for non-x86 architectures will grow with the introduction of the M1 chip.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  it also requires 8 GB of ram, apparently, so you'd have to get one of the beefiest rpi4s even if it ran on ARM.
dominicst 6y ago
I really like the look of this however bare it mind that it not able to run on raspberry pi / ARM processors.
compsciphd 6y ago
I used to use apache-gallery (apache perl module that would turn directories of photos in galleries with thumbnails and different sized photos to view) and had it setup that each user on my machine could drop photos into their ~/gallery dir it would automatically turn them into galleries with little fuss or muss. while this seems more featurefull, I wonder if I'd use them.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  That’s super for publishing photos for the web. Thus seems to be focused towards managing your entire photo collection for you, in a similar way that google photos and iCloud photos does.
mro_name 6y ago
I wonder what the purpose of such tools is. Archiving? Safe storage? Offering stock-photos for sale? Or just dropping an uncurated pile images into the interwebs? When publising curated photo-sets myself (<1k pics per feed), I use a static-site-generator approach https://notabug.org/mro/Photos2Atom https://notabug.org/mro/Photos2Atom and rather sacrifice features but long-term robustness and installability.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Some people might take photos of themselves on vacations, or their kids and are not satisfied with throwing them all in a folder and using Windows image preview to look at them.
- Rotten194 6y ago
  Actually being able to find your photos, especially if you have friends and family who share photos with you and aren't willing to adapt to your organizational scheme. Google Photos really shines when you give up trying to organize your photos and let the AI take over. If I want to find a photo of my wife from 3 months ago -- I just tap on her face and it shows up, whether she took it or I did or her mom did, without needing to get everyone to collaborate on a photo organization scheme. If I could get that from a self-hosted option, given Google's... track record... I'd definitely be interested, though it doesn't seem this is quite there yet.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    You can takeout your photos and albums to store in a backup (locally or on another cloud provider)
libeclipse 6y ago
Are photos encrypted, both in-transit and at rest?
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  It's self hosted, so both parts are up to you.
  - libeclipse 6y ago
    Not necessarily. Is unencrypted data even sent to the server? That's controlled at the application layer. Of course you could setup TLS and FDE but this doesn't guarantee that your data will be safe.
    - iforgotpassword 6y ago
      Huh? It's a web app. If you set up https, no data is ever sent to the server unencrypted. Likewise setting up FDE means your data is encrypted on the server. > but this doesn't guarantee that your data will be safe I don't get what you're trying to get at here. If you're taking about bugs compromising the encryption then I guess this applies to practically every software out there making this a moot discussion.
pjmlp 6y ago
I just use jAlbum and put up a static website, no need for fancy dynamic server stuff, while it offers lots of tools for image processing.
iforgotpassword 6y ago
Incidentally I've been trying out Digikam for the last couple days, mostly because of face recognition. The whole app is pretty slow on lower end hardware, they even recommend having an SSD which my travel laptop which I tested it on doesn't have. That's when I thought I should look for a web based solution because that would also solve acessing and managing the lib from multiple devices, and now there's this post here. I guess before making another switch I should check out other solutions too and compare their feature matrix and how well those work. With digikam I noticed that it seems to overfit once you tagged a couple hundred faces of the same person, for example, and is less likely to identify that person in new photos.
- ape4 6y ago
  I am also trying digiKam this week. Sadly the face recognition is unusable. For example I tagged one photo with Name1 and many other photos with other names. But it always suggests Name1.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    Yes, I found tagging a person less than about ten times tends to mess up the recognition. The sweet spot is about 20-50, then as described above as soon as you have a couple hundred for one person it seems to overfit. I could identify half the detected faces pretty easily by re-running detection two or three times but eventually I ended up with a remaining set of faces that always got detected as the wrong person, if at all, and it's not that they are all blurry or otherwise low quality. Also I wonder how bad it is to accidentally assign the wrong tag to a person. I noticed that it happened three or four times, so I ended up having maybe 400 proper assignments and then one false tag. Could they even add a function to detect this? The next thing for me would be to research which management tools support face recognition and what they use to do it. Anything using what digikam uses would not be worth trying to me.
alvarlagerlof 6y ago
No screenshots and a broken demo
- tjoff 6y ago
  Demo works fine for me.
- netsharc 6y ago
  Huh, the demo looks empty at first glance, only if you go to Photos > Without Timestamp do you see any content. It's easy to criticize, but huh, if this were a commercial product, a manager would be complaining to the appropriate team about how crappy the demo is. The Github page says the app has "slight focus on cool graphs" but the demo's "Data Viz" section is completely empty. EDIT: Oh not completely empty, the face recognition library has data. I'm interested to see my frequency of photos per day/week/month, etc, so if I want to try that out I would have to install the whole thing locally.
tauntz 6y ago
What's the current recommended way of getting your photos out from Google Photos? And I don't mean manually via Google Takeout (that's a dumpster fire and doesn't work most of the time) but I'd like to automate it for periodic backups. You never know when you Google Account might be killed, taking tens of years of pictures and videos with it :(
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Why rely on google photos in the first place? If you are taking photos with android devices, you can backup the device folder containing the photos/videos. Also, I just tried google checkout, and it took about 30 seconds to schedule a google photos only every-2-months-for-a-year recurring takeout of my data. We'll see if it actually works...if it does, it isn't so bad.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - CraigJPerry 6y ago
    There’s a subset of users who click the takeout button, get the message saying we’ll email you in a bit and then... nothing. If you’re affected it’s not possible to get help from Google according to Mike Elgin. I did a full export (circa 8Gb) around 18 months ago and i have around 1,000 pictures of someone else’s in my archives. I suppose other people have some of my pictures too.
    - iforgotpassword 6y ago
      With the whole self isolation thing going on currently it's actually nice to see another face again every now and then. :-)
    - blackoil 6y ago
      Were the photos shared with you? or a security hole leaking private photos of random people??
danez 6y ago
Is there a good android app for librephotos (or any other application) that offers similar features than Google Photos? A while ago I tried adding photos to my nextcloud instance, but the nextcloud app in my opinion is very rudimentary. I really missed face grouping, location search, the year based scrollbar, etc.
- netsharc 6y ago
  Google Photos also uses other means to add location metadata to photos, if you have Google Maps Timeline enabled that logs your location, and you've uploaded photos from another camera (e.g. DSLR), it will assume, based on the timestamps, that photos were taken at the location your phone says you were at that time. Sadly I doubt librephotos has that integration. Hmm, one could take out one's Google Maps Timeline info as JSON, and write a parser for librephotos (or others) that adds the location metadata into the photos.
notretarded 6y ago
Can't we come up with better names than Libre{X}?
- tpxl 6y ago
  They are perfectly good names, no? Assuming you know what libre means, it tells you it's free as in beer and self-hostable, and X is, well, whatever X is.
danellis 6y ago
How good is the search in practice? Unsurprisingly, Google Photos is excellent at automatically categorizing photos.
arendtio 6y ago
There are two projects I would mention in the same spirit: - https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism - https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed While I think photoprism has a very similar scope, pixelfed has stronger emphasis on federation. The project website gives a nice overview over different providers: https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
  How is the album sharing? All i really want is to be able to build albums and create a link to send to family members, possibly password protected and optionally with expiration. Or just the ability to share/unshare in some way.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Photoprism looks great, thanks! I've been looking for a project like this, but my biggest requirement is that it doesn't move my photos from where they are, which no project I've found can satisfy. Everything insists on moving things to its own store.
  - jdright 6y ago
    I have the exact same issue. I've been looking for something that will just work and have both facial detection and "object" detection (dogs mostly). I think I tried photoprism a long time ago and it failed on my requirements unfortunately.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Which requirement did it fail, do you remember? I just installed it and it's indexing, and it found both faces and dogs fine so far (hasn't indexed much yet, though).
      - jdright 6y ago
        It was maybe 1 year ago, it was failing any recognition, it was just unable to index anything. I'll try again today and will test these other alternatives listed in other comments too, hopefully something will actually work now.
beilabs 6y ago
Can someone enlighten me on storage? Is it stored on the docker container (locally) or does it allow for storage within say Google Storage or S3, even Backblaze perhaps? I tried the demo on Firefox but I couldn't actually figure out how to upload an image to test it out. Firefox / Linux user.
- beilabs 6y ago
  I think I'm able to answer this myself. Supports Nextcloud for storage; not sure I'm happy with just that.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos#first-steps-after-setting-up https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos#first-steps-after... Local directories (so mount whatever you want to that path) or NextCloud native integration
74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
How does DropBox handle customer data? Is it protected from any analysis or scanning at least according to the ToS? Or do they also inspect and/or sell my data?
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  https://www.dropbox.com/terms https://www.dropbox.com/terms
HeckFeck 6y ago
> You need a x86 processor and it is recommended to have 8GBs of RAM. This is a bit much for a home cloud installation, but I could see it becoming what Invidious is to YouTube.
- Can_Not 6y ago
  Most likely the machine learning features are what cause that.
JD557 6y ago
Looking at this project and some of the alternatives provided, they seem to be quite memory hungry. I assume this is related to the ML model. Is there any way to run this (or one fo the alternatives) in a "Lite" mode without any ML? I see that Photoprism has a ton of flags, but it's not obvious how those affect memory usage.
- hanklazard 6y ago
  Yeah, I think for users of Google Photos, the ML was a big part of it. Lots of other options without, I’ve used and like Lychee (1). (1) https://lychee.electerious.com/ https://lychee.electerious.com/
- olliebennett 6y ago
  PhotoPrism uses TensorFlow for the image classification / ML stuff (to add labels to your images), but it can be completely disabled via a flag (or toggle under advanced settings) before you begin indexing if you don't need it. PhotoPrism's ML object detection is no doubt not as powerful as Google's, but it seems to work pretty well based on the demo, and I know the devs are working on improving it frequently.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  yeah, 8 GB of RAM for a photo gallery seems completely insane...
- mceachen 6y ago
  PhotoStructure will run comfortably with 1gb RAM, and scales to very large (>1mm file) libraries. The ML models I'm loading for the next version may take a bit more RAM than that, but (as most features with PhotoStructure), you'll be able to selectively disable them to taste. https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/ https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/
- derneuere 6y ago
  We are not sure why it needs that much RAM. We know that it has something to do, with the ML models. I am pretty sure we can optimize it in the future.
subpixel 6y ago
How do this and the other alternatives handle Apple’s “Live Photos”? This pernicious feature is adored in my family and they won’t consider options that would take it away.
- tipsysquid 6y ago
  In the Android world, Samsung and Google support eachothers live picture format. As far as I can tell for Google they embed video in the picture, Samsung has their own format for this. Im on an older version of android and the live photos dont have the snappiness of Apple's, but that could be a processor power issue or even stylistic choice. Particularly the length of the live photo is noticeably different. Im not sure how Apple stores the live picture info, but having it crossplatform would be fantastic for services like these.
  - fsflyer 6y ago
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32508375/apple-live-photo-file-format https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32508375/apple-live-phot... gives some of the details.
- jdright 6y ago
  Is this the same thing as Samsung's Motion Photo? If so, it is just a .mp4 attached to the jpeg, should be easy to support in the future.
dirtyid 6y ago
The trainable face classifier will go a long way. I've been unfortunately trained by Google's unlimited upload behaviour that it's going to be impossible to parse through my archive without Google's semantic identification of contents.
Can_Not 6y ago
What's like this, but perhaps without machine learning and targets "s3 compatible APIs"?
zaroth 6y ago
> You will need at least 10 GB of HDD Space for the docker images. It needs that space because of the machine learning models. Are face detection models on the iPhone not run locally? Do they take up this much space on-device? Multi GBs just seems “large” for this?
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Docker Image means it includes an extra OS install. Your iPhone uses the same OS for all apps.
Bishonen88 6y ago
For anyone moving from google photos and looking for alternatives, I recently transitioned to a NAS from Synology. They offer many apps, and one is very similar to this project, although a bit more polished. It's not open source, though (AFAIK). Performance with 2TB of movies and raw photos is awesome (60k files+). Indexing and face recognition took a few days, though. https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  It's amazing that synology would hold themselves back with a proprietary app when they are trying to sell hardware and are competing against Google and Apple.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    Synology is selling an experience, like Apple, not hardware. It's a plug-it-and-it-works private-on-premise cloud. They are not competing with Google or Apple in the sense that customer usually decide on-premise or cloud-based and only then look for a solution (prices are on the same scale, so the reason to choose one over the other is usually not price).
  - Octopuz 6y ago
    You could still run docker on the x86 models and host one of the solutions mentioned here.
- dsego 6y ago
  A bit off-topic, but I've just bought a small 2-bay synology NAS and I'm wondering if I should go ext4 or btrfs for my family photos/videos. I like the idea of data safety features like checksums & scrubbing, but ext4 seems more robust & tested. Which did you go with?
  - Octopuz 6y ago
    btrfs works fine in Synology's implementation. Please keep in mind that RAID is not a backup. You can backup to a cloud service or to a friend's house with its own Synology.
buzzert 6y ago
I’d really like to get off of iCloud Photo Library, but I’m not sure of a way to reliably and automatically sync photos off of my iPhone to a provider like LibrePhotos. Has anyone figured this out?
- wakkaflokka 6y ago
  I'm trying to figure this out myself. I've gone from Google Photos -> iCloud -> testing out Unraid + PhotoPrism + NextCloud. That is, point PhotoPrism's import folder to the NextCloud photos folder. Both hosted on Unraid. And then on my iPhone, have the photos automatically uploaded. Only issue so far is I don't see an auto-detect and import option in PhotoPrism so I have to manually click 'import'.
- glial 6y ago
  Not sure about the upload part, but for getting photos out of iCloud, this works: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
- mceachen 6y ago
  Several of my beta users have recommended PhotoSync. I've used Resilio Sync on my iOS test device successfully as well. Most NAS providers (like Synology and QNAP) also have native sync apps. It's good to have options so if one gives you attitude, you can switch it out. I wrote up more details here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#how-do-i-back-up-files-on-my-phone https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...
cozzyd 6y ago
my crappy solution = gnome-photos with the broadway backend, but this is a terrible hack that only allows one connection at a time.

386 points by hanklazard 6y ago

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago

Amazing, I was looking for a replacement (I have a beefy home server)

ax0ar 6y ago

I wonder how this will perform when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos.

deanclatworthy 6y ago
There was a fantastic article by one of the frontend engineers at Google about how they built the UI for photos to be scalable: https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 There's no reason why the lessons learnt here couldn't be incorporated into an OS project.
- mceachen 6y ago
  That article addresses how to do a "scrubbable" infinite scroll for their timeline view. Rendering correctly-scaled images is a different issue: Google Photos renders the image to the precise viewport dimensions (which is why it takes sometimes a couple seconds to render). When I designed PhotoStructure, I knew I wanted everything to show instantly, so resizing is done to several common viewport sizes at import time (and these sizes are customizable). When you're browsing your library, your browser fetches the smallest variant that will still show with high quality based on native display resolution.
ddalex 6y ago
My personal photo archive is 100k+ I'll test this out and report back.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  I would love to hear your update. I have 80k+ and also need a solution for many pictures.
  - ddalex 6y ago
    The problem with this thing is that it doesn't work. So having played with this for several hours today * installation was ok, but I had to reach out to the discord channel to be able to configure it properly * started to index the photos; at 16480 photos (After about 1h) it stopped progressing with no error message * for the photos that are listed as indexed, when going to the gallery, there are no thumbnails * it appears that there is no metadata being indexed for those photos either In short, this is not ready for prime time yet I currently run PhotoStructure what works ok with indexing, but has other gaps (no tagging, face recognition, etc..)
    - mceachen 6y ago
      The next release (alpha build will drop in a week or two) will include keyword, album, and person tag imports from Google Takeouts, Lightroom, Picasa, and digiKam. See: https://photostructure.com/about/2020-release-notes/#vnext https://photostructure.com/about/2020-release-notes/#vnext Local face recognition, if it doesn't make it into this release, will be in the following release: most of the detection, aggregation, and backend storage is already implemented in my feature branch. Please vote for features you want on the new forum! https://forum.photostructure.com/c/feature-requests/7/l/latest?order=votes https://forum.photostructure.com/c/feature-requests/7/l/late...
      - ddalex 6y ago
        Thanks for pointing these out! What I'm looking for is Lightroom-album style tagging (keyword and star-rating) that I can apply to photos manually - I dont' have my archive tagged in anywhere, and I need to do that somewhere I'm thinking about biting the bullet and import everything in Lightroom just to get tagging :(
Jnr 6y ago
Sadly it won't. I have been following it since release of OwnPhotos. Back then it was a messy university project of the original developer mixing different tech to achieve the goal. It simply stopped working with bigger sets of images. I tried this fork as well, it has the same problem. Normally I would provide some pull requests but in this case the code base seemed too much hacked together from random things. What doesn't work is the backend indexing part.
kn100 6y ago
I tested it a few months ago hosted on my desktop (Ryzen 2600 6 core CPU, 16gb of RAM) with my entire photo library of around 100k photos - or about 60gb of data, and the performance was better than I expected. The ML image classification stuff it does took a few hours for sure, I left it go overnight, but then in the morning the ability to filter for specific classifications or jump to a specific date was pretty much as fast as you'd expect it to be (almost instant). This was using the default SQLite config. The one thing I wished was that the ML Classification stuff it did was better - because it was nowhere near as good as what Google does with Photos, and nowhere near as useful for that reason. I still deeply miss Google Photos. For context, my setup is pretty old fashioned these days. I plug my phone in, and use Shotwell to import the photos into my local photo library. Duplicati does a backup of all my photos once a week to Backblaze. Photoprism reads from my local copy and allows me to effectively browse my photos at home.

ripvanwinkle 6y ago

I am looking for a solution like this, can folks with experience comment on their experience with this(LibrePhotos) NextCloud or alternatives. Aspects that I think are important include the community of maintainers in addition to the current state of functionality

edoceo 6y ago
I'm currently working to use more NextCloud. My prime objectives are for notes/b9kmark keeping and photos/media. So far the setup was pretty easy on my VM but I kicked the tires with their VM image first. And so far the Android app is doing mostly OK. There is a lot to get into. And extensions out the wazoo. I've not had to work with any community (yet) cause so far, it's just work - or there is some config I need to tweak (docs are great!) With their VM and docker images tho, super easy to kick tires.
HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
I've used Nextcloud. Auto-upload from your phone is nice, but I haven't found a way to share arbitrary groups of photos except by copying them into a folder and sharing the folder. Also, thumbnail generation is slow and I haven't put in the time to try to speed it up. I haven't used PhotoPrism, but wanted to toss it out there as an alternative.
- hkt 6y ago
  https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/previewgenerator https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/previewgenerator This builds the thumbnails in the background. I think it used to get triggered on upload but says it needs a cronjob now. Works OK on a folder of 40GB of photos. What I still find irritating about photos in nextcloud is I keep mine in high resolution but nextcloud won't downscale them to fit the viewing device screen, so I use 20mb a photo with all the UX impairment one might imagine when actually a few kB would do. It'd be nice if it cached light, fullscreen versions and offered a "view in full resolution" button.
  - ekianjo 6y ago

s_gourichon 6y ago

Listed on https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleries https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho... though that does not mention the advanced capabilities like face recognition. How does it perform with huge collections? https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly claims staying fast even with 4+TB 500,000 photo collection.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

technojunkie 6y ago

This looks and feels very promising, nice. Is there any documentation on the difference between this fork and the original project? https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos

sammorrowdrums 6y ago
Appears there have been a bunch of fixes. There are also 217 forks of OwnPhotos. https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos/compare/dev...LibrePhotos:dev https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos/compare/dev...LibrePhoto... I don't know if the original repo and LibrePhotos will permanently diverge (that appears to be the intention), but I like you am a bit confused at the necessity for a permanent fork and I'd like to know more too before committing to a version.
- technojunkie 6y ago
  Wow, I didn't know Github had that feature, thanks for the link! Maybe the two repo authors can come together and sync the projects since both are so closely related. Nonetheless, I hope there will be more information via a changelog or an outline with differences and intentions. It's one of the more impressive projects I've seen to replace Google Photos so I hope there's a lot of transparency!
  - derneuere 6y ago
    Hey, here is a dev from LibrePhotos. The original project is abandoned and pull request do not get merge anymore. That's why we started with a new fork.
- dastx 6y ago
  My understanding from the reddit post was that it was forked due to the original seemingly being abandoned.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    Given the last commit on ownphotos is from 2019, that seems likely and reasonable

ashton314 6y ago

Darn. Doesn’t look like it runs on ARM. No Raspberry Pi. I can appreciate that it is difficult to port things. On a side note: I’m eager to see how much support for non-x86 architectures will grow with the introduction of the M1 chip.

cozzyd 6y ago
it also requires 8 GB of ram, apparently, so you'd have to get one of the beefiest rpi4s even if it ran on ARM.

dominicst 6y ago

I really like the look of this however bare it mind that it not able to run on raspberry pi / ARM processors.

compsciphd 6y ago

I used to use apache-gallery (apache perl module that would turn directories of photos in galleries with thumbnails and different sized photos to view) and had it setup that each user on my machine could drop photos into their ~/gallery dir it would automatically turn them into galleries with little fuss or muss. while this seems more featurefull, I wonder if I'd use them.

oarsinsync 6y ago
That’s super for publishing photos for the web. Thus seems to be focused towards managing your entire photo collection for you, in a similar way that google photos and iCloud photos does.

mro_name 6y ago

I wonder what the purpose of such tools is. Archiving? Safe storage? Offering stock-photos for sale? Or just dropping an uncurated pile images into the interwebs? When publising curated photo-sets myself (<1k pics per feed), I use a static-site-generator approach https://notabug.org/mro/Photos2Atom https://notabug.org/mro/Photos2Atom and rather sacrifice features but long-term robustness and installability.

iforgotpassword 6y ago
Some people might take photos of themselves on vacations, or their kids and are not satisfied with throwing them all in a folder and using Windows image preview to look at them.
Rotten194 6y ago
Actually being able to find your photos, especially if you have friends and family who share photos with you and aren't willing to adapt to your organizational scheme. Google Photos really shines when you give up trying to organize your photos and let the AI take over. If I want to find a photo of my wife from 3 months ago -- I just tap on her face and it shows up, whether she took it or I did or her mom did, without needing to get everyone to collaborate on a photo organization scheme. If I could get that from a self-hosted option, given Google's... track record... I'd definitely be interested, though it doesn't seem this is quite there yet.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  You can takeout your photos and albums to store in a backup (locally or on another cloud provider)

libeclipse 6y ago

Are photos encrypted, both in-transit and at rest?

iforgotpassword 6y ago
It's self hosted, so both parts are up to you.
- libeclipse 6y ago
  Not necessarily. Is unencrypted data even sent to the server? That's controlled at the application layer. Of course you could setup TLS and FDE but this doesn't guarantee that your data will be safe.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    Huh? It's a web app. If you set up https, no data is ever sent to the server unencrypted. Likewise setting up FDE means your data is encrypted on the server. > but this doesn't guarantee that your data will be safe I don't get what you're trying to get at here. If you're taking about bugs compromising the encryption then I guess this applies to practically every software out there making this a moot discussion.

pjmlp 6y ago

I just use jAlbum and put up a static website, no need for fancy dynamic server stuff, while it offers lots of tools for image processing.

iforgotpassword 6y ago

Incidentally I've been trying out Digikam for the last couple days, mostly because of face recognition. The whole app is pretty slow on lower end hardware, they even recommend having an SSD which my travel laptop which I tested it on doesn't have. That's when I thought I should look for a web based solution because that would also solve acessing and managing the lib from multiple devices, and now there's this post here. I guess before making another switch I should check out other solutions too and compare their feature matrix and how well those work. With digikam I noticed that it seems to overfit once you tagged a couple hundred faces of the same person, for example, and is less likely to identify that person in new photos.

ape4 6y ago
I am also trying digiKam this week. Sadly the face recognition is unusable. For example I tagged one photo with Name1 and many other photos with other names. But it always suggests Name1.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Yes, I found tagging a person less than about ten times tends to mess up the recognition. The sweet spot is about 20-50, then as described above as soon as you have a couple hundred for one person it seems to overfit. I could identify half the detected faces pretty easily by re-running detection two or three times but eventually I ended up with a remaining set of faces that always got detected as the wrong person, if at all, and it's not that they are all blurry or otherwise low quality. Also I wonder how bad it is to accidentally assign the wrong tag to a person. I noticed that it happened three or four times, so I ended up having maybe 400 proper assignments and then one false tag. Could they even add a function to detect this? The next thing for me would be to research which management tools support face recognition and what they use to do it. Anything using what digikam uses would not be worth trying to me.

alvarlagerlof 6y ago

No screenshots and a broken demo

tjoff 6y ago
Demo works fine for me.
netsharc 6y ago
Huh, the demo looks empty at first glance, only if you go to Photos > Without Timestamp do you see any content. It's easy to criticize, but huh, if this were a commercial product, a manager would be complaining to the appropriate team about how crappy the demo is. The Github page says the app has "slight focus on cool graphs" but the demo's "Data Viz" section is completely empty. EDIT: Oh not completely empty, the face recognition library has data. I'm interested to see my frequency of photos per day/week/month, etc, so if I want to try that out I would have to install the whole thing locally.

tauntz 6y ago

What's the current recommended way of getting your photos out from Google Photos? And I don't mean manually via Google Takeout (that's a dumpster fire and doesn't work most of the time) but I'd like to automate it for periodic backups. You never know when you Google Account might be killed, taking tens of years of pictures and videos with it :(

oh_sigh 6y ago
Why rely on google photos in the first place? If you are taking photos with android devices, you can backup the device folder containing the photos/videos. Also, I just tried google checkout, and it took about 30 seconds to schedule a google photos only every-2-months-for-a-year recurring takeout of my data. We'll see if it actually works...if it does, it isn't so bad.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- CraigJPerry 6y ago
  There’s a subset of users who click the takeout button, get the message saying we’ll email you in a bit and then... nothing. If you’re affected it’s not possible to get help from Google according to Mike Elgin. I did a full export (circa 8Gb) around 18 months ago and i have around 1,000 pictures of someone else’s in my archives. I suppose other people have some of my pictures too.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    With the whole self isolation thing going on currently it's actually nice to see another face again every now and then. :-)
  - blackoil 6y ago
    Were the photos shared with you? or a security hole leaking private photos of random people??

danez 6y ago

Is there a good android app for librephotos (or any other application) that offers similar features than Google Photos? A while ago I tried adding photos to my nextcloud instance, but the nextcloud app in my opinion is very rudimentary. I really missed face grouping, location search, the year based scrollbar, etc.

netsharc 6y ago
Google Photos also uses other means to add location metadata to photos, if you have Google Maps Timeline enabled that logs your location, and you've uploaded photos from another camera (e.g. DSLR), it will assume, based on the timestamps, that photos were taken at the location your phone says you were at that time. Sadly I doubt librephotos has that integration. Hmm, one could take out one's Google Maps Timeline info as JSON, and write a parser for librephotos (or others) that adds the location metadata into the photos.

notretarded 6y ago

Can't we come up with better names than Libre{X}?

tpxl 6y ago
They are perfectly good names, no? Assuming you know what libre means, it tells you it's free as in beer and self-hostable, and X is, well, whatever X is.

danellis 6y ago

How good is the search in practice? Unsurprisingly, Google Photos is excellent at automatically categorizing photos.

arendtio 6y ago

There are two projects I would mention in the same spirit: - https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism - https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed While I think photoprism has a very similar scope, pixelfed has stronger emphasis on federation. The project website gives a nice overview over different providers: https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
How is the album sharing? All i really want is to be able to build albums and create a link to send to family members, possibly password protected and optionally with expiration. Or just the ability to share/unshare in some way.
StavrosK 6y ago
Photoprism looks great, thanks! I've been looking for a project like this, but my biggest requirement is that it doesn't move my photos from where they are, which no project I've found can satisfy. Everything insists on moving things to its own store.
- jdright 6y ago
  I have the exact same issue. I've been looking for something that will just work and have both facial detection and "object" detection (dogs mostly). I think I tried photoprism a long time ago and it failed on my requirements unfortunately.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Which requirement did it fail, do you remember? I just installed it and it's indexing, and it found both faces and dogs fine so far (hasn't indexed much yet, though).
    - jdright 6y ago
      It was maybe 1 year ago, it was failing any recognition, it was just unable to index anything. I'll try again today and will test these other alternatives listed in other comments too, hopefully something will actually work now.

beilabs 6y ago

Can someone enlighten me on storage? Is it stored on the docker container (locally) or does it allow for storage within say Google Storage or S3, even Backblaze perhaps? I tried the demo on Firefox but I couldn't actually figure out how to upload an image to test it out. Firefox / Linux user.

beilabs 6y ago
I think I'm able to answer this myself. Supports Nextcloud for storage; not sure I'm happy with just that.
oarsinsync 6y ago
https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos#first-steps-after-setting-up https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos#first-steps-after... Local directories (so mount whatever you want to that path) or NextCloud native integration

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago

How does DropBox handle customer data? Is it protected from any analysis or scanning at least according to the ToS? Or do they also inspect and/or sell my data?

alisonkisk 6y ago
https://www.dropbox.com/terms https://www.dropbox.com/terms

HeckFeck 6y ago

> You need a x86 processor and it is recommended to have 8GBs of RAM. This is a bit much for a home cloud installation, but I could see it becoming what Invidious is to YouTube.

Can_Not 6y ago
Most likely the machine learning features are what cause that.

JD557 6y ago

Looking at this project and some of the alternatives provided, they seem to be quite memory hungry. I assume this is related to the ML model. Is there any way to run this (or one fo the alternatives) in a "Lite" mode without any ML? I see that Photoprism has a ton of flags, but it's not obvious how those affect memory usage.

hanklazard 6y ago
Yeah, I think for users of Google Photos, the ML was a big part of it. Lots of other options without, I’ve used and like Lychee (1). (1) https://lychee.electerious.com/ https://lychee.electerious.com/
olliebennett 6y ago
PhotoPrism uses TensorFlow for the image classification / ML stuff (to add labels to your images), but it can be completely disabled via a flag (or toggle under advanced settings) before you begin indexing if you don't need it. PhotoPrism's ML object detection is no doubt not as powerful as Google's, but it seems to work pretty well based on the demo, and I know the devs are working on improving it frequently.
cozzyd 6y ago
yeah, 8 GB of RAM for a photo gallery seems completely insane...
mceachen 6y ago
PhotoStructure will run comfortably with 1gb RAM, and scales to very large (>1mm file) libraries. The ML models I'm loading for the next version may take a bit more RAM than that, but (as most features with PhotoStructure), you'll be able to selectively disable them to taste. https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/ https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/
derneuere 6y ago
We are not sure why it needs that much RAM. We know that it has something to do, with the ML models. I am pretty sure we can optimize it in the future.

subpixel 6y ago

How do this and the other alternatives handle Apple’s “Live Photos”? This pernicious feature is adored in my family and they won’t consider options that would take it away.

tipsysquid 6y ago
In the Android world, Samsung and Google support eachothers live picture format. As far as I can tell for Google they embed video in the picture, Samsung has their own format for this. Im on an older version of android and the live photos dont have the snappiness of Apple's, but that could be a processor power issue or even stylistic choice. Particularly the length of the live photo is noticeably different. Im not sure how Apple stores the live picture info, but having it crossplatform would be fantastic for services like these.
- fsflyer 6y ago
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32508375/apple-live-photo-file-format https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32508375/apple-live-phot... gives some of the details.
jdright 6y ago
Is this the same thing as Samsung's Motion Photo? If so, it is just a .mp4 attached to the jpeg, should be easy to support in the future.

dirtyid 6y ago

The trainable face classifier will go a long way. I've been unfortunately trained by Google's unlimited upload behaviour that it's going to be impossible to parse through my archive without Google's semantic identification of contents.

Can_Not 6y ago

What's like this, but perhaps without machine learning and targets "s3 compatible APIs"?

zaroth 6y ago

> You will need at least 10 GB of HDD Space for the docker images. It needs that space because of the machine learning models. Are face detection models on the iPhone not run locally? Do they take up this much space on-device? Multi GBs just seems “large” for this?

alisonkisk 6y ago
Docker Image means it includes an extra OS install. Your iPhone uses the same OS for all apps.

Bishonen88 6y ago

For anyone moving from google photos and looking for alternatives, I recently transitioned to a NAS from Synology. They offer many apps, and one is very similar to this project, although a bit more polished. It's not open source, though (AFAIK). Performance with 2TB of movies and raw photos is awesome (60k files+). Indexing and face recognition took a few days, though. https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments

alisonkisk 6y ago
It's amazing that synology would hold themselves back with a proprietary app when they are trying to sell hardware and are competing against Google and Apple.
- beagle3 6y ago
  Synology is selling an experience, like Apple, not hardware. It's a plug-it-and-it-works private-on-premise cloud. They are not competing with Google or Apple in the sense that customer usually decide on-premise or cloud-based and only then look for a solution (prices are on the same scale, so the reason to choose one over the other is usually not price).
- Octopuz 6y ago
  You could still run docker on the x86 models and host one of the solutions mentioned here.
dsego 6y ago
A bit off-topic, but I've just bought a small 2-bay synology NAS and I'm wondering if I should go ext4 or btrfs for my family photos/videos. I like the idea of data safety features like checksums & scrubbing, but ext4 seems more robust & tested. Which did you go with?
- Octopuz 6y ago
  btrfs works fine in Synology's implementation. Please keep in mind that RAID is not a backup. You can backup to a cloud service or to a friend's house with its own Synology.

buzzert 6y ago

I’d really like to get off of iCloud Photo Library, but I’m not sure of a way to reliably and automatically sync photos off of my iPhone to a provider like LibrePhotos. Has anyone figured this out?

wakkaflokka 6y ago
I'm trying to figure this out myself. I've gone from Google Photos -> iCloud -> testing out Unraid + PhotoPrism + NextCloud. That is, point PhotoPrism's import folder to the NextCloud photos folder. Both hosted on Unraid. And then on my iPhone, have the photos automatically uploaded. Only issue so far is I don't see an auto-detect and import option in PhotoPrism so I have to manually click 'import'.
glial 6y ago
Not sure about the upload part, but for getting photos out of iCloud, this works: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
mceachen 6y ago
Several of my beta users have recommended PhotoSync. I've used Resilio Sync on my iOS test device successfully as well. Most NAS providers (like Synology and QNAP) also have native sync apps. It's good to have options so if one gives you attitude, you can switch it out. I wrote up more details here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#how-do-i-back-up-files-on-my-phone https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...

cozzyd 6y ago

my crappy solution = gnome-photos with the broadway backend, but this is a terrible hack that only allows one connection at a time.