11 ms·

Lychee – Self-hosted photo-management done right

261 points by shrx 4y ago

shrx 4y ago
Disclaimer: I'm not associated with the Lychee dev team, just a very happy user. I've been using Lychee to self-host my photos for years now and the experience has been extremely positive. The interface is beautiful, intuitive and very streamlined. The layout supports both desktop and mobile browsers. The project is under active development and the developers take a lot of effort in addressing the open issues on the github repo. If you're looking for a self-hosted photo gallery solution, this is highly recommended.
LinuxBender 4y ago
This looks nice. I might try it out. One nitpick, the .git directory is rather large and probably needs some attention as it is 129MB. The tests directory also has a bit of photo content. Perhaps this could be stored outside of git somehow? Excluding those directories the repository would be less than 11MB.
- m463 4y ago
  I'm uncertain, but would git clone --depth=1 mitigate this?
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    The total size with --depth=1 is 239MB and the .git folder is 116MB. Also the same with adding --branch=master.
- eredengrin 4y ago
  It's all tradeoffs. If it's test data taking up space, it's useful to have the tests tracked along side the source so it's reasonable to put it in the repository. It could be put in a separate git repository and then tracked as a submodule, but it adds a bit of complexity for arguably minimal gain (developers need the tests anyway so it's only really helpful for users who want to download the sources and not the tests). Something like git lfs could maybe have a use but it also adds complexity. Unless they expect it to grow into the GB range personally I like the decision to just put it directly in the repository.
superkuh 4y ago
The best way to self-host and manage photos is to put them in a directory on your filesystem and then look at them with your eyes using your operating system file manager. Trying to implement this functionality, again, in the browser is just absurd. The best way for other people to look at them is via a static webserver serving static html files generated by some photo gallery tool like jigl. It has no active components to fail or get exploited in the future.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > The best way for other people to look at them is via a static webserver For some use cases only. Most of my photos are not public and a large chunk of them is being shared with small groups of people only. I'm not going to risk public-but-hidden URLs just in case they'll get indexed by accident. A static site is not usable at all for me.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    HTTP basic authentication is very easy to set up and maintain (and keep secure) on pretty much every webserver ever made. A dynamic system PHP like Lychee is very hard to infeasible for an average non-technical user to keep maintained and secure. Even technical web developers have trouble keeping php projects secure over years. A static webserver with http basic auth is more secure now and incomparably more secure over 5-10 years. If you are worried about security then definitely do not give a third party PHP system access to your files.
- dewey 4y ago
  That might be the "best way" for you, but not for everyone. Personally I have so many pictures that I really appreciate the "memories" that Apple Photos extracts and shows me from time to time. That would be very hard to implement yourself. It always picks good pictures and not random screenshots you have lying around or blurry pictures. A directy listning is definitly not a scalable solution if you are not looking to just go through all pictures of a specific date.
- zepolen 4y ago
  No. Using a file system to look at photos is absurd. Searching photos using text, handling live images, displaying on a map by gps coords, categorizing people/places/albums automatically. None of this is handled by a filesystem or jigl.
usrme 4y ago
I haven't (yet) used this myself, but it seems Lychee is also available as an application[1] that can be installed for those using YunoHost[2]. This should make trying this out even simpler. --- [1]: https://yunohost.org/en/app_lychee https://yunohost.org/en/app_lychee [2]: https://yunohost.org/en/whatsyunohost https://yunohost.org/en/whatsyunohost
khimaros 4y ago
PhotoPrism is another option in this space which includes some automated ML tagging of images.
- rabbitofdeath 4y ago
  100% this - I tried a handful of self-hosted options and PhotoPrism is the fastest that I tested with sane folder organization for your filesystem.
- jhauris 4y ago
  Looks really nice! I could definitely give this a try. For others who are looking for possible deal breakers: It's AGPL They have the community version/premium model. Differentiators of premium (from https://photoprism.app/features https://photoprism.app/features): * support * higher max res (900MP vs. 150MP) * non-rate limited reverse geocoding * higher quality maps * premium themes * visual configuration options * hardware video transcoding
  - mimsee 4y ago
    > For others who are looking for possible deal breakers: It's AGPL What makes AGPL a deal breaker for self-hosting one’s photos?
    - jeltz 4y ago
      Yeah, I personally dislike AGPL but even I do not see any practical issues with it for this use.
    - kybernetyk 4y ago
      You can't build a hip start up around it and get millions of VC money. Because of the APGL you'd have to open source your service. Something the typical unicorn startup isn't too keen on. Taking community software: yes. Building a for profit product around it: yes. Giving back to the community: lol no.
    - jhauris 4y ago
vladstudio 4y ago
I researched my options for self hosted file storage that would include (modest) photo viewer and audio player. I tried, among others, Lychee and Photoprism. I found not so popular web app - FileRun - and have been very happy with it so far. https://www.filerun.com/ https://www.filerun.com/
- breakds 4y ago
  Just want to say that filerun is a really good option for self-host NAS with WebDAV support as well as a nice web app. Would definitely recommend. Even though you use filerun to host files, you can still point Lychee/Plex etc to the photos and videos, which might be inside a subdirectory under the root directory of your filerun instance.
- brulard 4y ago
  Hello Vlad, I just came to tell you that I'm a big fan of your wallpapers since forever. Your style is one of my very few favourites. Thanks a lot for your work!
  - vladstudio 4y ago
    Thank you! I really appreciate it. This year is not the most productive (war time stress) but I still hope to keep drawing.
ochrist 4y ago
Thumbs up for Lychee. I've used it for a couple of years, and it works great. I have begun to upload my photos (and even video snippets) to my own public website for sharing. For me it was important to be able to share private albums via some simple kind of user management, and that works fine. Not affiliated in any way. Just a happy user. I've recently upgraded to PHP 8, and Lychee still works without problems.
jacooper 4y ago
Nextcloud also proved their photo app, now with ML tagging and face and object detection.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Improved*.
- ochrist 4y ago
  I use Lychee currently for my photo sharing, but have just installed Nextcloud and will certainly test this out. There are a few things I miss in Lychee such as commenting and statistics, but I don't know if Nextcloud will make this easier.
SPBS 4y ago
The UI from the screenshots look slick, but I can't help but notice that there is barely any JavaScript listed in the repo. Is this a primarily server-side rendered UI?
- hanniabu 4y ago
  New developers may not believe this, but javascript isn't needed for a UI
- SPBS 4y ago
  Oh, if I had read further into the README I would have seen this: > https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee#build https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee#build > Lychee is ready to use, right out of the box. If you want to contribute and edit CSS or JS files, you need to rebuild https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee-front https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee-front. So their JavaScript source code is in a separate "Lychee-front" repository and they commit the build artifacts into the main "Lychee" repo. Not sure why they would do this.
colordrops 4y ago
Been putting together a spreadsheet of self-hosted file apps and trying them out. Still haven't found something that meets all my requirements. Does anything exist with: * Automatic album generation based on detection of an "event", e.g. a cluster of photos taken together around the same time, organizing them in a folder, even better using an optional album title, e.g. 2022-06-24 - Picnic at the Park * Modern UX * Mobile support * If no sync support, at least the detection of new files in a folder, say from syncthing These are the core features IMHO, and everything else is icing. I'm basically looking for something that can replace Google Photos in a reasonable way.
- gchaincl 4y ago
  try photoprism
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Thanks, will check it out.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      Got it installed and trying it out. Can't find any functionality that groups albums by event. Any idea where to find this?
- Yacoby 4y ago
  Immich (https://www.immich.app/ https://www.immich.app/) is still under heavy development, but looks like it will hit most of those requirements (but not automatic album generation).
  - colordrops 4y ago
    I hadn't heard of this, thanks.
- Telemakhos 4y ago
  I'd been using Chevereto and look forward to trying Lychee, but I'm also open to other suggestions if you have any.
stackedinserter 4y ago
> Made for photographers Please someone make a photo/video storage for families. Our photo stream is not artisan award-winning landscapes, they're messy bunch of travel photos, pictures of receipts and random exif-less pngs sent to us.
- bleomycin 4y ago
  immich isn’t quite there yet but it’s trajectory looks pretty good to fill this role https://www.immich.app https://www.immich.app
  - PenguinCoder 4y ago
    This is on my list to keep an eye on. I like that it's just a simple front end and not trying to be everything like Photo prism. I use Photo prism but I don't like how heavy it is. I want to use something like immich but it's not quite ready for production usage for me.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  If this existed, but also contained AI object recognition to automatically tag and describe photos, I would pay actually quite a lot of money for it.
  - Chico75 4y ago
    Google photos but self-hosted?
    - LeoPanthera 4y ago
      Yes please.
      - halfdan 4y ago
        I'm pretty happy with Synology Photos on my NAS. It's got face detection, interprets the exif and gives you geo maps, has albums and sharing. Got it set up for my entire family.
Xeoncross 4y ago
I feel like only scripting language projects like this ever take off (owncloud, wordpress, ghost, etc..) Like the kind of developer that tries to write the Rust/Go/Erlang/Haskell version ends up stuck on finding the perfect way to handle errors, trying to include a complex ML recommendation system, or creating a custom embedded database with fast lookup times for the possibility of albums with 100 million photos. Meanwhile, PHP and Ruby keep pumping out these fun little systems that have security holes every few months and need constant babysitting. Sorry, I don't mean to be negative. I'm really glad to see this, it just prompted some reflection.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Maybe because scripting languages are very pleasant to use in backends. Few things in web development beat the joy of changing a single line, pushing the affected file, and (usually) seeing it take effect immediately. I've developed websites in .Net and doing a tiny change becomes a big chore of serious business. Surely there are critical web applications that need compiled code and scalability, but hobby projects benefit from the accessibility interpreted languages provide. Maybe if it becomes popular the effort of porting it to a safer and more performant platform would be worth it.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    The bigger a backend system, the more you crave for static guarantees like a type system. I think that such tools are mostly successful as products, not as code bases. So the successful ones are likely designed and implemented by competent photograpers with some programming chops, who naturally pick languages with very low barrier of entry.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    The barrier to entry is way lower, way more developers will only learn scripting languages in their careers. A greater percentage of the projects who can succeed as a product will be using scripting languages. Especially considering performance is often not crucial, as long as it's fast enough: worst case scenario, you just throw more servers at it. The cost of hosting is often a small part of your budget compared to developers time (unless you're using AWS or developers from third world countries).
beauHD 4y ago
Ente[0] is similar. Haven't tried it but looks promising. There's also Pixelfed[1] which isn't as private but great if you don't want to join the Instagram brigade. [0] https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ [1] https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/
ggm 4y ago
De duplication is the killer feature. Especially if it can handle edited files even partially. Exif tag management is a nightmare. Dublin core on steroids. Date and time handling for approximate time knowledge kills many systems. It has to make choices about photo import implications for file path, and for file atime and mtime and multiple exif times, and private tags. Google honours a ridiculous small set of tags, and never reread. Google does sidecar files to avoid file change breaking hash values. All decisions have consequences. Photoprism and exiftool forums abound with special cases. A million of them.
- mceachen 4y ago
  Deduplication is a hairy problem, and was my first priority to solve when trying to get my own mess of photos together when I started writing PhotoStructure. I'm on the fifth major iteration of image hashing at this point, using a L*a*b mean hash, along with a kmeans-gathered set of dominant colors, along with dynamic thresholds that take into account differing mimetypes, fuzzy captured at times, and monochromatic images. This explains a bunch of the issues and tradeoffs I made while assembling the heuristics in PhotoStructure : https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplicate/ https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplica...
- novok 4y ago
  Mylio has a pretty good dedup in my experience. It's extra careful also and lets you verify each one or just do it all at once: https://community.mylio.com/posts/video-introducing-deduplication-in-mylio-photos https://community.mylio.com/posts/video-introducing-deduplic...
kkfx 4y ago
I still fail to understand why instead of try building networked apps, like Plan 9 have started showing in the past, we keep going adding web-apps for anything reducing powerful desktops to mere dumb terminal and impose a central point of failure even at home. Oh, sure, it's easier but going that route means end up in the mess we all know of modern "devops and alike" no one can really know nor manage.
- karencarits 4y ago
  In this specific case, web apps may be very suited as I guess a major usecase is sharing images with other people, and just sharing a link is much easier than having them (say a grandparent with limited technical skills or a one off share with a friend of a friend) installing an application which may not even exist for their device
  - kkfx 4y ago
    A link can also be a link to a mountable fuse fs share, like webdav/sshfs/9P etc and the other side can simply browse content not with a specific UI but with it's own favorite UI. If we rediscover the classic Plan 9 idea of anything is a stream on a network we can create our OWN web on our desktop, choosing what to cache locally, what to sync etc, in a far more powerful, simple, resilient and flexible way. A small example: we have since decades OFX feeds for financial operations. Why instead of spending gazillion of resources to build and keep up web-banking porcals (portals are another kind of beasts) when we can just give customers credentials and relevant links and the customer operate on a simple XML stream with his/shes favorite tool, with anything in a single place, it's style, automation, ... Perhaps because of surveillance capitalism?
- amelius 4y ago
  Dumb terminal you say? These days webbrowsers are insanely complicated pieces of software. Servers are much "dumber", especially the ones hosting just photos at home.
  - kkfx 4y ago
sorenjan 4y ago
One of my favorite features in Google Photos is the map view. I often can't remember when I took a photo, but know where it was. Open the map, navigate to where I took it, and there it is. I consider it a must have for a photo manager now.
- conception 4y ago
  Just an FYI for Apple folks that Apple photos had this as well on OSX and iOS.
ptbkoo 4y ago
Looking to move away from google photos but hard to find anything close to the features that google photos provide. Closest thing has been synology photos.
Fiahil 4y ago
if the authors are around, here is a couple of things to improve on the « done right » part : - loading thumbnails should be near instantaneous for the whole album. If it is taking longer, then let me downscale further. - loading full-scale, several megabytes, photos must continue in the background. otherwise I’ll be waiting on a black screen for several seconds during a slideshow. It’s something dumb to do, but somehow Plex can’t seem to handle that properly…
jokethrowaway 4y ago
This looks nice and it's definitely needed. Nextcloud is nowhere close to what we need and librecloud seems to lack performance (maybe because of the frontend architecture?) I'm currently on librecloud (after a migration from google photos) but I'm half thinking of building my own with an eye to performance
redkoala 4y ago
Can someone suggest workflows / products to sync / delete photos off multiple iPhones within the same family to the cloud?
ur-whale 4y ago
Is face recog built-in and does it work as well as Google Photo's built-in face recog?
jacob019 4y ago
Currently using Nextcloud Photos with Yaga on Android for viewing photos. It works well enough, but there's room for improvement. Does Lychee have an Android app? Can anyone compare?
stanislavb 4y ago
And here it is the Github repo: https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee. This might be helpful to people when looking for Lychee alternatives.
SlavikCA 4y ago
After trying few alternatives, I'm using https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 - extremely fast. I'm using it with my 70 000+ photos. Scanning is ~10x faster, then with PhotoPrism, and it works even without scanning. - It just works off file system. DB used only for cache. - it uses file folders structure - no timeline
jimmcslim 4y ago
Another one I came across recently is Damselfly https://damselfly.info https://damselfly.info
jimmcslim 4y ago
Is there any online tool where I can upload a photo that doesn't contain GPS data in the EXIF metadata, but gives me an estimate of the location that the photo was taken from - e.g. not just identifying the Eiffel Tower but also whereabouts I was standing when I took it. I'd love to be able to enrich my older photos with reasonably accurate GPS location - or at least a '95% chance that the photo was taken within 500m of this point'.
- gsich 4y ago
  If you have Google Spying active you could get your location (or the location of your smartphone) at that time. I'd also be interested in such a service. Sounds hard tough if you don't have lots of pictures to correlate to.
- _visgean 4y ago
  there is this: https://twitter.com/whereml https://twitter.com/whereml. Another option is to use something like GPT which might have sufficient understanding of some of the objects... But I think unless you have some very memorable objects like eiffel tower or big ben it will be very rough.. E.g. a picture of a beach will be impossible yet this system might put it somewhere... So I would be a bit worried about trying to automate it..
Helmut10001 4y ago
I considered Lychee but went for Photoview [1] for internal exploration of my photos [1], which follows the 4-facets principle (who, what, when, where). There's a map (where), an album view (what), face recognition (who), and a timeline (when). All of these make it pretty convenient for different purposes. It is also folder-based and I set it up in read-only mode, so Photoview doesn't modify my files or structures. [1]: https://github.com/photoview/photoview https://github.com/photoview/photoview
t0bia_s 4y ago
Back end is outdated, definitely not for photographers that want present their work seriously.
rpigab 4y ago
I like Piwigo for now, didn't put lots of pictures but it's easy to set up, sync files, access management, etc.
- mikecoles 4y ago
  Piwigo is what I have been coming back to after trying others out on occasion.

261 points by shrx 4y ago

shrx 4y ago

Disclaimer: I'm not associated with the Lychee dev team, just a very happy user. I've been using Lychee to self-host my photos for years now and the experience has been extremely positive. The interface is beautiful, intuitive and very streamlined. The layout supports both desktop and mobile browsers. The project is under active development and the developers take a lot of effort in addressing the open issues on the github repo. If you're looking for a self-hosted photo gallery solution, this is highly recommended.

LinuxBender 4y ago

This looks nice. I might try it out. One nitpick, the .git directory is rather large and probably needs some attention as it is 129MB. The tests directory also has a bit of photo content. Perhaps this could be stored outside of git somehow? Excluding those directories the repository would be less than 11MB.

m463 4y ago
I'm uncertain, but would git clone --depth=1 mitigate this?
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  The total size with --depth=1 is 239MB and the .git folder is 116MB. Also the same with adding --branch=master.
eredengrin 4y ago
It's all tradeoffs. If it's test data taking up space, it's useful to have the tests tracked along side the source so it's reasonable to put it in the repository. It could be put in a separate git repository and then tracked as a submodule, but it adds a bit of complexity for arguably minimal gain (developers need the tests anyway so it's only really helpful for users who want to download the sources and not the tests). Something like git lfs could maybe have a use but it also adds complexity. Unless they expect it to grow into the GB range personally I like the decision to just put it directly in the repository.

superkuh 4y ago

The best way to self-host and manage photos is to put them in a directory on your filesystem and then look at them with your eyes using your operating system file manager. Trying to implement this functionality, again, in the browser is just absurd. The best way for other people to look at them is via a static webserver serving static html files generated by some photo gallery tool like jigl. It has no active components to fail or get exploited in the future.

viraptor 4y ago
> The best way for other people to look at them is via a static webserver For some use cases only. Most of my photos are not public and a large chunk of them is being shared with small groups of people only. I'm not going to risk public-but-hidden URLs just in case they'll get indexed by accident. A static site is not usable at all for me.
- superkuh 4y ago
  HTTP basic authentication is very easy to set up and maintain (and keep secure) on pretty much every webserver ever made. A dynamic system PHP like Lychee is very hard to infeasible for an average non-technical user to keep maintained and secure. Even technical web developers have trouble keeping php projects secure over years. A static webserver with http basic auth is more secure now and incomparably more secure over 5-10 years. If you are worried about security then definitely do not give a third party PHP system access to your files.
dewey 4y ago
That might be the "best way" for you, but not for everyone. Personally I have so many pictures that I really appreciate the "memories" that Apple Photos extracts and shows me from time to time. That would be very hard to implement yourself. It always picks good pictures and not random screenshots you have lying around or blurry pictures. A directy listning is definitly not a scalable solution if you are not looking to just go through all pictures of a specific date.
zepolen 4y ago
No. Using a file system to look at photos is absurd. Searching photos using text, handling live images, displaying on a map by gps coords, categorizing people/places/albums automatically. None of this is handled by a filesystem or jigl.

usrme 4y ago

I haven't (yet) used this myself, but it seems Lychee is also available as an application[1] that can be installed for those using YunoHost[2]. This should make trying this out even simpler. --- [1]: https://yunohost.org/en/app_lychee https://yunohost.org/en/app_lychee [2]: https://yunohost.org/en/whatsyunohost https://yunohost.org/en/whatsyunohost

khimaros 4y ago

PhotoPrism is another option in this space which includes some automated ML tagging of images.

rabbitofdeath 4y ago
100% this - I tried a handful of self-hosted options and PhotoPrism is the fastest that I tested with sane folder organization for your filesystem.
jhauris 4y ago
Looks really nice! I could definitely give this a try. For others who are looking for possible deal breakers: It's AGPL They have the community version/premium model. Differentiators of premium (from https://photoprism.app/features https://photoprism.app/features): * support * higher max res (900MP vs. 150MP) * non-rate limited reverse geocoding * higher quality maps * premium themes * visual configuration options * hardware video transcoding
- mimsee 4y ago
  > For others who are looking for possible deal breakers: It's AGPL What makes AGPL a deal breaker for self-hosting one’s photos?
  - jeltz 4y ago
    Yeah, I personally dislike AGPL but even I do not see any practical issues with it for this use.
  - kybernetyk 4y ago
    You can't build a hip start up around it and get millions of VC money. Because of the APGL you'd have to open source your service. Something the typical unicorn startup isn't too keen on. Taking community software: yes. Building a for profit product around it: yes. Giving back to the community: lol no.
  - jhauris 4y ago

vladstudio 4y ago

I researched my options for self hosted file storage that would include (modest) photo viewer and audio player. I tried, among others, Lychee and Photoprism. I found not so popular web app - FileRun - and have been very happy with it so far. https://www.filerun.com/ https://www.filerun.com/

breakds 4y ago
Just want to say that filerun is a really good option for self-host NAS with WebDAV support as well as a nice web app. Would definitely recommend. Even though you use filerun to host files, you can still point Lychee/Plex etc to the photos and videos, which might be inside a subdirectory under the root directory of your filerun instance.
brulard 4y ago
Hello Vlad, I just came to tell you that I'm a big fan of your wallpapers since forever. Your style is one of my very few favourites. Thanks a lot for your work!
- vladstudio 4y ago
  Thank you! I really appreciate it. This year is not the most productive (war time stress) but I still hope to keep drawing.

ochrist 4y ago

Thumbs up for Lychee. I've used it for a couple of years, and it works great. I have begun to upload my photos (and even video snippets) to my own public website for sharing. For me it was important to be able to share private albums via some simple kind of user management, and that works fine. Not affiliated in any way. Just a happy user. I've recently upgraded to PHP 8, and Lychee still works without problems.

jacooper 4y ago

Nextcloud also proved their photo app, now with ML tagging and face and object detection.

jacooper 4y ago
Improved*.
ochrist 4y ago
I use Lychee currently for my photo sharing, but have just installed Nextcloud and will certainly test this out. There are a few things I miss in Lychee such as commenting and statistics, but I don't know if Nextcloud will make this easier.

SPBS 4y ago

The UI from the screenshots look slick, but I can't help but notice that there is barely any JavaScript listed in the repo. Is this a primarily server-side rendered UI?

hanniabu 4y ago
New developers may not believe this, but javascript isn't needed for a UI
SPBS 4y ago
Oh, if I had read further into the README I would have seen this: > https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee#build https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee#build > Lychee is ready to use, right out of the box. If you want to contribute and edit CSS or JS files, you need to rebuild https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee-front https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee-front. So their JavaScript source code is in a separate "Lychee-front" repository and they commit the build artifacts into the main "Lychee" repo. Not sure why they would do this.

colordrops 4y ago

Been putting together a spreadsheet of self-hosted file apps and trying them out. Still haven't found something that meets all my requirements. Does anything exist with: * Automatic album generation based on detection of an "event", e.g. a cluster of photos taken together around the same time, organizing them in a folder, even better using an optional album title, e.g. 2022-06-24 - Picnic at the Park * Modern UX * Mobile support * If no sync support, at least the detection of new files in a folder, say from syncthing These are the core features IMHO, and everything else is icing. I'm basically looking for something that can replace Google Photos in a reasonable way.

gchaincl 4y ago
try photoprism
- colordrops 4y ago
  Thanks, will check it out.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Got it installed and trying it out. Can't find any functionality that groups albums by event. Any idea where to find this?
Yacoby 4y ago
Immich (https://www.immich.app/ https://www.immich.app/) is still under heavy development, but looks like it will hit most of those requirements (but not automatic album generation).
- colordrops 4y ago
  I hadn't heard of this, thanks.
Telemakhos 4y ago
I'd been using Chevereto and look forward to trying Lychee, but I'm also open to other suggestions if you have any.

stackedinserter 4y ago

> Made for photographers Please someone make a photo/video storage for families. Our photo stream is not artisan award-winning landscapes, they're messy bunch of travel photos, pictures of receipts and random exif-less pngs sent to us.

bleomycin 4y ago
immich isn’t quite there yet but it’s trajectory looks pretty good to fill this role https://www.immich.app https://www.immich.app
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  This is on my list to keep an eye on. I like that it's just a simple front end and not trying to be everything like Photo prism. I use Photo prism but I don't like how heavy it is. I want to use something like immich but it's not quite ready for production usage for me.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
If this existed, but also contained AI object recognition to automatically tag and describe photos, I would pay actually quite a lot of money for it.
- Chico75 4y ago
  Google photos but self-hosted?
  - LeoPanthera 4y ago
    Yes please.
    - halfdan 4y ago
      I'm pretty happy with Synology Photos on my NAS. It's got face detection, interprets the exif and gives you geo maps, has albums and sharing. Got it set up for my entire family.

Xeoncross 4y ago

I feel like only scripting language projects like this ever take off (owncloud, wordpress, ghost, etc..) Like the kind of developer that tries to write the Rust/Go/Erlang/Haskell version ends up stuck on finding the perfect way to handle errors, trying to include a complex ML recommendation system, or creating a custom embedded database with fast lookup times for the possibility of albums with 100 million photos. Meanwhile, PHP and Ruby keep pumping out these fun little systems that have security holes every few months and need constant babysitting. Sorry, I don't mean to be negative. I'm really glad to see this, it just prompted some reflection.

ASalazarMX 4y ago
Maybe because scripting languages are very pleasant to use in backends. Few things in web development beat the joy of changing a single line, pushing the affected file, and (usually) seeing it take effect immediately. I've developed websites in .Net and doing a tiny change becomes a big chore of serious business. Surely there are critical web applications that need compiled code and scalability, but hobby projects benefit from the accessibility interpreted languages provide. Maybe if it becomes popular the effort of porting it to a safer and more performant platform would be worth it.
- nine_k 4y ago
  The bigger a backend system, the more you crave for static guarantees like a type system. I think that such tools are mostly successful as products, not as code bases. So the successful ones are likely designed and implemented by competent photograpers with some programming chops, who naturally pick languages with very low barrier of entry.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  The barrier to entry is way lower, way more developers will only learn scripting languages in their careers. A greater percentage of the projects who can succeed as a product will be using scripting languages. Especially considering performance is often not crucial, as long as it's fast enough: worst case scenario, you just throw more servers at it. The cost of hosting is often a small part of your budget compared to developers time (unless you're using AWS or developers from third world countries).

beauHD 4y ago

Ente[0] is similar. Haven't tried it but looks promising. There's also Pixelfed[1] which isn't as private but great if you don't want to join the Instagram brigade. [0] https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ [1] https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/

ggm 4y ago

De duplication is the killer feature. Especially if it can handle edited files even partially. Exif tag management is a nightmare. Dublin core on steroids. Date and time handling for approximate time knowledge kills many systems. It has to make choices about photo import implications for file path, and for file atime and mtime and multiple exif times, and private tags. Google honours a ridiculous small set of tags, and never reread. Google does sidecar files to avoid file change breaking hash values. All decisions have consequences. Photoprism and exiftool forums abound with special cases. A million of them.

mceachen 4y ago
Deduplication is a hairy problem, and was my first priority to solve when trying to get my own mess of photos together when I started writing PhotoStructure. I'm on the fifth major iteration of image hashing at this point, using a L*a*b mean hash, along with a kmeans-gathered set of dominant colors, along with dynamic thresholds that take into account differing mimetypes, fuzzy captured at times, and monochromatic images. This explains a bunch of the issues and tradeoffs I made while assembling the heuristics in PhotoStructure : https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplicate/ https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplica...
novok 4y ago
Mylio has a pretty good dedup in my experience. It's extra careful also and lets you verify each one or just do it all at once: https://community.mylio.com/posts/video-introducing-deduplication-in-mylio-photos https://community.mylio.com/posts/video-introducing-deduplic...

kkfx 4y ago

I still fail to understand why instead of try building networked apps, like Plan 9 have started showing in the past, we keep going adding web-apps for anything reducing powerful desktops to mere dumb terminal and impose a central point of failure even at home. Oh, sure, it's easier but going that route means end up in the mess we all know of modern "devops and alike" no one can really know nor manage.

karencarits 4y ago
In this specific case, web apps may be very suited as I guess a major usecase is sharing images with other people, and just sharing a link is much easier than having them (say a grandparent with limited technical skills or a one off share with a friend of a friend) installing an application which may not even exist for their device
- kkfx 4y ago
  A link can also be a link to a mountable fuse fs share, like webdav/sshfs/9P etc and the other side can simply browse content not with a specific UI but with it's own favorite UI. If we rediscover the classic Plan 9 idea of anything is a stream on a network we can create our OWN web on our desktop, choosing what to cache locally, what to sync etc, in a far more powerful, simple, resilient and flexible way. A small example: we have since decades OFX feeds for financial operations. Why instead of spending gazillion of resources to build and keep up web-banking porcals (portals are another kind of beasts) when we can just give customers credentials and relevant links and the customer operate on a simple XML stream with his/shes favorite tool, with anything in a single place, it's style, automation, ... Perhaps because of surveillance capitalism?
amelius 4y ago
Dumb terminal you say? These days webbrowsers are insanely complicated pieces of software. Servers are much "dumber", especially the ones hosting just photos at home.
- kkfx 4y ago

sorenjan 4y ago

One of my favorite features in Google Photos is the map view. I often can't remember when I took a photo, but know where it was. Open the map, navigate to where I took it, and there it is. I consider it a must have for a photo manager now.

conception 4y ago
Just an FYI for Apple folks that Apple photos had this as well on OSX and iOS.

ptbkoo 4y ago

Looking to move away from google photos but hard to find anything close to the features that google photos provide. Closest thing has been synology photos.

Fiahil 4y ago

if the authors are around, here is a couple of things to improve on the « done right » part : - loading thumbnails should be near instantaneous for the whole album. If it is taking longer, then let me downscale further. - loading full-scale, several megabytes, photos must continue in the background. otherwise I’ll be waiting on a black screen for several seconds during a slideshow. It’s something dumb to do, but somehow Plex can’t seem to handle that properly…

jokethrowaway 4y ago

This looks nice and it's definitely needed. Nextcloud is nowhere close to what we need and librecloud seems to lack performance (maybe because of the frontend architecture?) I'm currently on librecloud (after a migration from google photos) but I'm half thinking of building my own with an eye to performance

redkoala 4y ago

Can someone suggest workflows / products to sync / delete photos off multiple iPhones within the same family to the cloud?

ur-whale 4y ago

Is face recog built-in and does it work as well as Google Photo's built-in face recog?

jacob019 4y ago

Currently using Nextcloud Photos with Yaga on Android for viewing photos. It works well enough, but there's room for improvement. Does Lychee have an Android app? Can anyone compare?

stanislavb 4y ago

And here it is the Github repo: https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee. This might be helpful to people when looking for Lychee alternatives.

SlavikCA 4y ago

After trying few alternatives, I'm using https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 - extremely fast. I'm using it with my 70 000+ photos. Scanning is ~10x faster, then with PhotoPrism, and it works even without scanning. - It just works off file system. DB used only for cache. - it uses file folders structure - no timeline

jimmcslim 4y ago

Another one I came across recently is Damselfly https://damselfly.info https://damselfly.info

jimmcslim 4y ago

Is there any online tool where I can upload a photo that doesn't contain GPS data in the EXIF metadata, but gives me an estimate of the location that the photo was taken from - e.g. not just identifying the Eiffel Tower but also whereabouts I was standing when I took it. I'd love to be able to enrich my older photos with reasonably accurate GPS location - or at least a '95% chance that the photo was taken within 500m of this point'.

gsich 4y ago
If you have Google Spying active you could get your location (or the location of your smartphone) at that time. I'd also be interested in such a service. Sounds hard tough if you don't have lots of pictures to correlate to.
_visgean 4y ago
there is this: https://twitter.com/whereml https://twitter.com/whereml. Another option is to use something like GPT which might have sufficient understanding of some of the objects... But I think unless you have some very memorable objects like eiffel tower or big ben it will be very rough.. E.g. a picture of a beach will be impossible yet this system might put it somewhere... So I would be a bit worried about trying to automate it..

Helmut10001 4y ago

I considered Lychee but went for Photoview [1] for internal exploration of my photos [1], which follows the 4-facets principle (who, what, when, where). There's a map (where), an album view (what), face recognition (who), and a timeline (when). All of these make it pretty convenient for different purposes. It is also folder-based and I set it up in read-only mode, so Photoview doesn't modify my files or structures. [1]: https://github.com/photoview/photoview https://github.com/photoview/photoview

t0bia_s 4y ago

Back end is outdated, definitely not for photographers that want present their work seriously.

rpigab 4y ago

I like Piwigo for now, didn't put lots of pictures but it's easy to set up, sync files, access management, etc.

mikecoles 4y ago
Piwigo is what I have been coming back to after trying others out on occasion.