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Photoprism – open-source Google Photos Alternative

501 points by lom 4y ago

igor47 4y ago
I'm running this self-hosted, using docker compose and traefik. Modern tools make self hosting SO much easier!
- dicknuckle 4y ago
  They do indeed. I moved all my home infra to docker about 5 years ago and couldn't be happier. It forces my ADD brain to keep things tidy on the home server and now I barely have to do anything unless the server runs out of disk space. Side note: Just last weekend used autocompose.py to pull all of it into Docker compose files. The tool isn't perfect, but it works flawlessly for anything that isn't using weird mounts or host devices. For the problematic containers, I used inspect on the original, stopped it, spun up the compose version, and compared the inspect data. Take so much guesswork and googling out of Linux admin once you're versed in how it works
HankB99 4y ago
I tried it out and was generally happy with the results. Unfortunately there is no way to share my entire catalog of decades of pictures without giving out full admin access and I'm not comfortable doing that. I can share bits of my collection in a satisfactory manner but that does not meet my needs. I'll also add that some of the classification was amusing, but I suppose as time goes on it will get better.
- rscrawfo 4y ago
  I think the team is working on that feature.
- kriskrunch 4y ago
  Look again! Recently, I was happily surprised to find a way to share albums with friends. Just a simple guest link.
  - HankB99 4y ago
    I saw the option to share albums, but I wanted to allow a guest to see the entire collection. Happily it sounds like that is coming.
- lom 4y ago
  I’ve heard that feature is WIP currently. And yeah, the classification is funny. Apparently I classify as a wall now.
kccqzy 4y ago
I also self-host this together with Tailscale. The UI is not very polished but certainly very usable already. My personal journey was to get rid of my dependency on iCloud Photos. I managed to export two-decades worth of pictures and videos using a separate tool (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) and then import into PhotoPrism. Coming from Apple Photos, the UI is a bit lackluster but the freedom of owning the entire data more than makes up for it.
- maxhq 4y ago
  Have you been able to export meta data from iCloud and import it into PhotoPrism? (e.g. custom photo comments)
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    I personally do not have any photo comments but I suppose the software can handle it. From https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos#command-line-reference-export https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos#command-line-referenc... I think it will support exporting XMP metadata files with photo comments. Then from https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/use-cases/apple/ https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/use-cases/apple/ I think PhotoPrism will correctly import descriptions in XMP files.
rscrawfo 4y ago
Great app. It just works and works well. I need to donate again. Only two minor complaints are there’s no “On this day” function, and the instructions to view full resolution photos are a bit confusing. Otherwise i like it better than anything else.
simlevesque 4y ago
I'm looking for something that can extract HDR photos from videos like Google Photos.
mberning 4y ago
There are a few apps in this space worth checking out Photorprism Photostructure Lychee Digikam Synology Photos (if you have a synology) And probably a few others I am forgetting.
- askiiart 4y ago
  There's also IMMICH, pretty much a 1-to-1 clone of Google Photos.
- rainbowzootsuit 4y ago
  I will add immich which has been getting good development lately. https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/ https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich
- mceachen 4y ago
  Howdy! I'm the author of PhotoStructure. If you're thinking about self-hosting anything, my first recommendation is to get your backups in order now, before doing anything else. I wrote this a while back: <https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/ https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/>. Having a full, offline backup will only cost ~$20/TiB nowadays, which is cheap insurance if whatever app you try out doesn't quite behave as you expected it to. The second step is to make sure your server is both hardened (<https://forum.photostructure.com/t/server-hardening-for-beginners/1027 https://forum.photostructure.com/t/server-hardening-for-begi...>), and ideally, only available via a VPN (like TailScale) or at least via a reverse proxy (Cloudflare has a free solution). I compared and contrasted some of these solutions (along with instructions) here: <https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your-library-on-the-wan https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your...> The situation for self-hosting your photos just a couple years ago was pretty bleak--especially if you had hundreds of thousands (or more!) of photos. That may sound like a lot of photos, but for people shooting digital for 20+ years, it really isn't! Whatever image manager you pick, make sure the app follows existing metadata storage standards, so in the (seemingly inevitable) future when the app is abandoned, your photos are in directory structures that make sense to you, and the work you've put into organizing them isn't locked up in unreadable databases or folder structures. Spoiler alert: I got burned by this issue with prior apps, so I designed PhotoStructure from the ground up with exactly this in mind: <https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#open-standards-and-formats https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#open-stan...>. Unfortunately, many/most self-hosted solutions don't handle multiple source directories and configurable destination directories.
bb123 4y ago
I have ~1TB of photos and I liked the idea of hosting this on Digital Ocean, but it looks like a volume of that size would run me over $100/mo. I'll have to stick with iCloud Photos for now.
- ukuina 4y ago
  PikaPods has much better storage pricing for PhotoPrism.
  - hijinks 4y ago
    i don't see any pricing for storage on their site n/m signed up and you use sliders to get what you need.. looks like its about $15 a month for 1Tb of storage which isn't enough for me.. too bad.
    - ukuina 4y ago
      I dropped them an email and they increased the cap to 6TB. I enabled 2TB on my pod and it estimates $20/month.
- afranchuk 4y ago
  Storage volumes can be much cheaper. For instance, Backblaze B2 will run you around $6/TB/mo, IIRC. And some providers (usually the smaller ones) have discounts for bulk purchases (e.g. a year). Many self hosted apps support cloud storage.
  - stef25 4y ago
    Is it possible to use B2 or DO Spaces as storage for Photoprism?
    - hutattedonmyarm 4y ago
      Sort of. It's not natively supported, but you can use something like s3fs-fuse to mount a S3 compatible storage (like B2) locally and use that. I personally went a different route: Set up Nextcloud, point its primary storage to B2, and then mount a Nextcloud folder (using WebDAV) to my filesystem which I configured as primary storage for Photoprism. That setup was pretty slow, but I also had Nextcloud and Photoprism running on the same VPS which additionally was underpowered for even Photoprism alone. I am now using a separate server for Photoprism and performance is much better
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sodality2 4y ago
I just got this set up - it parsed ~5000 photos (half raw, half jpg) surprisingly quickly on my laptop. As stated by others, I wish I could look at certain days more easily. The share function is very cool, though - an easy way to showcase your photos to others.
afranchuk 4y ago
Funny, for the last week I've been trying various self hosted photo apps every night on my home server. Tonight was going to be Photoprism and then I see it pop up here! I've just wanted something that allows me to organize and tag photos, but that also has some sort of API or easy access to the database. I've been looking for something because I realized it'd be nice to see photos on a regular basis in my house: I want to set up a photo frame to display random photos from my family collection that have a particular tag. Otherwise I feel like I'm not going back and appreciating them enough, just taking pictures that are never seen again. Though photo app "memories" address that. I really like Photostructure's approach of always displaying a random sampling of photos when you're at higher organizational levels, that's a fun way to see different stuff.
- pheeney 4y ago
  My wife and I live states away from our respective families and once our first was born we started a self-hosted wordpress blog. Photoprism has been amazing to create albums that I later edit and document on a personal blog that the long distance families can access. We found it enjoyable to put together a post each month with some of our favorite photos and memories. Everyone else seems to love it as well. We are now working on putting together some posts on past vacations and other moments we want to remember. The combination of photoprism for viewing and wordpress for storytelling has been a perfect combination for us.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  My daughter, bless her, occasionally likes going through our old home videos which are accessible via Kodi on the TV in the main living space (easily accessible). I rarely actively go looking through old photos and videos, but when my daughter starts them up, everyone migrates into the room to watch them. I've had a damn good life, and my kids have had a damn good childhood and my wife and I have done a damn good job of parenting. It's so nice, and incongruent with 'the daily news cycle', to be reminded of these beautiful things, and it's also a reminder to continue the effort, because it really is so worthwhile. When I'm too old to do much else, I want to retire into my past.
  - 4y ago
fletchowns 4y ago
I've been using self-hosted Photoprism & Nextcloud to replace Google Photos/Drive/Docs for the past few months, so far so good. I do miss being able to search for something like "vaccine card" - the AI search is fairly primitive. I also worry about the security of it, so it's behind VPN which adds a slight inconvenience when accessing it from my phone. That being said, I like the idea of being in full control of my own data and I'm happy to support them financially, looking forward to future improvements of the app!
throwme_123 4y ago
Great project, congrats for building it! > Also, there is no native support for sharding or cloud storage APIs like S3. Instead, PhotoPrism prefers a fast, local solid-state drive. Won't use it myself though, as such solution should be centered around s3-like cloud storage with e2ee. Only the index should be in the server (and backup-ed).
- mtoohig 4y ago
  Well I have to appreciate the design choice since where I am internet is slow and unreliable. I couldn't imagine having to fetch each photo over the internet just to browse from my own home network. But there should be a feature to at least sync to a cloud service for backup purposes.
  - jve 4y ago
    I just mounted a readonly volume for photoprism to use thats all. And you can backup that folder with whatever you like. And you can get files to that folder however you want. Including mounting a volume from s3 API location via s3 fuse.
  - throwme_123 4y ago
    It's mostly about costs. I have 1 Tb of pictures. For example DigitalOcean: 1 Tb volume storage (without the instance) is $100/mo. S3: $13/mo (most would be infrequent access) + traffic would prob be free (100Gb/mo, I don't think I would read more than that). I am not interested in single servers that can crash on a low-cost provider that can catch fire, get my account deleted because of a software bug, get stolen at home, etc.
    - thorncorona 4y ago
      Google drive is 99/yr for 2Tb. You can use a folder synced to google drive as your serving folder and get double the storage. Of course at that point you might as well just use Google photos
    - stef25 4y ago
radiojasper 4y ago
Does it automatically sync my photos from my Android phone camera like Google photos does?
- e4e5 4y ago
  No,but you can set that up with third party applications and WebDAV.
unexistential 4y ago
Photoprism is great at what it does but it's not a Google Photos alternative. It doesn't auto-backup photos from your phone like Google Photos. I'm currently using Immich and although it's still a while away from having a stable release, it shows a great deal of promise. I like that it's being built with a clearly stated purpose of being a Google Photos alternative. It may never be as seamless or smooth as Google Photos, but I think it will be perfectly enough for privacy-conscious self-hosters.
- askiiart 4y ago
  I've been using it, and once it gets a stable release it looks like it'll be awesome, but right now it's pretty buggy. The new immich-proxy docker image doesn't work, so you have to use 1.45, and I've been having very odd issues with immich-postgres (it changes the permissions of the pg_data folder to 700 and owner to systemd_coredump... Not good.)
- AlanSE 4y ago
  That's awesome! Thanks for sharing. I had a go at all the contenders a while ago when Google Photos changed their storage policy and did not see that one. I see a sharing menu in one of their screenshots. Considering that it's self-hosted, how does sharing work in that system?
  - unexistential 4y ago
    You can create multiple users on your server and share your albums or individual assets with them. You can also create public sharing links that anyone can access, just like Google photos. You'll of course need to make the server accessible to them in some way. My server is hosted at home in a Raspberry Pi and an SSD for storage. I have a public domain name and it is forwarded to my home network through CloudFlare. Might be a little risky security-wise, but I want to eventually make this instance usable for my parents.
- ungawatkt 4y ago
  It supports WebDAV, discusses that in the docs, and links to an app that does well enough at backing up a phone to start off. Not seamless like Google photos for sure, but not nothing. https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/sync/webdav/ https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/sync/webdav/
charlfields 4y ago
You can host Photoprism[1] with Pikapods[2] and upload your pictures using PhotoSync[3] and then sync(backup) all your pictures to Hetzner using their Nextcloud hosting[4]. Pikapods is in LA and Hetzner is in Germany. This provides a good reliable setup for your invaluable pictures. This is what I use and I am very happy with, I don’t mind paying more than Icloud knowing that I am supporting open source products. [1]https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/ [2]https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/ [3]https://www.photosync-app.com/ https://www.photosync-app.com/ [4] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
- axelthegerman 4y ago
  Hetzner is now also in US East and West but not sure if just their cloud products (VPS etc) or also hosted offerings such as their nextcloud
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
If I remember, it does not have any sharing capabilities, which to me it's the key feature of google photo
- corndoge 4y ago
  https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/share/ https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/share/
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
    That's nice, wasn't there last time I tried!
- ThinkingGuy 4y ago
  This was my issue as well. Here's my primary use case for an app like this: A group of friends go on vacation together. Everyone takes photos and videos with their own devices. When we get home, we upload all our photos to a central location (self-hosted and running on Free software), so everyone can browse all the photos, and download copies of those they'd like. From the documentation it looks like I could share my photos with photoprism, but my friends wouldn't be able to contribute theirs.
wooby 4y ago
Photoprism rocks. I wrote up my experience with it in 2021, and I'm still happily using it: https://tailrecursion.com/~alan/HomePhotos.html https://tailrecursion.com/~alan/HomePhotos.html
artificialLimbs 4y ago
Using this for a few weeks and it's been fantastic. Looking forward to multi-user support. Once I clean out picures only my wife and I should see, I'll be able to share with everyone. =D What's the best way to move pics from phone to this? I hope it's not drag/drop in finder to samba share...
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  Oh, probably webdav. Thanks @ungawatkt. =)
colordrops 4y ago
I'm looking for a package that can automatically detect events, using ML or otherwise, grouping photos by proximity in time (and gaps in time between events), location, and image contents themselves. It's not an easy problem and I haven't found an open source package that does it
waymon 4y ago
What do you guys use to organize your local videos and photos? Photos is great on MacOS, I need a windows alternative.
ccakes 4y ago
Big Photoprism fan but would love a better way to auto-sync photos from an iPhone. The recommended app is clunky imo
AdrianB1 4y ago
I have installed Photoprism a few weeks ago in a jail on FreeBSD (TrueNAS, more precisely) and I have mixed feelings; it uses 70 GB of storage for 260 GB of photos, which sounds bad, and the face recognition is very unreliable so far, while the interface is unfinished - things like batch operations don't exist and I read some discussions on the product tracker and the development model is ... so and so. It is great that the product exists, but it is limited and unpolished, I will probably delete it soon and re-evaluate in a couple of years.
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withinrafael 4y ago
Heads up, can't swipe the carousel left/right reliably. I'm using Edge/Android 13 on a Pixel 7 in portrait orientation.
jve 4y ago
I once was complaining about nextcloud photo gallery and someone recommended Photorpism [1]. It has been day/night difference - I wanted a simple gallery that enables viewing my mess of unorganized photos. Yet, for it to be simple on UX, it had to be complex under the hood - has to self-organize based on metadata/AI, duplicate detection, generate thumbnails on his own, etc - and this is what Photoprism is. Photoprism has superb performance - I have no lag going shifting through many, many photos. Nextcloud lately upgraded their gallery, but it is still slow. It generates thumbnails on-the-fly. Maybe I can configure it somehow (I tried for v1 gallery but failed). Anyways, Photoprism is great and works out of the box. I like that I can select photos from different folders/views and do with selected photos something (like add to an album). Moreover things works (Except delete, but archive is OK) for readonly volume, which is handy to mount nextcloud folder. However a thing to note - you cannot use RPI4 with 2GB to use AI features - at least I had many other services running and RPI was lacking. But viewing photos was still good. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31988575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31988575
- MitPitt 4y ago
  Nextcloud has a Preview generator plugin that lets you generate thumbnails in advance. Unfortunately Nextcloud is the only gallery suitable for me because of its groups file access system. None of the other gallery apps have it. If anyone has suggestions for apps with a good access system, please let me know.
- ssl232 4y ago
  Nextcloud Gallery has the benefit of being in Nextcloud with all my other stuff, with companion phone app and syncing and whatnot set up already on my home server. I wish (fully anticipating a "PRs welcome" retort) that it would have more of Google Photos's AI features.
  - creshal 4y ago
    Nextcloud's usual attitude alas is "PRs welcome, but fuck you if you want documentation or help, pay us". Nextcloud burned through several photo/gallery apps that ended up being dropped because of maintainer burn out, and the obtuse and opaque APIs make it really hard for outsiders to pick it up. (We tried to make companion addons to improve photo metadata, etc. for several years, but eventually gave up because Nextcloud is too awful to work with from a dev's perspective.)
totetsu 4y ago
Finally something to do with my RPI.. I wonder how many months it will take to tag all my photos on that CPU over USB2..
- lom 4y ago
  I’m running it on my pi, it’s indexed 4000 of my 8000 pictures in the last 30 hours. So yeah, not exactly fast - but it’s a rpi 2 or so, not exactly known for its performance.
sneak 4y ago
Language: Go License: Affero GPL
diceduckmonk 4y ago
Wondering if there are plans to get shareable web link for albums and/or individual photos?
- fy20 4y ago
  This is the main reason why I still use Google Photos. I have shared albums with my family, that automatically add photos using facial recognition. If I want to create an album for an event and share with people it's really easy.
- Akashic101 4y ago
  That is already possible as long as the machine you are hosting photoprism on is already open to the internet. You can create a shareable link to an album (dont know about individual pictures) which gives people read-only access to that specific album and nothing else
ur-whale 4y ago
Open source is one thing, but most importantly, is it self-hosted and how smooth is the integration with your phone's camera?
reacharavindh 4y ago
I need to check again. The last I used it a few months ago, the features were working, but had usability quirks. For example, the automated scanning would tag faces of people, but ofcourse it is not perfect and has misses or false tags - but there was no way to manually tag faces or correct the mistakes. Because such a thing was pushed until a new photoviewer was developed. Such a thing told me that the project was not ready for serious alternative to Apple Photos/Google Photos _yet_. I chose to wait and watch instead. It would be very nice to have an open alternative to the Apple/Google ones.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  I don't think I'd bother treating it unless face detection was at least as good a Picasa was (in 2008?). It astinishes me that this feature isn't available on any photo organiser app on Linux.
duckmysick 4y ago
Let's say I want to host it on Digital Ocean, Hetzner, or even a server that's sitting in my room. I want a family member to have an access to it too. How do I keep it secured? How can I make sure nobody breaks in and access my photos?
- infinityio 4y ago
  I'd recommend using a VPN (or VPN-like service) to connect to the server - it might not be as simple as Google Photos et al to set up, but is likely the most secure option Edit: from a similar comment, see https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your-library-on-the-wan https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your...
  - duckmysick 4y ago
    Something like Tailscale? I thought about it, but aren't the current best practices moving away from VPN access towards more granular authentication and authorization? If I understand it correctly, once someone gets past VPN, it's over. So now I have to secure both VPN and my server (and the services).
perryizgr8 4y ago
The biggest two problems with Photoprism are: 1. No sync facility. I have to use some other app or do it manually. 2. No native mobile app. They have a webapp, but it is absolutely not good enough. Slow, laggy, unresponsive, just unusable if you have lots of photos. I know mobile app development is very costly these days, and photoprism is free. So I am putting up with it.
kryptoncalm 4y ago
I’m a big fan of PiGallery2 myself [1]. Very simple and fast, meant for running on a Raspberry Pi (hence the name). I remember photoprism having some subscription requirement for certain features. Other notable alternatives: - PiWiGo [2] - Photoview [3] - Zenphoto [4] [1] http://bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2/ http://bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2/ [2] https://piwigo.org/ https://piwigo.org/ [3] https://photoview.github.io/ https://photoview.github.io/ [4] https://www.zenphoto.org/ https://www.zenphoto.org/
bicepjai 4y ago
Do we have any self hosting or other services that create movies with photos and music if provided? I have synology photos that solves backup and a decent portal to view and share, but cannot find some service for automatic movie generation based on events wrt time and place
heliodor 4y ago
What photo display device would work with Photoprism? I have been dumping photos into Google Photos for years and years, never to be seen again. But then I got a Google Nest photo frame sitting on my kitchen counter and it has dramatically changed things.
jwineinger 4y ago
Can anyone speak to how well the facial recognition and group works? I find that feature quite valuable in Google Photos
- Daviey 4y ago
  I've not yet used it, but I found this sadly interesting: https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/organize/people/#asian-faces-and-children https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/organize/people/#asia...
conceptualspace 4y ago
i have one pet peeve with every photo organizer or gallery i've tried: they are slow.. especially for very large galleries. if you read the original google blog post about how they built photos, a lot of effort went into performance. so i took that as inspiration to start building an open source offline-first organizer that takes this performance to your desktop (and up a notch). its not on github yet, but seeing the enthusiasm here i thought i would ask what else would you want to see in it? my hn username is also my github username, for the curious :)
- sigmonsays 4y ago
  I am not sure where my bottlenecks are but I do not have a ton of photos but specific operations are incredibly slow in EVERY photo tool like scrolling through dates and loading thumbnails. Are these use cases you optimize for? I'd love to see what you're working on =P
  - conceptualspace 4y ago
    exactly!!! yes they are. for thumbnails im using webP which achieves much better compression than the more standard png (like 10:1) which enables us to do a lot more with them. and when navigating fullsize photos, using some intelligent preloading so we never bog out :D i'll try to get some initial commits pushed up soon. u can follow me here, the project is called montage (open to suggestions on name too lol): https://github.com/conceptualspace https://github.com/conceptualspace
- SlavikCA 4y ago
  I found very FAST folder-based photo viewer: https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 The word "fast" is the first word in their description. I'm using it for about 2 years now, hosted on my Synology
oregoncurtis 4y ago
I'm currently using Adobe bridge to cull my old photos and add keywords to them for better searching. One of the main things in trying to find is a good system of adding keywords and ratings that is tied to the file without any side cars. Is this even possible? Does Photoprism store it's labels in a sidecar or is it editing the exif of the photo? It would be nice to be able to organize photos in a platform agnostic way.

501 points by lom 4y ago

igor47 4y ago

I'm running this self-hosted, using docker compose and traefik. Modern tools make self hosting SO much easier!

dicknuckle 4y ago
They do indeed. I moved all my home infra to docker about 5 years ago and couldn't be happier. It forces my ADD brain to keep things tidy on the home server and now I barely have to do anything unless the server runs out of disk space. Side note: Just last weekend used autocompose.py to pull all of it into Docker compose files. The tool isn't perfect, but it works flawlessly for anything that isn't using weird mounts or host devices. For the problematic containers, I used inspect on the original, stopped it, spun up the compose version, and compared the inspect data. Take so much guesswork and googling out of Linux admin once you're versed in how it works

HankB99 4y ago

I tried it out and was generally happy with the results. Unfortunately there is no way to share my entire catalog of decades of pictures without giving out full admin access and I'm not comfortable doing that. I can share bits of my collection in a satisfactory manner but that does not meet my needs. I'll also add that some of the classification was amusing, but I suppose as time goes on it will get better.

rscrawfo 4y ago
I think the team is working on that feature.
kriskrunch 4y ago
Look again! Recently, I was happily surprised to find a way to share albums with friends. Just a simple guest link.
- HankB99 4y ago
  I saw the option to share albums, but I wanted to allow a guest to see the entire collection. Happily it sounds like that is coming.
lom 4y ago
I’ve heard that feature is WIP currently. And yeah, the classification is funny. Apparently I classify as a wall now.

kccqzy 4y ago

I also self-host this together with Tailscale. The UI is not very polished but certainly very usable already. My personal journey was to get rid of my dependency on iCloud Photos. I managed to export two-decades worth of pictures and videos using a separate tool (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) and then import into PhotoPrism. Coming from Apple Photos, the UI is a bit lackluster but the freedom of owning the entire data more than makes up for it.

maxhq 4y ago
Have you been able to export meta data from iCloud and import it into PhotoPrism? (e.g. custom photo comments)
- kccqzy 4y ago
  I personally do not have any photo comments but I suppose the software can handle it. From https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos#command-line-reference-export https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos#command-line-referenc... I think it will support exporting XMP metadata files with photo comments. Then from https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/use-cases/apple/ https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/use-cases/apple/ I think PhotoPrism will correctly import descriptions in XMP files.

rscrawfo 4y ago

Great app. It just works and works well. I need to donate again. Only two minor complaints are there’s no “On this day” function, and the instructions to view full resolution photos are a bit confusing. Otherwise i like it better than anything else.

simlevesque 4y ago

I'm looking for something that can extract HDR photos from videos like Google Photos.

mberning 4y ago

There are a few apps in this space worth checking out Photorprism Photostructure Lychee Digikam Synology Photos (if you have a synology) And probably a few others I am forgetting.

askiiart 4y ago
There's also IMMICH, pretty much a 1-to-1 clone of Google Photos.
rainbowzootsuit 4y ago
I will add immich which has been getting good development lately. https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/ https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich
mceachen 4y ago
Howdy! I'm the author of PhotoStructure. If you're thinking about self-hosting anything, my first recommendation is to get your backups in order now, before doing anything else. I wrote this a while back: <https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/ https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/>. Having a full, offline backup will only cost ~$20/TiB nowadays, which is cheap insurance if whatever app you try out doesn't quite behave as you expected it to. The second step is to make sure your server is both hardened (<https://forum.photostructure.com/t/server-hardening-for-beginners/1027 https://forum.photostructure.com/t/server-hardening-for-begi...>), and ideally, only available via a VPN (like TailScale) or at least via a reverse proxy (Cloudflare has a free solution). I compared and contrasted some of these solutions (along with instructions) here: <https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your-library-on-the-wan https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your...> The situation for self-hosting your photos just a couple years ago was pretty bleak--especially if you had hundreds of thousands (or more!) of photos. That may sound like a lot of photos, but for people shooting digital for 20+ years, it really isn't! Whatever image manager you pick, make sure the app follows existing metadata storage standards, so in the (seemingly inevitable) future when the app is abandoned, your photos are in directory structures that make sense to you, and the work you've put into organizing them isn't locked up in unreadable databases or folder structures. Spoiler alert: I got burned by this issue with prior apps, so I designed PhotoStructure from the ground up with exactly this in mind: <https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#open-standards-and-formats https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#open-stan...>. Unfortunately, many/most self-hosted solutions don't handle multiple source directories and configurable destination directories.

bb123 4y ago

I have ~1TB of photos and I liked the idea of hosting this on Digital Ocean, but it looks like a volume of that size would run me over $100/mo. I'll have to stick with iCloud Photos for now.

ukuina 4y ago
PikaPods has much better storage pricing for PhotoPrism.
- hijinks 4y ago
  i don't see any pricing for storage on their site n/m signed up and you use sliders to get what you need.. looks like its about $15 a month for 1Tb of storage which isn't enough for me.. too bad.
  - ukuina 4y ago
    I dropped them an email and they increased the cap to 6TB. I enabled 2TB on my pod and it estimates $20/month.
afranchuk 4y ago
Storage volumes can be much cheaper. For instance, Backblaze B2 will run you around $6/TB/mo, IIRC. And some providers (usually the smaller ones) have discounts for bulk purchases (e.g. a year). Many self hosted apps support cloud storage.
- stef25 4y ago
  Is it possible to use B2 or DO Spaces as storage for Photoprism?
  - hutattedonmyarm 4y ago
    Sort of. It's not natively supported, but you can use something like s3fs-fuse to mount a S3 compatible storage (like B2) locally and use that. I personally went a different route: Set up Nextcloud, point its primary storage to B2, and then mount a Nextcloud folder (using WebDAV) to my filesystem which I configured as primary storage for Photoprism. That setup was pretty slow, but I also had Nextcloud and Photoprism running on the same VPS which additionally was underpowered for even Photoprism alone. I am now using a separate server for Photoprism and performance is much better

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sodality2 4y ago

I just got this set up - it parsed ~5000 photos (half raw, half jpg) surprisingly quickly on my laptop. As stated by others, I wish I could look at certain days more easily. The share function is very cool, though - an easy way to showcase your photos to others.

afranchuk 4y ago

Funny, for the last week I've been trying various self hosted photo apps every night on my home server. Tonight was going to be Photoprism and then I see it pop up here! I've just wanted something that allows me to organize and tag photos, but that also has some sort of API or easy access to the database. I've been looking for something because I realized it'd be nice to see photos on a regular basis in my house: I want to set up a photo frame to display random photos from my family collection that have a particular tag. Otherwise I feel like I'm not going back and appreciating them enough, just taking pictures that are never seen again. Though photo app "memories" address that. I really like Photostructure's approach of always displaying a random sampling of photos when you're at higher organizational levels, that's a fun way to see different stuff.

pheeney 4y ago
My wife and I live states away from our respective families and once our first was born we started a self-hosted wordpress blog. Photoprism has been amazing to create albums that I later edit and document on a personal blog that the long distance families can access. We found it enjoyable to put together a post each month with some of our favorite photos and memories. Everyone else seems to love it as well. We are now working on putting together some posts on past vacations and other moments we want to remember. The combination of photoprism for viewing and wordpress for storytelling has been a perfect combination for us.
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
My daughter, bless her, occasionally likes going through our old home videos which are accessible via Kodi on the TV in the main living space (easily accessible). I rarely actively go looking through old photos and videos, but when my daughter starts them up, everyone migrates into the room to watch them. I've had a damn good life, and my kids have had a damn good childhood and my wife and I have done a damn good job of parenting. It's so nice, and incongruent with 'the daily news cycle', to be reminded of these beautiful things, and it's also a reminder to continue the effort, because it really is so worthwhile. When I'm too old to do much else, I want to retire into my past.
- 4y ago

fletchowns 4y ago

I've been using self-hosted Photoprism & Nextcloud to replace Google Photos/Drive/Docs for the past few months, so far so good. I do miss being able to search for something like "vaccine card" - the AI search is fairly primitive. I also worry about the security of it, so it's behind VPN which adds a slight inconvenience when accessing it from my phone. That being said, I like the idea of being in full control of my own data and I'm happy to support them financially, looking forward to future improvements of the app!

throwme_123 4y ago

Great project, congrats for building it! > Also, there is no native support for sharding or cloud storage APIs like S3. Instead, PhotoPrism prefers a fast, local solid-state drive. Won't use it myself though, as such solution should be centered around s3-like cloud storage with e2ee. Only the index should be in the server (and backup-ed).

mtoohig 4y ago
Well I have to appreciate the design choice since where I am internet is slow and unreliable. I couldn't imagine having to fetch each photo over the internet just to browse from my own home network. But there should be a feature to at least sync to a cloud service for backup purposes.
- jve 4y ago
  I just mounted a readonly volume for photoprism to use thats all. And you can backup that folder with whatever you like. And you can get files to that folder however you want. Including mounting a volume from s3 API location via s3 fuse.
- throwme_123 4y ago
  It's mostly about costs. I have 1 Tb of pictures. For example DigitalOcean: 1 Tb volume storage (without the instance) is $100/mo. S3: $13/mo (most would be infrequent access) + traffic would prob be free (100Gb/mo, I don't think I would read more than that). I am not interested in single servers that can crash on a low-cost provider that can catch fire, get my account deleted because of a software bug, get stolen at home, etc.
  - thorncorona 4y ago
    Google drive is 99/yr for 2Tb. You can use a folder synced to google drive as your serving folder and get double the storage. Of course at that point you might as well just use Google photos
  - stef25 4y ago

radiojasper 4y ago

Does it automatically sync my photos from my Android phone camera like Google photos does?

e4e5 4y ago
No,but you can set that up with third party applications and WebDAV.

unexistential 4y ago

Photoprism is great at what it does but it's not a Google Photos alternative. It doesn't auto-backup photos from your phone like Google Photos. I'm currently using Immich and although it's still a while away from having a stable release, it shows a great deal of promise. I like that it's being built with a clearly stated purpose of being a Google Photos alternative. It may never be as seamless or smooth as Google Photos, but I think it will be perfectly enough for privacy-conscious self-hosters.

askiiart 4y ago
I've been using it, and once it gets a stable release it looks like it'll be awesome, but right now it's pretty buggy. The new immich-proxy docker image doesn't work, so you have to use 1.45, and I've been having very odd issues with immich-postgres (it changes the permissions of the pg_data folder to 700 and owner to systemd_coredump... Not good.)
AlanSE 4y ago
That's awesome! Thanks for sharing. I had a go at all the contenders a while ago when Google Photos changed their storage policy and did not see that one. I see a sharing menu in one of their screenshots. Considering that it's self-hosted, how does sharing work in that system?
- unexistential 4y ago
  You can create multiple users on your server and share your albums or individual assets with them. You can also create public sharing links that anyone can access, just like Google photos. You'll of course need to make the server accessible to them in some way. My server is hosted at home in a Raspberry Pi and an SSD for storage. I have a public domain name and it is forwarded to my home network through CloudFlare. Might be a little risky security-wise, but I want to eventually make this instance usable for my parents.
ungawatkt 4y ago
It supports WebDAV, discusses that in the docs, and links to an app that does well enough at backing up a phone to start off. Not seamless like Google photos for sure, but not nothing. https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/sync/webdav/ https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/sync/webdav/

charlfields 4y ago

You can host Photoprism[1] with Pikapods[2] and upload your pictures using PhotoSync[3] and then sync(backup) all your pictures to Hetzner using their Nextcloud hosting[4]. Pikapods is in LA and Hetzner is in Germany. This provides a good reliable setup for your invaluable pictures. This is what I use and I am very happy with, I don’t mind paying more than Icloud knowing that I am supporting open source products. [1]https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/ [2]https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/ [3]https://www.photosync-app.com/ https://www.photosync-app.com/ [4] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

axelthegerman 4y ago
Hetzner is now also in US East and West but not sure if just their cloud products (VPS etc) or also hosted offerings such as their nextcloud

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

If I remember, it does not have any sharing capabilities, which to me it's the key feature of google photo

corndoge 4y ago
https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/share/ https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/share/
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
  That's nice, wasn't there last time I tried!
ThinkingGuy 4y ago
This was my issue as well. Here's my primary use case for an app like this: A group of friends go on vacation together. Everyone takes photos and videos with their own devices. When we get home, we upload all our photos to a central location (self-hosted and running on Free software), so everyone can browse all the photos, and download copies of those they'd like. From the documentation it looks like I could share my photos with photoprism, but my friends wouldn't be able to contribute theirs.

wooby 4y ago

Photoprism rocks. I wrote up my experience with it in 2021, and I'm still happily using it: https://tailrecursion.com/~alan/HomePhotos.html https://tailrecursion.com/~alan/HomePhotos.html

artificialLimbs 4y ago

Using this for a few weeks and it's been fantastic. Looking forward to multi-user support. Once I clean out picures only my wife and I should see, I'll be able to share with everyone. =D What's the best way to move pics from phone to this? I hope it's not drag/drop in finder to samba share...

artificialLimbs 4y ago
Oh, probably webdav. Thanks @ungawatkt. =)

colordrops 4y ago

I'm looking for a package that can automatically detect events, using ML or otherwise, grouping photos by proximity in time (and gaps in time between events), location, and image contents themselves. It's not an easy problem and I haven't found an open source package that does it

waymon 4y ago

What do you guys use to organize your local videos and photos? Photos is great on MacOS, I need a windows alternative.

ccakes 4y ago

Big Photoprism fan but would love a better way to auto-sync photos from an iPhone. The recommended app is clunky imo

AdrianB1 4y ago

I have installed Photoprism a few weeks ago in a jail on FreeBSD (TrueNAS, more precisely) and I have mixed feelings; it uses 70 GB of storage for 260 GB of photos, which sounds bad, and the face recognition is very unreliable so far, while the interface is unfinished - things like batch operations don't exist and I read some discussions on the product tracker and the development model is ... so and so. It is great that the product exists, but it is limited and unpolished, I will probably delete it soon and re-evaluate in a couple of years.

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withinrafael 4y ago

Heads up, can't swipe the carousel left/right reliably. I'm using Edge/Android 13 on a Pixel 7 in portrait orientation.

jve 4y ago

I once was complaining about nextcloud photo gallery and someone recommended Photorpism [1]. It has been day/night difference - I wanted a simple gallery that enables viewing my mess of unorganized photos. Yet, for it to be simple on UX, it had to be complex under the hood - has to self-organize based on metadata/AI, duplicate detection, generate thumbnails on his own, etc - and this is what Photoprism is. Photoprism has superb performance - I have no lag going shifting through many, many photos. Nextcloud lately upgraded their gallery, but it is still slow. It generates thumbnails on-the-fly. Maybe I can configure it somehow (I tried for v1 gallery but failed). Anyways, Photoprism is great and works out of the box. I like that I can select photos from different folders/views and do with selected photos something (like add to an album). Moreover things works (Except delete, but archive is OK) for readonly volume, which is handy to mount nextcloud folder. However a thing to note - you cannot use RPI4 with 2GB to use AI features - at least I had many other services running and RPI was lacking. But viewing photos was still good. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31988575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31988575

MitPitt 4y ago
Nextcloud has a Preview generator plugin that lets you generate thumbnails in advance. Unfortunately Nextcloud is the only gallery suitable for me because of its groups file access system. None of the other gallery apps have it. If anyone has suggestions for apps with a good access system, please let me know.
ssl232 4y ago
Nextcloud Gallery has the benefit of being in Nextcloud with all my other stuff, with companion phone app and syncing and whatnot set up already on my home server. I wish (fully anticipating a "PRs welcome" retort) that it would have more of Google Photos's AI features.
- creshal 4y ago
  Nextcloud's usual attitude alas is "PRs welcome, but fuck you if you want documentation or help, pay us". Nextcloud burned through several photo/gallery apps that ended up being dropped because of maintainer burn out, and the obtuse and opaque APIs make it really hard for outsiders to pick it up. (We tried to make companion addons to improve photo metadata, etc. for several years, but eventually gave up because Nextcloud is too awful to work with from a dev's perspective.)

totetsu 4y ago

Finally something to do with my RPI.. I wonder how many months it will take to tag all my photos on that CPU over USB2..

lom 4y ago
I’m running it on my pi, it’s indexed 4000 of my 8000 pictures in the last 30 hours. So yeah, not exactly fast - but it’s a rpi 2 or so, not exactly known for its performance.

sneak 4y ago

Language: Go License: Affero GPL

diceduckmonk 4y ago

Wondering if there are plans to get shareable web link for albums and/or individual photos?

fy20 4y ago
This is the main reason why I still use Google Photos. I have shared albums with my family, that automatically add photos using facial recognition. If I want to create an album for an event and share with people it's really easy.
Akashic101 4y ago
That is already possible as long as the machine you are hosting photoprism on is already open to the internet. You can create a shareable link to an album (dont know about individual pictures) which gives people read-only access to that specific album and nothing else

ur-whale 4y ago

Open source is one thing, but most importantly, is it self-hosted and how smooth is the integration with your phone's camera?

reacharavindh 4y ago

I need to check again. The last I used it a few months ago, the features were working, but had usability quirks. For example, the automated scanning would tag faces of people, but ofcourse it is not perfect and has misses or false tags - but there was no way to manually tag faces or correct the mistakes. Because such a thing was pushed until a new photoviewer was developed. Such a thing told me that the project was not ready for serious alternative to Apple Photos/Google Photos _yet_. I chose to wait and watch instead. It would be very nice to have an open alternative to the Apple/Google ones.

raffraffraff 4y ago
I don't think I'd bother treating it unless face detection was at least as good a Picasa was (in 2008?). It astinishes me that this feature isn't available on any photo organiser app on Linux.

duckmysick 4y ago

Let's say I want to host it on Digital Ocean, Hetzner, or even a server that's sitting in my room. I want a family member to have an access to it too. How do I keep it secured? How can I make sure nobody breaks in and access my photos?

infinityio 4y ago
I'd recommend using a VPN (or VPN-like service) to connect to the server - it might not be as simple as Google Photos et al to set up, but is likely the most secure option Edit: from a similar comment, see https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your-library-on-the-wan https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your...
- duckmysick 4y ago
  Something like Tailscale? I thought about it, but aren't the current best practices moving away from VPN access towards more granular authentication and authorization? If I understand it correctly, once someone gets past VPN, it's over. So now I have to secure both VPN and my server (and the services).

perryizgr8 4y ago

The biggest two problems with Photoprism are: 1. No sync facility. I have to use some other app or do it manually. 2. No native mobile app. They have a webapp, but it is absolutely not good enough. Slow, laggy, unresponsive, just unusable if you have lots of photos. I know mobile app development is very costly these days, and photoprism is free. So I am putting up with it.

kryptoncalm 4y ago

I’m a big fan of PiGallery2 myself [1]. Very simple and fast, meant for running on a Raspberry Pi (hence the name). I remember photoprism having some subscription requirement for certain features. Other notable alternatives: - PiWiGo [2] - Photoview [3] - Zenphoto [4] [1] http://bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2/ http://bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2/ [2] https://piwigo.org/ https://piwigo.org/ [3] https://photoview.github.io/ https://photoview.github.io/ [4] https://www.zenphoto.org/ https://www.zenphoto.org/

bicepjai 4y ago

Do we have any self hosting or other services that create movies with photos and music if provided? I have synology photos that solves backup and a decent portal to view and share, but cannot find some service for automatic movie generation based on events wrt time and place

heliodor 4y ago

What photo display device would work with Photoprism? I have been dumping photos into Google Photos for years and years, never to be seen again. But then I got a Google Nest photo frame sitting on my kitchen counter and it has dramatically changed things.

jwineinger 4y ago

Can anyone speak to how well the facial recognition and group works? I find that feature quite valuable in Google Photos

Daviey 4y ago
I've not yet used it, but I found this sadly interesting: https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/organize/people/#asian-faces-and-children https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/organize/people/#asia...

conceptualspace 4y ago

i have one pet peeve with every photo organizer or gallery i've tried: they are slow.. especially for very large galleries. if you read the original google blog post about how they built photos, a lot of effort went into performance. so i took that as inspiration to start building an open source offline-first organizer that takes this performance to your desktop (and up a notch). its not on github yet, but seeing the enthusiasm here i thought i would ask what else would you want to see in it? my hn username is also my github username, for the curious :)

sigmonsays 4y ago
I am not sure where my bottlenecks are but I do not have a ton of photos but specific operations are incredibly slow in EVERY photo tool like scrolling through dates and loading thumbnails. Are these use cases you optimize for? I'd love to see what you're working on =P
- conceptualspace 4y ago
  exactly!!! yes they are. for thumbnails im using webP which achieves much better compression than the more standard png (like 10:1) which enables us to do a lot more with them. and when navigating fullsize photos, using some intelligent preloading so we never bog out :D i'll try to get some initial commits pushed up soon. u can follow me here, the project is called montage (open to suggestions on name too lol): https://github.com/conceptualspace https://github.com/conceptualspace
SlavikCA 4y ago
I found very FAST folder-based photo viewer: https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 The word "fast" is the first word in their description. I'm using it for about 2 years now, hosted on my Synology

oregoncurtis 4y ago

I'm currently using Adobe bridge to cull my old photos and add keywords to them for better searching. One of the main things in trying to find is a good system of adding keywords and ratings that is tied to the file without any side cars. Is this even possible? Does Photoprism store it's labels in a sidecar or is it editing the exif of the photo? It would be nice to be able to organize photos in a platform agnostic way.