15 ms·

Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance

797 points by radialapps 3y ago

Memories is a FOSS Google Photos alternative that you can self-host (it runs as a Nextcloud plugin). Website: https://memories.gallery/ https://memories.gallery/ GitHub: https://github.com/pulsejet/memories https://github.com/pulsejet/memories Demo Server: https://demo.memories.gallery/apps/memories/ https://demo.memories.gallery/apps/memories/ (demo runs in San Francisco on a free-tier cloud vm) Memories has been built ground-up for high performance and is extremely fast when configured correctly. In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time! Some features to highlight: * A timeline similar to Google Photos where you can skip to any time in history instantly. * AI-based tagging that runs locally on your server, identifying and tagging people and objects. * Albums and external sharing. * Metadata editing support * A world map of your photos, supported both on mobile and the web * Did I mention it's extremely fast? Would love to hear feedback from the HN community! :)

lxe 3y ago
Looks polished!
aendruk 3y ago
What are your thoughts on PhotoPrism?
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  It's nice, but $24/year/forever to have multiple users is a bit much...
  - rockooooo 3y ago
    $24 a year is too much?
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      When every other aspect of the app is basically free, yes. I would pay once for the functionality, not as a subscription.
      - gene91 3y ago
        They offer a lifetime price of $128. https://www.photoprism.app/membership/faq https://www.photoprism.app/membership/faq > Are there alternatives to a recurring subscription? > > Yes, our Plus members automatically receive a free Lifetime Essentials membership after 24 months
- radialapps 3y ago
  My thoughts? Too slow. No timeline view. Looks terrible.
timmg 3y ago
Just curious: what's the business model for something like this.
- burnte 3y ago
  Doesn't look like it's a business, so probably no business plan.
- radialapps 3y ago
  It's free
warkdarrior 3y ago
Ugh, it's tied to Nextcloud. Is there a standalone option?
- parl_match 3y ago
  Yes! It's open source, so simply download the project, make the requisite changes, and then run it wherever you like. https://github.com/pulsejet/memories https://github.com/pulsejet/memories
  - burnte 3y ago
    I think you meant to say "No, but it's open source, so simply download the project, make the requisite changes, and then run it wherever you like." When you say "Yes, it's OSS so you can just do it yourself" it's generally viewed as snarky and misleading, as the question wasn't "can I modify it" but "is it available already in another form?" It's just not helpful to anyone to word it like that backwards manner.
    - parl_match 3y ago
      It's just not helpful to complain about someone else's work, either.
      - nsteel 3y ago
        Especially considering there's an answer already at https://memories.gallery/faq/ https://memories.gallery/faq/
- burnte 3y ago
  Doesn't seem to be.
- mcint 3y ago
  I found NextCloud pretty easy to set up...from yunohost.org. By contrast, when I tried to install it manually, the distribution install scripts broke on the second run, on changes that the very same script made on the first run. Anti-idempotent, I dropped it with the impression of drumming up hosting or consulting business.
leononame 3y ago
Hi, this looks super polished, congratulations. I've got a couple of questions: - Does the metadata editing allow it to write back to the file, storing the edited metadata in a sidecar or in the EXIF data? - Does it support some kind of auto-stacking? E.g. having raw files alongside exported tiff/jpg and recognizing that they are the same file? Especially for a nextcloud based solution, that'd be awesome
- radialapps 3y ago
  Yes. Yes.
  - gwbrooks 3y ago
    Does it preserve and/or allow editing of the text metadata (typically, the generative prompt) appended to PNG files created with Stable Diffusion?
    - radialapps 3y ago
      No idea what that is
      - tejtm 3y ago
        older versions of png did not support an exif chunk, so other metadata/property chunks were/are sometimes used
    - cwillu 3y ago
      That's exif metadata, so it should Just Work™
belinder 3y ago
How does this compare to immich? I spent a few weekends ago setting that up and it's working great, though it doesn't always detect faces correctly and swiping through images is a bit slower than Google photos
- talhah 3y ago
  The main thing to me was that since this runs on Nextcloud its more extensible as the photos are just stored under the files and you can use various other apps to do what your heart desires. The other aspect is you get your own Gdrive alternative. You may or may not want this. For mobile compatibility Nextcloud is better since you can choose which folder photos go to and you can essentially automatically backup albums whereas with Immich you can't automatically specify which album photos from a directory should go [1]. In addition to this, Immich isn't too stable yet and each time you update the server all clients have to be on the latest version, at least since the last time I used Immich. 1. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1678 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1678
  - menthe 3y ago
    This is moot. - Immich supports external libraries - Use docker compose and never worry about versions breaking
    - talhah 3y ago
      > This is moot. Immich fully supports external libraries. You're correct, Immich does support external libraries. To be more elaborate with my original comment, I meant inbuilt apps of Nextcloud which integrate well and complement the memories app. An example app would be the Face recognition one or Recognize if you fancy a different implementation. Nextcloud is after all an ecosystem so using memories gains you the other benefits of such an ecosystem. This might be overkill for some so it's upto your usecases. Versions breaking is an issue since both mobile and server clients have to be on the same version. Compared to Nextcloud Memories this is not an issue. This was an issue when I've last used Immich so this may have changed since then.
pathsjs 3y ago
How complex is it to configure memories? I own a hosted instance of NextCloud from Hetzner, but I would rather not misconfigure it. Also, is there a mobile app? I think not having one is limiting, since most of the time I want to look at the pictures on the phone
- radialapps 3y ago
  Everything can be mostly configured through the admin panel, maybe 15-20 minutes? There's a mobile app for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memories https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memori... On iOS, you can use the PWA ("add to homescreen") and it behaves almost exactly as a native app
  - raybb 3y ago
    You might wanna consider adding a page to your docs about setup on hetzner since it's so popular for NC hosting. Seems that it is possible to get it mostly working based on this issue: https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/issues/110 https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/issues/110
    - raybb 3y ago
      They also don't support the recognize app. https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/19acyje/managed_nectcloud_with_support_for_recognize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/19acyje/managed_...
pathsjs 3y ago
How complex is it to configure? I have an instance of NextCloud from Hetzner, but I would rather not misconfigure it. Also, is there a mobile app? Most of the time when I look at pictures I am on the phone
- talhah 3y ago
  As easy as downloading an app from the store and telling it which directory to work with. If you need the AI features those require separate apps and depending on your deployment it might need some effort. I'm running a docker image and had to ensure I have some of the required libraries for the AI things to work. It isn't too hard to misconfigure though and I believe there's a decent amount of resources for this. As for mobile app, there isn't an explicit one but the webapp interface is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I also use NC photos and it still works with the tags and face recognition things. That app doesn't require "Memories" as far as I know.
  - radialapps 3y ago
    There is an Android app, not for iOS yet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memories https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memori...
    - SushiHippie 3y ago
      Awesome! F-Droid Link: https://f-droid.org/packages/gallery.memories/ https://f-droid.org/packages/gallery.memories/ GitHub releases: https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/releases?q=android https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/releases?q=android
    - XCSme 3y ago
      Is there any photo-syncing at play? Or it's just a viewer for the data already on your NextCloud instance. If I take photos with my phone, I have to manually upload them to NextCloud?
      - 3y ago
bl4kers 3y ago
Basically the last thing keeping me locked into Google Photos is it's social features. I see "external sharing" is mentioned but haven't found more information on that. Ideally I'd want the option to share an album with password protection, doesn't require an account to view, and allows comments on photos. Bonus would be to have a running album feed with view receipts per account. I know that's a lot but wanted to be specific. I'm ready to migrate but haven't found a platform that has feature parity on this front.
- magic_hamster 3y ago
  It sounds like you can implement this by hosting your photos on a server with password access. You don't even need google for this.
  - lytedev 3y ago
    #ThatDropboxComment ;)
- radialapps 3y ago
  You can share folders and albums that don't need an account to view. Folders do support password protection as well.
  - singhrac 3y ago
    Does it support allowing others to upload photos as well (eg from a group trip)? If it does I’ll install it today on my homelab.
    - radialapps 3y ago
      Folders: this is fully supported. You can share out links of folders that anyone can upload to etc. These get stored in that folder (in your account) then. Albums: partial support. You can share links to albums that are viewable or share albums with others with an account on your nextcloud instance. People who have an account can upload photos to the shared albums.
conqrr 3y ago
I will take whatever is the most stable. I don't need a lot of feature, just a timeline and gallery with albums. Immich fits it for now, but it is way too focused on piling features and is bleeding edge. I hope memories has stability as its goal.
- radialapps 3y ago
  Indeed. Backward compatibility is also a major goal and there have been almost no major breaking changes since v2 (at v7 currently)
- dugite-code 3y ago
  I've been using it for quite a while and had no issues with the app at all. Only one hick-up with Nextcloud itself but that was really my fault if I'm honest
Fnoord 3y ago
(Still installing/configuring.) Awesome, this is the main piece of puzzle I (or rather: my wife) miss from Nextcloud (the default Photos has terrible performance and lacks some features). Gonna set it up. Also nice to see Face Recognition app is used. Now I'm gonna have to edit my docker-compose.yml for the dependencies but that is fine. Also, I've been trying Photoprism and also I tried Immich in past. They have disadvantages: they don't sync with whatever got uploaded to Nextcloud and they either do not have a mobile front-end or it is some web app. They also have stability issues, though I had most success with Photoprism. I suppose it won't be as useful to me as it could be as I'm stripping all EXIF data from any photo uploaded by Nextcloud because I fear my wife stupidly just shares whatever when she should not. Yes, I know you can do OSINT analysis anyway, but that is a skill as of yet.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Try https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ I like it very much.
  - avhception 3y ago
    Thanks, that looks really interesting!
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    Not for me. I self-host Nextcloud in my home network. I have a Wireguard VPN set up to it, too. I'll have fiber (1000/1000 mbit) soon, so not worried about network speed. I prefer something native in Nextcloud. And I do not need E2E encryption; I already use FDE in this VM. That said, to each their own, thanks for sharing.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Your setup is what I set out to build. Ente.io is what I landed in after I managed to put it off so long. Congrats on actually doing it
      - 3y ago
ementally 3y ago
How is it compared to https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ ?
- hanniabu 3y ago
  looks like memories has auto-categorization
- radialapps 3y ago
  Different goals. Ente is commercial, Memories is free Ente is focused on E2EE, Memories is focused on self-hosting.
  - saddist0 3y ago
    It has a commercial offering, but it isn't "commercial" and provide self hosting fyi. https://github.com/ente-io https://github.com/ente-io
  - xiconfjs 3y ago
    ente.io is fully open source since 2024: https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/ https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/
menthe 3y ago
For having used Memories on Nextcloud, and having spent hours trying to micro optimize the Nginx & PHP configuration, I can safely say that, while it is better than the Nextcloud’s native Photos app, this is absolutely nowhere near to Immich, Filerun, or surprisingly even a dumb SMB share (which doesn’t have thumbnail caching…!). I’ve really tried hard, as Immich’s support for external libraries was still in a PR at that time, and didn’t want to have two separate tools to grab files and grab photos. A big part of the problem, it seems, is that, when you have a large library, and you jump/scroll to a specific year or so, it won’t cancel the previous page(s) worth of thumbnails loading. So as soon as you’re scrolling to search for something, it quickly accumulates hundreds of useless requests that quickly overload the PHP workers, and make everything crawl to a standstill. I personally had to give up. When trying to grab photos from abroad for my shortly upcoming proposal, I’ve literally deleted Nextcloud/Memories, plopped Immich in docker compose, let it index/transcode/generate thumbnails from scratch against my “external library” (so Immich doesn’t duplicate the medias), and that ended up savings me days of buffering, and was able to find the nice pictures for the occasion! (R740xd with 48 cores and 96TB SSD-backed ZFS pool)
- radialapps 3y ago
  It's silly to micro optimize nginx / php when you have docker. Just use the Nextcloud Docker image or AIO and be done with it, everything is pre-optimized. Thumbnail caching exists (it's even highly configurable), there's absolutely zero buffering even with 100k photos+ on a raspberry pi. You obviously did not read the documentation or install the preview generator (which the docs clearly tell you to) Your deployment skills are hot garbage EDIT 3: ^the last line was in response to something that has been edited out of the original comment EDIT: the comment this is in reply to was edited multiple times. This is pointless and a lot of it is just false. EDIT 2: (at least currently the previous comment claims unnecessary PHP requests) this only happens if your configuration is incomplete; you didn't install preview generator as the docs say. Secondly it happens exactly once, the first time you see the image. All other requests are gracefully cancelled.
  - menthe 3y ago
    Absolutely was using the AIO image, with thumbnail generation enabled for every formats of my library (another thing you need to manually edit in Nextcloud’s configuration as by default the format list is limited). And it’s only “pre-optimized” if you are cool with PHP memory limit crashes, PHP operation timeouts, PHP request size limits, and the works. Another joy associated with using Nextcloud sync is that uploads don’t even seem to support multi-part resumable uploads. So not only is it crazy slow, if there’s any error during the auto-upload of a 2G video clip, or the app is temporally backgrounded by iOS, it’ll go into an exponential back off (which you can force start), and eventually just start the upload for that/those file(s) over from scratch - good ways to waste days burning in your screen while in a trip and trying to ensure your medias are backed up in case you lose your phone on a trip. Try uploading raw images & 4k clips shot on iPhone to Nextcloud using the Nextcloud app + the AIO image from abroad. I’m telling you, I’ve tried to use them for quite some time, and I’m far from DevOps-illiterate - I’ve been using k8s since it’s infancy, we wrote the original Operators at CoreOS way back.
ggm 3y ago
Does it have perceptual hash duplicate detection?
adam_gyroscope 3y ago
Is there auto syncing from Apple Photos? That’s the missing feature in Google Photos for me.
- dugite-code 3y ago
  There is an Auto upload function in the Nextcloud APP, I believe it works on IOS
greatNespresso 3y ago
Impressed by the loading speed of pictures, how does that work?
- radialapps 3y ago
  It uses very complex hand optimized SQL queries to do everything in a single database query. The database is also structured in a way to support this. The result: each request overall only takes a few milliseconds for the hardest part, the rest of the optimization is a game of caching.
spencerflem 3y ago
I was just setting this up last weekend! Its lovely, really well put together. If this is your project, thank you so much
- radialapps 3y ago
  Great to hear that! It's FOSS and I only work on this in my free time, so please keep the bug reports coming as you run into them! :)
greensoap 3y ago
I think this is relevant; but does anyone know of any software that is able to tag photos based on quality- like blur, framing, composition. We have too many photos. So many duplicates from the same day. I’ve dreamed of something that would tag or prune based on the best of from any given set of photos. It would turn our library of 80000 random photos into a set of photos I can put on a frame and see the “good ones”.
- zilti 3y ago
  digiKam might have this or similar, or there might be a plugin for it. It's gotten so many features that I hardly know what's going on anymore.
- radialapps 3y ago
  This one has been on my mind for a long time. A good start would be blurred photos, duplicate identification and finding a generically "good" photo given a set (e.g. photos from a single location)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Delete the bad ones.
  - greensoap 3y ago
    Why didn't I think of that?
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      This, but unironically. You're asking for some solution to a problem you shouldn't have. Keeping shitty photos is hoarding and making your life worse. Hit that delete button.
sampli 3y ago
I’m a big fan of https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/ and I use it every day for thousands of assets
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
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hereme888 3y ago
I tried it a year ago through Nextcloud AIO and it barely worked... Has it had major improvements since? Or is it because I was using the AIO version of Nextcloud?
- radialapps 3y ago
  The project is a little over a year old, so yeah lol
XiS 3y ago
Tried this a year ago, it was a real mess, barely worked and broke often. Hopefully it changed a lot in the meantime because I would really like this to be integrated into NextCloud. I the meantime, I'm really happy using Immich
- radialapps 3y ago
  Umm the project barely existed a year ago, it was in very early stages.
doublesocket 3y ago
I currently use Mylio. The feature I like most is that I can store a compressed version of my entire catalog on my phone so it's very quick to find something and it works offline. I can then download the full res image if I want it. My biggest complaint about Mylio is there is still no automatic synchronisation from Android. You have to leave the app open for it to sync. Wondering if the Memories Android app can handle both of these points?
- radialapps 3y ago
  First one is interesting, not possible at the moment. The Nextcloud app is used for auto-upload, that does support background upload at least on Android.
raybb 3y ago
Nextcloud itself is a PWA. Did you have to do anything special to make what seems like essentially your own PWA inside another? I ask because I'd love to turn the nextcloud/tasks app into a PWA but was concerned about how it could work.
- radialapps 3y ago
  Not much, it works pretty much out of the box.
COGlory 3y ago
Where can I give you money? I see nothing on the support page.
- radialapps 3y ago
  The GitHub has sponsors, thanks! :) https://github.com/sponsors/pulsejet https://github.com/sponsors/pulsejet
blacklion 3y ago
Is here any FOSS, self-hosting (single-user is Ok), alternative to flickr? With all its albums, collections, photostream, map, keywords, etc? I'm looking at this Memories now, but I don't like first page, sorry, with all photos is small and divided with white spaces and dates... But I don't need any metadata editing, AI and mobile apps, I need gallery for high-quality photos to view on big screens.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
What's the vps specs required to get started? I do not need ai features for example. Just a place for family to store photos on. Preferably on the cheapest vps with s3 backend
- radialapps 3y ago
  See the demo above. It runs on a free-tier VM from Oracle. Minimum requirements are quite low. Mainly you need memory to get good performance (at least 4GB, say). CPU-wise it runs fine with massive libraries even on RPi. I don't recommend S3 as external storage though; the Nextcloud implementation is quite finicky. Unless you can mount that and use it inside docker, that would work fine. EDIT: features like AI are all optional.
laksmanv 3y ago
Hi! I love it - how can I reach out to you?
- radialapps 3y ago
  https://memories.gallery/faq/#getting-help https://memories.gallery/faq/#getting-help :)
dmitrygr 3y ago
How hard would this be to deploy the old-fashioned way (as an executable on my own linux box, no docker/nexcloud/prevcloud/bulbasaur/cerebii/cubone)?
- radialapps 3y ago
  Easy to deploy, hard to configure right. All you need is PHP + an HTTP server (then tune it https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/server_tuning.html https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/instal...)
porphyra 3y ago
Does it have search by keywords/semantics? That would be my main need. For example if I need to find photos of red algae I could just search for that. OpenAI open sourced CLIP a couple of years ago: https://github.com/openai/CLIP https://github.com/openai/CLIP and I was planning to write something myself to index my vast photo library but got too lazy and gave up.
- radialapps 3y ago
  Not yet, search is a major planned feature
senectus1 3y ago
right, i think i have a new project this weekend. I've been trying to find a way out of google photos... but that auto OBJECT and face tagging is a so useful. I can search for car and get cars, or dog and get dogs etc I look forward to testing this out!
nikolayasdf123 3y ago
does it support HDR? live photos? 4K HDR videos? dare I say, new apple "spatial" video format?
- radialapps 3y ago
  HDR kinda works, depends on the photo. Live photos are fully supported (Apple/Google/Samsung/Xiaomi at least). HDR videos are a pain to transcode, it mostly doesn't work well (but this is not very well tested / worked on). No idea about the spatial stuff.
  - nikolayasdf123 3y ago
    got it. guess my point is that excellent support for latest formats are super important for this to be viable for mass user (AFAIK latest browsers still do not support HDR photos.. so guess would be hard to implement in open source those).
  - nikolayasdf123 3y ago
    > transcode... I guess other important point is to store originals as well (or maybe even rendering originals directly). and also RAW format for audio video. then comes question on handling 250GB+ videos and libraries for TBs sizes Apple Photos rocks in all of the above. and it also works excellently offline. to beat it you have to really solve those problems..
    - radialapps 3y ago
      Only the originals are stored. Transcoding is needed to play any video in browsers, e.g. HEVC isn't supported by most browsers. For this, Memories transcodes your video on the fly and streams it to the browser with HLS. RAW support for photos is easy and already supported, no idea about videos. As far as "beating" Apple, I'm ready to bet that'll never happen (not just with this project but any really). A small open source project can't really compete with a $2T company
nntwozz 3y ago
I've been using Lychee for many years - https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee Memories looks like a nice alternative, anyone using Lychee here with a comparison?
- radialapps 3y ago
  Can't compare myself, but here's a general comparison table between various alternatives in this space that someone has been maintaining. https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
  - eblanshey 3y ago
    Wow, the state of self-hosted photo libraries has gotten way better since I last settled on Photoprism a few years ago. Both Memories and Immich seem very polished. The timeline features look great. I may need to play around with these.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tuananh 3y ago
I've been using Synology Photos. Not OSS but they have Android/iOS app so that I can just log in once and enable auto-backup.
codethief 3y ago
Fantastic project! > No Lock-In > Memories stores most of the metadata in the EXIF headers of your photos, which means that you can easily migrate to other solutions without losing your data. It also utilizes your existing filesystem structure for organization without converting it to any specialized format Given that, would a standalone version be feasible, i.e. one that doesn't rely on Nextcloud and only operates on a folder on disk? I mean, while Memories might not lock you in, Nextcloud can still do so. (No two-way sync etc. etc.) Currently, I just use Syncthing to synchronize all my files across devices (laptop, phone, home server, …) and it works splendidly! Ideally I'd just want to run Memories either locally (on the local copy of my photos folder) or on my home server (on the home server's copy of my photos folder).
- raybb 3y ago
  Probably not what you want but I use rclone to mount my hetzner NC instance and have syncthing that points to that mounted folder. It's been pretty hands free solution for me since I don't have a computer at home that's always on. It all started because I didn't want to keep getting sync conflicts with my obsidian notes between laptop and phone.
  - BodyCulture 3y ago
    Is that data in the data centre encrypted?
    - raybb 3y ago
      I don't think that Hetzner has the next cloud encryption turned on. So I assume it is not encrypted but when I use syncthing, I can turn on encryption there for the NC node.
      - codethief 3y ago
        But then an app like Memories wouldn't be able to read your files, would it?
auscad 3y ago
I would really like to see an integrated camera app that allows me to hide my photos from the OS so that big brother doesn't automatically ingest them
- lxgr 3y ago
  If you don’t trust your OS, how can you trust it to run an app? Apps can’t hide data from the OS that’s running them.
  - auscad 3y ago
    I’m concerned about what the OS is doing in accordance with its privacy policy or terms of service. Without having read them (I am only human) I assume the photos in the default location are sent off for analysis to “improve your experience by showing you relevant advertising”. I would be surprised if this above-board surveillance went as far as crawling the filesystem
- dugite-code 3y ago
  The Nextcloud App (Not the Memories Nextcloud app) allows taking a photo that goes directly to the server. It's also got a Scan document feature that I use to scan to a Paperless folder for processing.
deleted 3y ago
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Linda231 3y ago
[dead]
adrr 3y ago
Biggest missing feature for all these self hosted photo hosting is the lack of a real search. Being able to search for things like "beach at night" is a time saver instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of photos. There are trained neural networks out there like https://github.com/openai/CLIP https://github.com/openai/CLIP which are quite good.
- kn100 3y ago
  Immich does exactly this with CLIP models, you can even customise which CLIP model it uses and it does a phenomenally good job, I'd personally say surpassing even Google Photos.
  - ic3man5 3y ago
    I can 2nd Immich, nextcloud sync was just terrible for me also.
  - Jnr 3y ago
    Immich is awesome for this and many other things. Automatic facial recognition feature in immich is also great.
    - hgomersall 3y ago
      Is there a hosted service of Immich? I'm keen to try it but really don't want the faff of self hosting (happy to pay!).
      - Jnr 3y ago
        I don't think they offer hosted solution yet. I self host but donate to the project. Not hard to set up, using docker compose. Just remember to set up automated backups, since there is no company taking care of that.
      - bshaughn 3y ago
        Yes! Pikapods, which is a service to "self host" open source tools cheaply. I discovered and implemented this yesterday during lunch, took only a few minutes. you get $5 in credit without entering a CC https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/
jojohack 3y ago
This great, Thanks for sharing!
rc_kas 3y ago
Oh god. I <3 for making this.
anigbrowl 3y ago
This looks promising, plus it won't try to push its idea of my favorite photos at me when my phone detects I'm awake each day - a gPhotos behavior I find increasingly creepy and never asked for.
- mcfedr 3y ago
  Disable notifications and it's gone
  - spurgu 3y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted (upvoted to counter). I assume you mean the notifications of Google Photos (and not disabling notifications altogether). I don't see any legitimate use for them so might as well just turn them off. Edit: It doesn't change the fact that the behavior is creepy though. Maybe that's the criticism.
WhitneyLand 3y ago
Great work Varun. Doing photos is one thing, but doing it to scale and also with high performance at the client is a very nice accomplishment.
- radialapps 3y ago
  Thank you!
stavros 3y ago
This is fantastic, better photo viewing is the only thing I was missing from Nextcloud, since without this I basically can't see any photos (they're too slow and the UX is bad). I installed this, indexed the photos, etc, but I still get lots of grey boxes (photos not loading) when I browse. Am I missing something, or is my server just too slow for this? EDIT: I think my server is just too slow. The entire machine freezes when loading one of the photos.
- radialapps 3y ago
  You're missing the preview generator, so it's trying to generate them on demand. See https://memories.gallery/config/#recommended-apps https://memories.gallery/config/#recommended-apps Also note there are some extra config steps for the preview app (initial run, cron job). See https://github.com/nextcloud/previewgenerator https://github.com/nextcloud/previewgenerator
  - stavros 3y ago
    Ahh, thank you, I did install the preview generator but missed the initial run, thanks!
forgingahead 3y ago
Nice work! Been looking for a good standalone photo manager for a while. Three questions: 1. Can we do multiple person search? Eg: photos with Person A and Person B? 2. Any plans for descriptive search using CLIP or any of the existing neural networks out there? 3. I see we can edit the exif description, but maybe can we have a custom caption box? eg: "Mum and Dad in 1993". Ideally that would also be available for search, and it would appear more explicitly when browsing photos (kind of like a real album with the notes written next to each photo).
- Jnr 3y ago
  You should try Immich. It already does 1. and 2. very well.
mikrotikker 3y ago
PHP? Really? Why?
- dugite-code 3y ago
  Because Nextcloud is made in PHP and it's not a bad language? It's been a long time since PHP5
nwbort 3y ago
Any suggestions on the best workflow to export out of Google Photos? I have ~200GB in Google Photos and would need to eg put together the weird Google Photos metadata into usable format for Memories
- radialapps 3y ago
  Google Takeout. Importing from takeout metadata is supported (at least edits to the images; not albums right now)
  - ajtaylor 3y ago
    I tried using Takeout but the exported file structure and various metadata files were almost incomprehensible. This is likely partly my fault because I didn't download the full 100+ zip files, but I suspect there would be so many files scattered in too many directories to be much use.
    - exhilaration 3y ago
      I found this in an HN comment https://metadatafixer.com/ https://metadatafixer.com/ I haven't used it but it looks pretty promising
    - nwbort 3y ago
      Yeah this was what my concern was basically
muppetman 3y ago
These are all similar things that Gallery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_Project) promised (not the same features because location for example wasn't a thing). And delivered on for a great number of years, really well. It seemed like the future of image hosting. And then it slowly trailed off, v3 of Gallery did get released but to a lukewarm reception (the old plugins/addons didn't work and the cloud was just starting to take over) and then yea, it just died. I have my gallery still online these days, with a fork so that PHP8 still works with it, but I've had to hide it behind an IP Access list now because I don't trust it being public facing anymore. I don't mean to shit on this project, I hope it's massively successful. We need more awesome open source apps like this. But I've been burnt once already pouring my heart and soul into an open source image gallery so I'm not going to do it again. In hindsight I wish I'd put all my photos in Flickr (I thought I was being so clever using Gallery) because it's stood the test of time that Gallery didn't. These days I use Google Photos, I can't see it going away anytime soon (though of course it's Google so who knows) Sorry this rant is probably very offtopic. The product itself looks amazing and I DO hope it achieves the success that Gallery couldn't.
hwbunny 3y ago
In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time! --- Wow, and why is that necessary?
- bogdan 3y ago
  Because we have limited time in this world and waiting for photos to load isn't the best way to spend that time
dohello 3y ago
this is awesome!
ksvarma 3y ago
Great work and finally I could take that step of bringing all the pictures together locally.
hunter2_ 3y ago
I need to dig deeper, but for now I just want to say how delightful it is to be able to go to the next/previous photo by swiping even if I've zoomed in. Google Photos makes me zoom all the way back out first with a huge pinch, which leads to a lot of frustration when swipes fail to change the photo. Nice work.
- beAbU 3y ago
  "It's not a bug, it's a feature". Many rely on this "issue" to prevent people from swiping to photos they're not supposed to see - a common enough occurence when showing someone a photo on your phone.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    Reminds me of this: https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/ https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-wi... Users will always find a way...
  - spurgu 3y ago
    Indeed. Maybe there should be a setting for this functionality so you can turn it on/off according to your preferences.
  - stevenicr 3y ago
    "prevent people from swiping to photos they're not supposed to see" I feel this is a common problem and there could be a solution like long-press pop a menu that allows you to lock 'just this pic' until photos is closed and reopened.. or select 'pics from just today' or 'pics just from the past XX minutes' Or something, this issue is huge in a lot of circumstances.
28304283409234 3y ago
Have been using it for a couple of months now! Wife and I love the album feature which helps us to maintain photo albums async. It is a huge step up from the default photo's app in Nextcloud. Absolutely wonderful stuff.
mcfedr 3y ago
Shout out for photo prism, similar concept, with nice ai search, and doesn't need next cloud, just a folder. https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/ No affiliation, just a happy consumer.
- intuxikated 3y ago
  does it do automatic tagging / recognizing faces / scenes / objects?
  - noisem4ker 3y ago
    Sort of. It uses TensorFlow for object recognition and categorization. I personally wouldn't say it's very reliable. I'm not going to compare it to Google Photos, though, as I never fed my photo library to the latter.
  - nolok 3y ago
    They have a features page : https://www.photoprism.app/features https://www.photoprism.app/features
  - janwillemb 3y ago
    Yes but it is very unreliable. Especially for recognizing kids.
- gaazoh 3y ago
  Still requires hosting AFAICT. Would you know of a native Windows software alternative, perhaps? I could probably manage to host Photo Prism or Memories, but there's no way my parents would take the time to learn and set up a server, yet they have decades of pictures to sort through.
  - noisem4ker 3y ago
    They offer a hosted service, on PikaPods: https://www.photoprism.app/cloud https://www.photoprism.app/cloud
- 3y ago
tamimio 3y ago
Can I search for a text in a photo? Off topic: what’s the best desktop application that allows that? A lot of my pics in my iPhone are still there because of this feature, but if there’s a program that does the same on windows/linux, I will be happy to use instead.
- stevenicr 3y ago
  I started playing with 'image scan ocr' (from the windows store I think) - to bulk pull the text from a bunch of screenshots / pics - hoping to export it all and make it searchable.. It did some things well, but I did not complete the mission for reasons I can't recall. I think powertoys->Text Extractor and other windows apps have this built in now, including the built-in win 11 'snipping tool' - ( https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/whats-new-with-snipping-tool-on-windows-11-september-2023-update https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/what... I was reading that MSsoft preinstalled Edge browser has " Enable Edge Screenshot Tool with Copilot, OCR and Search" - but I am unsure if this is on device or shared to cloud.
thih9 3y ago
Congrats on building this, looks great! Minor feedback: could you update the text or image to link to nextcloud? I know nothing about nextcloud, the project mentions it and I wanted to read more.
Ranmalie 3y ago
[flagged]
usrusr 3y ago
Would it be good for federation? As in ability to dump a large amount of mixed quality images on a local instance and then sync only a subset ("tagged favorite", "rated 4+ stars" or something like that) to an off-site instance. Because that's my number one requirement for image management: convenient management of the image selection subset pyramid. I know nextcloud has some federation features, but I have no idea if that could be put to work based on some exif criteria or other file metadata. For all I know this could be a killer feature that would be enough on its own to motivate the nextcloud plugin vs standalone decision, or it might be completely useless as in federation only based on entire folders.
XCSme 3y ago
I have been using https://www.photoprism.app https://www.photoprism.app for a couple of years, and it works better than expected, with the latest updates it's actually quite fast and the face tagging works reasonably well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
abhaynayar 3y ago
Missed opportunity to call it FOTOSS.
archon810 3y ago
I gave the demo album a whirl on my Pixel 8 Pro in Chrome. Two bugs stood out to me immediately: 1. Tapping on the i button does nothing. 2. After clicking around on some images, the back button was mostly useless until I pressed it like 10 times. I think it works for album navigation but stops working when you start photo navigation.
- radialapps 3y ago
  Thanks for the useful report! Fixes are in the pipeline and should land in the next version
garfieldnate 3y ago
I don't see this in the demo so I'll ask here: what does the UI look like for identifying unknown faces? In Picasa there was a tab somewhere with unknown faces grouped together by what it thought were the same person. It had a really good flow for this that was perfect for doing genealogy work with loads of old photos.
rrix2 3y ago
I set this up today, it's very nice, thank you! It indexed more than a decade of photos in a couple of hours and gave me geocoding and "on this date" back more than a decade. I didn't realize I could per-generate thumbnails on my server, too, your docs helped me out a bit there. Have you looked at how much in common the EXIF data elements can be shared with a desktop DAM like Digikam? I'm looking forward to the Android app being available in an F-Droid repository!
kirso 3y ago
Are there any migration ways (to for instance offload everything from iCloud to Memories)?
vishnumohandas 3y ago
The demo is really cool! Congrats on the launch!
nloa 3y ago
Would be nice if someone could create an Unraid community application for this.

797 points by radialapps 3y ago

lxe 3y ago

Looks polished!

aendruk 3y ago

What are your thoughts on PhotoPrism?

candiddevmike 3y ago
It's nice, but $24/year/forever to have multiple users is a bit much...
- rockooooo 3y ago
  $24 a year is too much?
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    When every other aspect of the app is basically free, yes. I would pay once for the functionality, not as a subscription.
    - gene91 3y ago
      They offer a lifetime price of $128. https://www.photoprism.app/membership/faq https://www.photoprism.app/membership/faq > Are there alternatives to a recurring subscription? > > Yes, our Plus members automatically receive a free Lifetime Essentials membership after 24 months
radialapps 3y ago
My thoughts? Too slow. No timeline view. Looks terrible.

timmg 3y ago

Just curious: what's the business model for something like this.

burnte 3y ago
Doesn't look like it's a business, so probably no business plan.
radialapps 3y ago
It's free

warkdarrior 3y ago

Ugh, it's tied to Nextcloud. Is there a standalone option?

parl_match 3y ago
Yes! It's open source, so simply download the project, make the requisite changes, and then run it wherever you like. https://github.com/pulsejet/memories https://github.com/pulsejet/memories
- burnte 3y ago
  I think you meant to say "No, but it's open source, so simply download the project, make the requisite changes, and then run it wherever you like." When you say "Yes, it's OSS so you can just do it yourself" it's generally viewed as snarky and misleading, as the question wasn't "can I modify it" but "is it available already in another form?" It's just not helpful to anyone to word it like that backwards manner.
  - parl_match 3y ago
    It's just not helpful to complain about someone else's work, either.
    - nsteel 3y ago
      Especially considering there's an answer already at https://memories.gallery/faq/ https://memories.gallery/faq/
burnte 3y ago
Doesn't seem to be.
mcint 3y ago
I found NextCloud pretty easy to set up...from yunohost.org. By contrast, when I tried to install it manually, the distribution install scripts broke on the second run, on changes that the very same script made on the first run. Anti-idempotent, I dropped it with the impression of drumming up hosting or consulting business.

leononame 3y ago

Hi, this looks super polished, congratulations. I've got a couple of questions: - Does the metadata editing allow it to write back to the file, storing the edited metadata in a sidecar or in the EXIF data? - Does it support some kind of auto-stacking? E.g. having raw files alongside exported tiff/jpg and recognizing that they are the same file? Especially for a nextcloud based solution, that'd be awesome

radialapps 3y ago
Yes. Yes.
- gwbrooks 3y ago
  Does it preserve and/or allow editing of the text metadata (typically, the generative prompt) appended to PNG files created with Stable Diffusion?
  - radialapps 3y ago
    No idea what that is
    - tejtm 3y ago
      older versions of png did not support an exif chunk, so other metadata/property chunks were/are sometimes used
  - cwillu 3y ago
    That's exif metadata, so it should Just Work™

belinder 3y ago

How does this compare to immich? I spent a few weekends ago setting that up and it's working great, though it doesn't always detect faces correctly and swiping through images is a bit slower than Google photos

talhah 3y ago
The main thing to me was that since this runs on Nextcloud its more extensible as the photos are just stored under the files and you can use various other apps to do what your heart desires. The other aspect is you get your own Gdrive alternative. You may or may not want this. For mobile compatibility Nextcloud is better since you can choose which folder photos go to and you can essentially automatically backup albums whereas with Immich you can't automatically specify which album photos from a directory should go [1]. In addition to this, Immich isn't too stable yet and each time you update the server all clients have to be on the latest version, at least since the last time I used Immich. 1. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1678 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1678
- menthe 3y ago
  This is moot. - Immich supports external libraries - Use docker compose and never worry about versions breaking
  - talhah 3y ago
    > This is moot. Immich fully supports external libraries. You're correct, Immich does support external libraries. To be more elaborate with my original comment, I meant inbuilt apps of Nextcloud which integrate well and complement the memories app. An example app would be the Face recognition one or Recognize if you fancy a different implementation. Nextcloud is after all an ecosystem so using memories gains you the other benefits of such an ecosystem. This might be overkill for some so it's upto your usecases. Versions breaking is an issue since both mobile and server clients have to be on the same version. Compared to Nextcloud Memories this is not an issue. This was an issue when I've last used Immich so this may have changed since then.

pathsjs 3y ago

How complex is it to configure memories? I own a hosted instance of NextCloud from Hetzner, but I would rather not misconfigure it. Also, is there a mobile app? I think not having one is limiting, since most of the time I want to look at the pictures on the phone

radialapps 3y ago
Everything can be mostly configured through the admin panel, maybe 15-20 minutes? There's a mobile app for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memories https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memori... On iOS, you can use the PWA ("add to homescreen") and it behaves almost exactly as a native app
- raybb 3y ago
  You might wanna consider adding a page to your docs about setup on hetzner since it's so popular for NC hosting. Seems that it is possible to get it mostly working based on this issue: https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/issues/110 https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/issues/110
  - raybb 3y ago
    They also don't support the recognize app. https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/19acyje/managed_nectcloud_with_support_for_recognize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/19acyje/managed_...

pathsjs 3y ago

How complex is it to configure? I have an instance of NextCloud from Hetzner, but I would rather not misconfigure it. Also, is there a mobile app? Most of the time when I look at pictures I am on the phone

talhah 3y ago
As easy as downloading an app from the store and telling it which directory to work with. If you need the AI features those require separate apps and depending on your deployment it might need some effort. I'm running a docker image and had to ensure I have some of the required libraries for the AI things to work. It isn't too hard to misconfigure though and I believe there's a decent amount of resources for this. As for mobile app, there isn't an explicit one but the webapp interface is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I also use NC photos and it still works with the tags and face recognition things. That app doesn't require "Memories" as far as I know.
- radialapps 3y ago
  There is an Android app, not for iOS yet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memories https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memori...
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Awesome! F-Droid Link: https://f-droid.org/packages/gallery.memories/ https://f-droid.org/packages/gallery.memories/ GitHub releases: https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/releases?q=android https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/releases?q=android
  - XCSme 3y ago
    Is there any photo-syncing at play? Or it's just a viewer for the data already on your NextCloud instance. If I take photos with my phone, I have to manually upload them to NextCloud?
    - 3y ago

bl4kers 3y ago

Basically the last thing keeping me locked into Google Photos is it's social features. I see "external sharing" is mentioned but haven't found more information on that. Ideally I'd want the option to share an album with password protection, doesn't require an account to view, and allows comments on photos. Bonus would be to have a running album feed with view receipts per account. I know that's a lot but wanted to be specific. I'm ready to migrate but haven't found a platform that has feature parity on this front.

magic_hamster 3y ago
It sounds like you can implement this by hosting your photos on a server with password access. You don't even need google for this.
- lytedev 3y ago
  #ThatDropboxComment ;)
radialapps 3y ago
You can share folders and albums that don't need an account to view. Folders do support password protection as well.
- singhrac 3y ago
  Does it support allowing others to upload photos as well (eg from a group trip)? If it does I’ll install it today on my homelab.
  - radialapps 3y ago
    Folders: this is fully supported. You can share out links of folders that anyone can upload to etc. These get stored in that folder (in your account) then. Albums: partial support. You can share links to albums that are viewable or share albums with others with an account on your nextcloud instance. People who have an account can upload photos to the shared albums.

conqrr 3y ago

I will take whatever is the most stable. I don't need a lot of feature, just a timeline and gallery with albums. Immich fits it for now, but it is way too focused on piling features and is bleeding edge. I hope memories has stability as its goal.

radialapps 3y ago
Indeed. Backward compatibility is also a major goal and there have been almost no major breaking changes since v2 (at v7 currently)
dugite-code 3y ago
I've been using it for quite a while and had no issues with the app at all. Only one hick-up with Nextcloud itself but that was really my fault if I'm honest

Fnoord 3y ago

(Still installing/configuring.) Awesome, this is the main piece of puzzle I (or rather: my wife) miss from Nextcloud (the default Photos has terrible performance and lacks some features). Gonna set it up. Also nice to see Face Recognition app is used. Now I'm gonna have to edit my docker-compose.yml for the dependencies but that is fine. Also, I've been trying Photoprism and also I tried Immich in past. They have disadvantages: they don't sync with whatever got uploaded to Nextcloud and they either do not have a mobile front-end or it is some web app. They also have stability issues, though I had most success with Photoprism. I suppose it won't be as useful to me as it could be as I'm stripping all EXIF data from any photo uploaded by Nextcloud because I fear my wife stupidly just shares whatever when she should not. Yes, I know you can do OSINT analysis anyway, but that is a skill as of yet.

jvanderbot 3y ago
Try https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ I like it very much.
- avhception 3y ago
  Thanks, that looks really interesting!
- Fnoord 3y ago
  Not for me. I self-host Nextcloud in my home network. I have a Wireguard VPN set up to it, too. I'll have fiber (1000/1000 mbit) soon, so not worried about network speed. I prefer something native in Nextcloud. And I do not need E2E encryption; I already use FDE in this VM. That said, to each their own, thanks for sharing.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Your setup is what I set out to build. Ente.io is what I landed in after I managed to put it off so long. Congrats on actually doing it
    - 3y ago

ementally 3y ago

How is it compared to https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ ?

hanniabu 3y ago
looks like memories has auto-categorization
radialapps 3y ago
Different goals. Ente is commercial, Memories is free Ente is focused on E2EE, Memories is focused on self-hosting.
- saddist0 3y ago
  It has a commercial offering, but it isn't "commercial" and provide self hosting fyi. https://github.com/ente-io https://github.com/ente-io
- xiconfjs 3y ago
  ente.io is fully open source since 2024: https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/ https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/

menthe 3y ago

For having used Memories on Nextcloud, and having spent hours trying to micro optimize the Nginx & PHP configuration, I can safely say that, while it is better than the Nextcloud’s native Photos app, this is absolutely nowhere near to Immich, Filerun, or surprisingly even a dumb SMB share (which doesn’t have thumbnail caching…!). I’ve really tried hard, as Immich’s support for external libraries was still in a PR at that time, and didn’t want to have two separate tools to grab files and grab photos. A big part of the problem, it seems, is that, when you have a large library, and you jump/scroll to a specific year or so, it won’t cancel the previous page(s) worth of thumbnails loading. So as soon as you’re scrolling to search for something, it quickly accumulates hundreds of useless requests that quickly overload the PHP workers, and make everything crawl to a standstill. I personally had to give up. When trying to grab photos from abroad for my shortly upcoming proposal, I’ve literally deleted Nextcloud/Memories, plopped Immich in docker compose, let it index/transcode/generate thumbnails from scratch against my “external library” (so Immich doesn’t duplicate the medias), and that ended up savings me days of buffering, and was able to find the nice pictures for the occasion! (R740xd with 48 cores and 96TB SSD-backed ZFS pool)

radialapps 3y ago
It's silly to micro optimize nginx / php when you have docker. Just use the Nextcloud Docker image or AIO and be done with it, everything is pre-optimized. Thumbnail caching exists (it's even highly configurable), there's absolutely zero buffering even with 100k photos+ on a raspberry pi. You obviously did not read the documentation or install the preview generator (which the docs clearly tell you to) Your deployment skills are hot garbage EDIT 3: ^the last line was in response to something that has been edited out of the original comment EDIT: the comment this is in reply to was edited multiple times. This is pointless and a lot of it is just false. EDIT 2: (at least currently the previous comment claims unnecessary PHP requests) this only happens if your configuration is incomplete; you didn't install preview generator as the docs say. Secondly it happens exactly once, the first time you see the image. All other requests are gracefully cancelled.
- menthe 3y ago
  Absolutely was using the AIO image, with thumbnail generation enabled for every formats of my library (another thing you need to manually edit in Nextcloud’s configuration as by default the format list is limited). And it’s only “pre-optimized” if you are cool with PHP memory limit crashes, PHP operation timeouts, PHP request size limits, and the works. Another joy associated with using Nextcloud sync is that uploads don’t even seem to support multi-part resumable uploads. So not only is it crazy slow, if there’s any error during the auto-upload of a 2G video clip, or the app is temporally backgrounded by iOS, it’ll go into an exponential back off (which you can force start), and eventually just start the upload for that/those file(s) over from scratch - good ways to waste days burning in your screen while in a trip and trying to ensure your medias are backed up in case you lose your phone on a trip. Try uploading raw images & 4k clips shot on iPhone to Nextcloud using the Nextcloud app + the AIO image from abroad. I’m telling you, I’ve tried to use them for quite some time, and I’m far from DevOps-illiterate - I’ve been using k8s since it’s infancy, we wrote the original Operators at CoreOS way back.

ggm 3y ago

Does it have perceptual hash duplicate detection?

adam_gyroscope 3y ago

Is there auto syncing from Apple Photos? That’s the missing feature in Google Photos for me.

dugite-code 3y ago
There is an Auto upload function in the Nextcloud APP, I believe it works on IOS

greatNespresso 3y ago

Impressed by the loading speed of pictures, how does that work?

radialapps 3y ago
It uses very complex hand optimized SQL queries to do everything in a single database query. The database is also structured in a way to support this. The result: each request overall only takes a few milliseconds for the hardest part, the rest of the optimization is a game of caching.

spencerflem 3y ago

I was just setting this up last weekend! Its lovely, really well put together. If this is your project, thank you so much

radialapps 3y ago
Great to hear that! It's FOSS and I only work on this in my free time, so please keep the bug reports coming as you run into them! :)

greensoap 3y ago

I think this is relevant; but does anyone know of any software that is able to tag photos based on quality- like blur, framing, composition. We have too many photos. So many duplicates from the same day. I’ve dreamed of something that would tag or prune based on the best of from any given set of photos. It would turn our library of 80000 random photos into a set of photos I can put on a frame and see the “good ones”.

zilti 3y ago
digiKam might have this or similar, or there might be a plugin for it. It's gotten so many features that I hardly know what's going on anymore.
radialapps 3y ago
This one has been on my mind for a long time. A good start would be blurred photos, duplicate identification and finding a generically "good" photo given a set (e.g. photos from a single location)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
globular-toast 3y ago
Delete the bad ones.
- greensoap 3y ago
  Why didn't I think of that?
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    This, but unironically. You're asking for some solution to a problem you shouldn't have. Keeping shitty photos is hoarding and making your life worse. Hit that delete button.

sampli 3y ago

I’m a big fan of https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/ and I use it every day for thousands of assets

deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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hereme888 3y ago

I tried it a year ago through Nextcloud AIO and it barely worked... Has it had major improvements since? Or is it because I was using the AIO version of Nextcloud?

radialapps 3y ago
The project is a little over a year old, so yeah lol

XiS 3y ago

Tried this a year ago, it was a real mess, barely worked and broke often. Hopefully it changed a lot in the meantime because I would really like this to be integrated into NextCloud. I the meantime, I'm really happy using Immich

radialapps 3y ago
Umm the project barely existed a year ago, it was in very early stages.

doublesocket 3y ago

I currently use Mylio. The feature I like most is that I can store a compressed version of my entire catalog on my phone so it's very quick to find something and it works offline. I can then download the full res image if I want it. My biggest complaint about Mylio is there is still no automatic synchronisation from Android. You have to leave the app open for it to sync. Wondering if the Memories Android app can handle both of these points?

radialapps 3y ago
First one is interesting, not possible at the moment. The Nextcloud app is used for auto-upload, that does support background upload at least on Android.

raybb 3y ago

Nextcloud itself is a PWA. Did you have to do anything special to make what seems like essentially your own PWA inside another? I ask because I'd love to turn the nextcloud/tasks app into a PWA but was concerned about how it could work.

radialapps 3y ago
Not much, it works pretty much out of the box.

COGlory 3y ago

Where can I give you money? I see nothing on the support page.

radialapps 3y ago
The GitHub has sponsors, thanks! :) https://github.com/sponsors/pulsejet https://github.com/sponsors/pulsejet

blacklion 3y ago

Is here any FOSS, self-hosting (single-user is Ok), alternative to flickr? With all its albums, collections, photostream, map, keywords, etc? I'm looking at this Memories now, but I don't like first page, sorry, with all photos is small and divided with white spaces and dates... But I don't need any metadata editing, AI and mobile apps, I need gallery for high-quality photos to view on big screens.

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2Gkashmiri 3y ago

What's the vps specs required to get started? I do not need ai features for example. Just a place for family to store photos on. Preferably on the cheapest vps with s3 backend

radialapps 3y ago
See the demo above. It runs on a free-tier VM from Oracle. Minimum requirements are quite low. Mainly you need memory to get good performance (at least 4GB, say). CPU-wise it runs fine with massive libraries even on RPi. I don't recommend S3 as external storage though; the Nextcloud implementation is quite finicky. Unless you can mount that and use it inside docker, that would work fine. EDIT: features like AI are all optional.

laksmanv 3y ago

Hi! I love it - how can I reach out to you?

radialapps 3y ago
https://memories.gallery/faq/#getting-help https://memories.gallery/faq/#getting-help :)

dmitrygr 3y ago

How hard would this be to deploy the old-fashioned way (as an executable on my own linux box, no docker/nexcloud/prevcloud/bulbasaur/cerebii/cubone)?

radialapps 3y ago
Easy to deploy, hard to configure right. All you need is PHP + an HTTP server (then tune it https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/server_tuning.html https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/instal...)

porphyra 3y ago

Does it have search by keywords/semantics? That would be my main need. For example if I need to find photos of red algae I could just search for that. OpenAI open sourced CLIP a couple of years ago: https://github.com/openai/CLIP https://github.com/openai/CLIP and I was planning to write something myself to index my vast photo library but got too lazy and gave up.

radialapps 3y ago
Not yet, search is a major planned feature

senectus1 3y ago

right, i think i have a new project this weekend. I've been trying to find a way out of google photos... but that auto OBJECT and face tagging is a so useful. I can search for car and get cars, or dog and get dogs etc I look forward to testing this out!

nikolayasdf123 3y ago

does it support HDR? live photos? 4K HDR videos? dare I say, new apple "spatial" video format?

radialapps 3y ago
HDR kinda works, depends on the photo. Live photos are fully supported (Apple/Google/Samsung/Xiaomi at least). HDR videos are a pain to transcode, it mostly doesn't work well (but this is not very well tested / worked on). No idea about the spatial stuff.
- nikolayasdf123 3y ago
  got it. guess my point is that excellent support for latest formats are super important for this to be viable for mass user (AFAIK latest browsers still do not support HDR photos.. so guess would be hard to implement in open source those).
- nikolayasdf123 3y ago
  > transcode... I guess other important point is to store originals as well (or maybe even rendering originals directly). and also RAW format for audio video. then comes question on handling 250GB+ videos and libraries for TBs sizes Apple Photos rocks in all of the above. and it also works excellently offline. to beat it you have to really solve those problems..
  - radialapps 3y ago
    Only the originals are stored. Transcoding is needed to play any video in browsers, e.g. HEVC isn't supported by most browsers. For this, Memories transcodes your video on the fly and streams it to the browser with HLS. RAW support for photos is easy and already supported, no idea about videos. As far as "beating" Apple, I'm ready to bet that'll never happen (not just with this project but any really). A small open source project can't really compete with a $2T company

nntwozz 3y ago

I've been using Lychee for many years - https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee Memories looks like a nice alternative, anyone using Lychee here with a comparison?

radialapps 3y ago
Can't compare myself, but here's a general comparison table between various alternatives in this space that someone has been maintaining. https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
- eblanshey 3y ago
  Wow, the state of self-hosted photo libraries has gotten way better since I last settled on Photoprism a few years ago. Both Memories and Immich seem very polished. The timeline features look great. I may need to play around with these.
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tuananh 3y ago

I've been using Synology Photos. Not OSS but they have Android/iOS app so that I can just log in once and enable auto-backup.

codethief 3y ago

Fantastic project! > No Lock-In > Memories stores most of the metadata in the EXIF headers of your photos, which means that you can easily migrate to other solutions without losing your data. It also utilizes your existing filesystem structure for organization without converting it to any specialized format Given that, would a standalone version be feasible, i.e. one that doesn't rely on Nextcloud and only operates on a folder on disk? I mean, while Memories might not lock you in, Nextcloud can still do so. (No two-way sync etc. etc.) Currently, I just use Syncthing to synchronize all my files across devices (laptop, phone, home server, …) and it works splendidly! Ideally I'd just want to run Memories either locally (on the local copy of my photos folder) or on my home server (on the home server's copy of my photos folder).

raybb 3y ago
Probably not what you want but I use rclone to mount my hetzner NC instance and have syncthing that points to that mounted folder. It's been pretty hands free solution for me since I don't have a computer at home that's always on. It all started because I didn't want to keep getting sync conflicts with my obsidian notes between laptop and phone.
- BodyCulture 3y ago
  Is that data in the data centre encrypted?
  - raybb 3y ago
    I don't think that Hetzner has the next cloud encryption turned on. So I assume it is not encrypted but when I use syncthing, I can turn on encryption there for the NC node.
    - codethief 3y ago
      But then an app like Memories wouldn't be able to read your files, would it?

auscad 3y ago

I would really like to see an integrated camera app that allows me to hide my photos from the OS so that big brother doesn't automatically ingest them

lxgr 3y ago
If you don’t trust your OS, how can you trust it to run an app? Apps can’t hide data from the OS that’s running them.
- auscad 3y ago
  I’m concerned about what the OS is doing in accordance with its privacy policy or terms of service. Without having read them (I am only human) I assume the photos in the default location are sent off for analysis to “improve your experience by showing you relevant advertising”. I would be surprised if this above-board surveillance went as far as crawling the filesystem
dugite-code 3y ago
The Nextcloud App (Not the Memories Nextcloud app) allows taking a photo that goes directly to the server. It's also got a Scan document feature that I use to scan to a Paperless folder for processing.

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Linda231 3y ago

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adrr 3y ago

Biggest missing feature for all these self hosted photo hosting is the lack of a real search. Being able to search for things like "beach at night" is a time saver instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of photos. There are trained neural networks out there like https://github.com/openai/CLIP https://github.com/openai/CLIP which are quite good.

kn100 3y ago
Immich does exactly this with CLIP models, you can even customise which CLIP model it uses and it does a phenomenally good job, I'd personally say surpassing even Google Photos.
- ic3man5 3y ago
  I can 2nd Immich, nextcloud sync was just terrible for me also.
- Jnr 3y ago
  Immich is awesome for this and many other things. Automatic facial recognition feature in immich is also great.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    Is there a hosted service of Immich? I'm keen to try it but really don't want the faff of self hosting (happy to pay!).
    - Jnr 3y ago
      I don't think they offer hosted solution yet. I self host but donate to the project. Not hard to set up, using docker compose. Just remember to set up automated backups, since there is no company taking care of that.
    - bshaughn 3y ago
      Yes! Pikapods, which is a service to "self host" open source tools cheaply. I discovered and implemented this yesterday during lunch, took only a few minutes. you get $5 in credit without entering a CC https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/

jojohack 3y ago

This great, Thanks for sharing!

rc_kas 3y ago

Oh god. I <3 for making this.

anigbrowl 3y ago

This looks promising, plus it won't try to push its idea of my favorite photos at me when my phone detects I'm awake each day - a gPhotos behavior I find increasingly creepy and never asked for.

mcfedr 3y ago
Disable notifications and it's gone
- spurgu 3y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted (upvoted to counter). I assume you mean the notifications of Google Photos (and not disabling notifications altogether). I don't see any legitimate use for them so might as well just turn them off. Edit: It doesn't change the fact that the behavior is creepy though. Maybe that's the criticism.

WhitneyLand 3y ago

Great work Varun. Doing photos is one thing, but doing it to scale and also with high performance at the client is a very nice accomplishment.

radialapps 3y ago
Thank you!

stavros 3y ago

This is fantastic, better photo viewing is the only thing I was missing from Nextcloud, since without this I basically can't see any photos (they're too slow and the UX is bad). I installed this, indexed the photos, etc, but I still get lots of grey boxes (photos not loading) when I browse. Am I missing something, or is my server just too slow for this? EDIT: I think my server is just too slow. The entire machine freezes when loading one of the photos.

radialapps 3y ago
You're missing the preview generator, so it's trying to generate them on demand. See https://memories.gallery/config/#recommended-apps https://memories.gallery/config/#recommended-apps Also note there are some extra config steps for the preview app (initial run, cron job). See https://github.com/nextcloud/previewgenerator https://github.com/nextcloud/previewgenerator
- stavros 3y ago
  Ahh, thank you, I did install the preview generator but missed the initial run, thanks!

forgingahead 3y ago

Nice work! Been looking for a good standalone photo manager for a while. Three questions: 1. Can we do multiple person search? Eg: photos with Person A and Person B? 2. Any plans for descriptive search using CLIP or any of the existing neural networks out there? 3. I see we can edit the exif description, but maybe can we have a custom caption box? eg: "Mum and Dad in 1993". Ideally that would also be available for search, and it would appear more explicitly when browsing photos (kind of like a real album with the notes written next to each photo).

Jnr 3y ago
You should try Immich. It already does 1. and 2. very well.

mikrotikker 3y ago

PHP? Really? Why?

dugite-code 3y ago
Because Nextcloud is made in PHP and it's not a bad language? It's been a long time since PHP5

nwbort 3y ago

Any suggestions on the best workflow to export out of Google Photos? I have ~200GB in Google Photos and would need to eg put together the weird Google Photos metadata into usable format for Memories

radialapps 3y ago
Google Takeout. Importing from takeout metadata is supported (at least edits to the images; not albums right now)
- ajtaylor 3y ago
  I tried using Takeout but the exported file structure and various metadata files were almost incomprehensible. This is likely partly my fault because I didn't download the full 100+ zip files, but I suspect there would be so many files scattered in too many directories to be much use.
  - exhilaration 3y ago
    I found this in an HN comment https://metadatafixer.com/ https://metadatafixer.com/ I haven't used it but it looks pretty promising
  - nwbort 3y ago
    Yeah this was what my concern was basically

muppetman 3y ago

These are all similar things that Gallery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_Project) promised (not the same features because location for example wasn't a thing). And delivered on for a great number of years, really well. It seemed like the future of image hosting. And then it slowly trailed off, v3 of Gallery did get released but to a lukewarm reception (the old plugins/addons didn't work and the cloud was just starting to take over) and then yea, it just died. I have my gallery still online these days, with a fork so that PHP8 still works with it, but I've had to hide it behind an IP Access list now because I don't trust it being public facing anymore. I don't mean to shit on this project, I hope it's massively successful. We need more awesome open source apps like this. But I've been burnt once already pouring my heart and soul into an open source image gallery so I'm not going to do it again. In hindsight I wish I'd put all my photos in Flickr (I thought I was being so clever using Gallery) because it's stood the test of time that Gallery didn't. These days I use Google Photos, I can't see it going away anytime soon (though of course it's Google so who knows) Sorry this rant is probably very offtopic. The product itself looks amazing and I DO hope it achieves the success that Gallery couldn't.

hwbunny 3y ago

In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time! --- Wow, and why is that necessary?

bogdan 3y ago
Because we have limited time in this world and waiting for photos to load isn't the best way to spend that time

dohello 3y ago

this is awesome!

ksvarma 3y ago

Great work and finally I could take that step of bringing all the pictures together locally.

hunter2_ 3y ago

I need to dig deeper, but for now I just want to say how delightful it is to be able to go to the next/previous photo by swiping even if I've zoomed in. Google Photos makes me zoom all the way back out first with a huge pinch, which leads to a lot of frustration when swipes fail to change the photo. Nice work.

beAbU 3y ago
"It's not a bug, it's a feature". Many rely on this "issue" to prevent people from swiping to photos they're not supposed to see - a common enough occurence when showing someone a photo on your phone.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Reminds me of this: https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/ https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-wi... Users will always find a way...
- spurgu 3y ago
  Indeed. Maybe there should be a setting for this functionality so you can turn it on/off according to your preferences.
- stevenicr 3y ago
  "prevent people from swiping to photos they're not supposed to see" I feel this is a common problem and there could be a solution like long-press pop a menu that allows you to lock 'just this pic' until photos is closed and reopened.. or select 'pics from just today' or 'pics just from the past XX minutes' Or something, this issue is huge in a lot of circumstances.

28304283409234 3y ago

Have been using it for a couple of months now! Wife and I love the album feature which helps us to maintain photo albums async. It is a huge step up from the default photo's app in Nextcloud. Absolutely wonderful stuff.

mcfedr 3y ago

Shout out for photo prism, similar concept, with nice ai search, and doesn't need next cloud, just a folder. https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/ No affiliation, just a happy consumer.

intuxikated 3y ago
does it do automatic tagging / recognizing faces / scenes / objects?
- noisem4ker 3y ago
  Sort of. It uses TensorFlow for object recognition and categorization. I personally wouldn't say it's very reliable. I'm not going to compare it to Google Photos, though, as I never fed my photo library to the latter.
- nolok 3y ago
  They have a features page : https://www.photoprism.app/features https://www.photoprism.app/features
- janwillemb 3y ago
  Yes but it is very unreliable. Especially for recognizing kids.
gaazoh 3y ago
Still requires hosting AFAICT. Would you know of a native Windows software alternative, perhaps? I could probably manage to host Photo Prism or Memories, but there's no way my parents would take the time to learn and set up a server, yet they have decades of pictures to sort through.
- noisem4ker 3y ago
  They offer a hosted service, on PikaPods: https://www.photoprism.app/cloud https://www.photoprism.app/cloud
3y ago

tamimio 3y ago

Can I search for a text in a photo? Off topic: what’s the best desktop application that allows that? A lot of my pics in my iPhone are still there because of this feature, but if there’s a program that does the same on windows/linux, I will be happy to use instead.

stevenicr 3y ago
I started playing with 'image scan ocr' (from the windows store I think) - to bulk pull the text from a bunch of screenshots / pics - hoping to export it all and make it searchable.. It did some things well, but I did not complete the mission for reasons I can't recall. I think powertoys->Text Extractor and other windows apps have this built in now, including the built-in win 11 'snipping tool' - ( https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/whats-new-with-snipping-tool-on-windows-11-september-2023-update https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/what... I was reading that MSsoft preinstalled Edge browser has " Enable Edge Screenshot Tool with Copilot, OCR and Search" - but I am unsure if this is on device or shared to cloud.

thih9 3y ago

Congrats on building this, looks great! Minor feedback: could you update the text or image to link to nextcloud? I know nothing about nextcloud, the project mentions it and I wanted to read more.

Ranmalie 3y ago

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usrusr 3y ago

Would it be good for federation? As in ability to dump a large amount of mixed quality images on a local instance and then sync only a subset ("tagged favorite", "rated 4+ stars" or something like that) to an off-site instance. Because that's my number one requirement for image management: convenient management of the image selection subset pyramid. I know nextcloud has some federation features, but I have no idea if that could be put to work based on some exif criteria or other file metadata. For all I know this could be a killer feature that would be enough on its own to motivate the nextcloud plugin vs standalone decision, or it might be completely useless as in federation only based on entire folders.

XCSme 3y ago

I have been using https://www.photoprism.app https://www.photoprism.app for a couple of years, and it works better than expected, with the latest updates it's actually quite fast and the face tagging works reasonably well.

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abhaynayar 3y ago

Missed opportunity to call it FOTOSS.

archon810 3y ago

I gave the demo album a whirl on my Pixel 8 Pro in Chrome. Two bugs stood out to me immediately: 1. Tapping on the i button does nothing. 2. After clicking around on some images, the back button was mostly useless until I pressed it like 10 times. I think it works for album navigation but stops working when you start photo navigation.

radialapps 3y ago
Thanks for the useful report! Fixes are in the pipeline and should land in the next version

garfieldnate 3y ago

I don't see this in the demo so I'll ask here: what does the UI look like for identifying unknown faces? In Picasa there was a tab somewhere with unknown faces grouped together by what it thought were the same person. It had a really good flow for this that was perfect for doing genealogy work with loads of old photos.

rrix2 3y ago

I set this up today, it's very nice, thank you! It indexed more than a decade of photos in a couple of hours and gave me geocoding and "on this date" back more than a decade. I didn't realize I could per-generate thumbnails on my server, too, your docs helped me out a bit there. Have you looked at how much in common the EXIF data elements can be shared with a desktop DAM like Digikam? I'm looking forward to the Android app being available in an F-Droid repository!

kirso 3y ago

Are there any migration ways (to for instance offload everything from iCloud to Memories)?

vishnumohandas 3y ago

The demo is really cool! Congrats on the launch!

nloa 3y ago

Would be nice if someone could create an Unraid community application for this.