> Made for photographers
Please someone make a photo/video storage for families. Our photo stream is not artisan award-winning landscapes, they're messy bunch of travel photos, pictures of receipts and random exif-less pngs sent to us.
Please someone make a photo/video storage for families. Our photo stream is not artisan award-winning landscapes, they're messy bunch of travel photos, pictures of receipts and random exif-less pngs sent to us.
https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/
The novel random "taste" UI makes navigating even very large libraries fun and serendipitous.
There are a ton of configurable image and video filters that can prevent the exif-less screenshots and other random nose from getting imported in the first place. Hop into the discord if you need any help with setup, I'm online.
(Also, know that I've open sourced a bunch of the core functionality, but this is commercial software, albeit with a very generous "free" tier).
That's why all of PhotoStructure's metadata changes are stored using EXIF or XMP standards either within the file, or alongside in a sidecar (if you prefer). File organization is also completely customizable, and designed to work in concert with other DAMs, if desired. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/system-of-record/
Also: if the business ends, the code becomes open source. Details here: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#if-photos...
Parallelism is provided by https://github.com/photostructure/batch-cluster.js/
Metadata reads and writes are via https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js/
Persistence is via SQLite: https://github.com/WiseLibs/better-sqlite3
Image transforms are via Sharp: https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/
My more nerdier blog posts are tagged here: https://photostructure.com/tags/coding/
I think their actual multi-user story is somewhat lacking, but if you want a shared picture dump with some features that help sorting through a bunch of random images it should work well.
Right now I'm working on a desktop tool (Linux-first because that's what I run) to take a bunch of folders as input, find duplicates and let you clean up the duplicates or "merge to destination" because this has been one thing I've struggled to find something nice to use for.
It's early days and I'm only so far at the point of hashing images and detecting and counting duplicates, but as an experienced backend software engineer the UI tools are a real learning curve.
I'm also trying to make the UX clean and simple with next to no UX nouse.
I'm using Wails + Svelte; I've not worked with Node, Svelte or Wails before so I may or may not end up switching techs but the backend is in Go.
It's not one of these photo gallery/management tools but I've been finding that really, all I honestly need for my family photos that are reaching terabytes in size is: that I'm not waating space and I have a good archive of everything in one place.
I'm curious if this is a tool others might be interested in.
Multi-user is lacking to missing. I'm not 100% sure which state photoprism is in, as I was shopping for a self host service. OTOH I don't care about that for family. I'm not hosting anything for untrusted people, or to default backup everything, but as common library. So I'm fine if everyone sees everything and expect people to play nice.
But I do agree that multi user (and maybe integrated auto-sync for phones) are major missing features. I'm just in the situation that it doesn't really matter to me currently.
The way I had Photoprism set up is that mine and my wife's phones would sync images nightly to the server, the photos would be rsyncd from the public facing sync server to an internal one (not in the DMZ) then I'd have the server send me a link to the import page on Photoprism because it lacks the feature to autosync when new files are added; I think having to open the page while on LAN (link was internal only) and click a button was the straw that broke the camels back here for me.
I think I also had something like 10-12 cores dedicated to it, which alongside the RAM use that constantly crept up, and the manual intervention, was just too much for a photo management tool that wasn't really even managing the photos in a way that was useful to us.
I had considered selling it for a nominal fee too but that comes with additional commitments from me, that I'm not sure I want to take on.
Maybe I'll just add Github Sponsors, KoFi or such and see if there's interest, when it's ready and released.
I have photoprism running on docker, which is running as a VM on a proxmox server that is a 13 year old Dell Optiplex 9020. Only 6Gb ram dedicated to the VM (2GB initial, ballon to 6GB), and photoprism uses 2 workers. I have a large 50k set of photo's from starting from when my daughter was born till now (17). I have never sorted through these photo's other than to dump them from my phone every 6 months (camera before smartphones become common). Initial import took less than 45 minutes and that was before tweaking settings. Full manual index with all options, still takes less than 45. Initial face recognition was about 33 people, once I tweaked settings, it's recognized 97 people with little input from me other than tagging the name correctly for a few photo's per person.
The only difference in my docker file vs the official are optimized settings, and I'm using a separate VM for the database server as I find multi tendency and backups easier with a VM. (VM only has 2GB ram allocated to it)
I'm extremely happy with it, as I always put off organizing my photo collect due to how massive it is. It's made the task so much easier.
I am however always looking for other tools. I'm interested in give yours a try, just wanted see what could be the massive difference in experiences.
Edit: as for my tool, it won't replace Photoprism, its primary goal is to deduplicate your photo library.
I'm currently using HomeGallery[0] behind Authelia[1] for authentication to view so many images effectively. For uploading, I'd been using Nextcloud, but it began to lag noticeably after a few thousand photos. I switched to FileRun[2] with symlink'd photo directories and a user for each family.
With HomeGallery, I get the desired performance on mobile devices with de-duplication and tagging. My instance detects objects fine, but I owe it troubleshooting time to figure out face recognition. The "similar images" feature can be fun with so many photos. A nice tagging modal on keybind per image would be a nice-to-have.
Using FileRun for uploads works fine, but I also needed a continuous cron job for docker exec to generate any missing thumbnails.
[0] https://github.com/xemle/home-gallery (or https://home-gallery.org/)
[1] https://github.com/authelia/authelia (or https://www.authelia.com/)
It does it in few steps, like reading metadata, creating thumbnails, transcoding for browsers, face detection, nudity detection (lol they really do have it) etc etc. The thing is _all_ the steps are performed for each picture/video in your library. Picture 5 won't be even visible in your library until pictures 1,2,3 and 4 don't have all the thumbnails, optimized versions, labels from TF model, detected nudity and many other things.
My 10yo two-core celeron nuc begged for help, I couldn't see it suffer.
I tried to contact devs on github, the response was "go import all your 40K pictures manually, subfolder by subfolder". I checked, it's now marked as "accepted answer", haha.
- Altar
- Bookcase
- Festival
- Keyboard
- Streetcar
Some are very wrong (A photo of a lake as "gallery"), some are wrong but tricky (red geode with white veins as "meat") and most are spot on.
Edit: In fact, I'm not sure that I have the facial recognition configured... perhaps its in a newer release
I just tried the Photoprism demo (https://demo.photoprism.app/browse), searched for "person", "grass", "wave", "head", "eye", "neon" and a bunch of other terms, nothing seemed to find any pictures although I took the concepts from existing photos I found.
Back button is also broken on the demo, which makes it seem like the most basic UX is not there yet in the application.
The quest continues...
Create a trip, upload a 1000 of pictures, delete all but 100-200, see them on the map or on the timeline. Add comments to individual pics or to location or to dates.
And yes, the whole family can upload pics and they can be batch assigned a date or location.
Too early to show anything yet.
It's not a shared album with lower res dupes, it's a real camera roll implemented as iCloud photo stream that multiple people can be permissioned to, with photos from your regular camera going in either manually, or automatically based on geofencing or proximity to other roll members. It can also retroactively suggest merging photos from shared events etc.
Your main camera roll then can show only private photos, shared photos, or both.
Apple One for Family includes 2TB storage and account owner can now optionally merge in their own 2TB for a total of 4TB for family photos.
In other news, iOS 16.0 now makes it easier for photo notes to end up in Notes not photos, also easier to snap send and delete, snap images of text to actual text, etc, many easier ways to avoid gunking up the photo roll.