There are a few apps in this space worth checking out
Photorprism
Photostructure
Lychee
Digikam
Synology Photos (if you have a synology)
And probably a few others I am forgetting.
Photorprism
Photostructure
Lychee
Digikam
Synology Photos (if you have a synology)
And probably a few others I am forgetting.
If you're thinking about self-hosting anything, my first recommendation is to get your backups in order now, before doing anything else. I wrote this a while back: <https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/>. Having a full, offline backup will only cost ~$20/TiB nowadays, which is cheap insurance if whatever app you try out doesn't quite behave as you expected it to.
The second step is to make sure your server is both hardened (<https://forum.photostructure.com/t/server-hardening-for-begi...>), and ideally, only available via a VPN (like TailScale) or at least via a reverse proxy (Cloudflare has a free solution). I compared and contrasted some of these solutions (along with instructions) here: <https://photostructure.com/faq/remote-access/#accessing-your...>
The situation for self-hosting your photos just a couple years ago was pretty bleak--especially if you had hundreds of thousands (or more!) of photos. That may sound like a lot of photos, but for people shooting digital for 20+ years, it really isn't!
Whatever image manager you pick, make sure the app follows existing metadata storage standards, so in the (seemingly inevitable) future when the app is abandoned, your photos are in directory structures that make sense to you, and the work you've put into organizing them isn't locked up in unreadable databases or folder structures.
Spoiler alert: I got burned by this issue with prior apps, so I designed PhotoStructure from the ground up with exactly this in mind: <https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#open-stan...>. Unfortunately, many/most self-hosted solutions don't handle multiple source directories and configurable destination directories.
I normally suggest people just try it out on their stuff—it runs pretty much everywhere. Hop into our discord <https://phstr.com/go/discord> if you have any questions or comments, I’m online.
I don’t have my notes here, so I can’t elaborate much why. But the gist from my memory is that photoprism has a lot of features, and naturally no single user is gonna needs all of those. But the installation is quite a bit more painful, and it is slower as a result. I recalled it building tensorflow on my freebsd machine when installing (which failed, due to bazel failing to build, due to them hardcoding an url download of a library which recently got updated and the link doesn’t work, you get the idea).
> When you view your PhotoStructure library’s home page, you’ll see a random selection, or “sampling,” of images from your library. When you click When, you don’t see all photos in reverse-chronological order, but instead, a random “sample” of images from every year. Click on a year, and you’ll see a random sampling from each month.
This is... just horrendously bad
When I go back in time, same.
"On this day X years ago" is fun, but very optional.
Just random things presented to you... That is just weird.
Regardless, I’m in a bit of a weird situation for the next few months with regards to my home server setup, but I’m bookmarking this to come back & will be absolutely paying for the upgrades too. Thanks for your awesome work!
See https://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/Wishlist__58___Parity_...
I really love it because it does Google Photos' backup workflow where it backs everything up automatically, and allows you to clean up local storage for photos saved in the NAS, and it works reliably for both Android and iOS.
It's a feature that's absolutely necessary when managing phones and tablets from family members who aren't tech-savvy but definitely need to back every photo up without clogging up their phone storage.
I'm setting up setup a new phone which has google photo as the default gallery app, and if you're not in the US and/pr don't want to use the google services, most of the stuff you have in the menus is literally worthless.
The "print service", for one. It's right in your face most of the time, but there is no option to turn it off if you basically can't use it.
I've been using "Simple Gallery Pro", but it lacks basic video editing support. I don't need anything fancy, but trimming videos is something you often need to do for sharing.
Any recommendations on the same vein?