Hacker News Reader

Comment by gobip | Hacker News Reader

Try it. Adopt it. :)

Just a few weeks ago, facial recognition was added and that was it for me. I finally made the switch from Google Photos and iCloud to immich. It's your self-hosted google photos alternative, with image recognition, a map, sharing folders publicly, or with other users on your server.

Some parts will be buggy though, like face detection, or memories. But the whole "backup & sync" part is very reliable, I've never had any issues.

View on HN

I’m working on building something similar.

From what I can tell, Immich, Ente, and PhotoPrism are the best of the batch when it comes to open source photo storage and management. They are all good, but it depends on what you’re looking for.

Personally, I want: E2E encryption, on-device face recognition, and the ability to self-host as well as a paid option for people who don’t want to manage their own server. The existing options each hit about 90% of that, but it’s a different 90% for each one.

Photoprism had the critical flaw of being single user last time I tried it, making it neat but a complete non starter for someone with a family larger than 1.

The same goes for me and I imagine many more. This is literally the only thing holding it back from being the perfect Google Photos replacement for families with someone who self-hosts.

Is there anyone in your family that you really want to have access to all your photos? Not even referring to just NSFW stuff. If your answer is "as the admin I'm the only one that can access everything" then consider the question from your family's POV. Not trying to discount your point only pointing out that single user and e2ee implementations have some value.

You make a good point and you are right, but for me the concern is that the same account can break a lot of stuff. I agree, if I put a photo out there, I don’t care who sees it if I’ve given them the password. But I just worry about people deleting things, mucking up the database, etc.

That's fair. Personally I'd like to see (and am working on) more solutions that make it realistic for everyone to run their own single user instances. Selfhosting shouldn't be any more difficult less secure than running an app on your phone.

Interesting philosophy on this, hadn’t thought about it this way before.

All the photos, no; but adding users from my family to back up from their devices, see their content, and share things between family members is a huge gap in Photoprism and why I stopped using it.

looks like they've added user management, but only on the + tier that is paid

iCloud photos has all of that except the self-host option. You may be aware - just saying as I didn't see it on your list, and the E2EE is somewhat new.

I’m currently using iCloud. It’s great, but the E2EE comes with the huge caveat that they scan your photos before encrypting, against a giant unaccountable database of hashes for bad stuff.

Even though I totally believe that the current set of hashes really does represent truly horrible stuff, I also suspect that it will expand over time to include anything that threatens those in power. In other words: they are coming for your Bernie memes.

So I would like to have a more secure option that doesn’t depend on the whims of the powerful to decide which images I’m allowed to own.

Apple shelved this feature a while ago, what you are thinking about is that it uses an on-device AI to scan for nudity in pictures sent to minors through iMessage, which doesn’t report anything back to apple.

Let’s hope it stays shelved then. In my experience, things are much easier to sneak into the details of some random update once the key functionality has been built and deployed. The root issue here is a loss of trust.

As someone who tried to organize a few hundred photos on iOS, the UX is severely crippled. For example, moving pictures from one album to another, or an album from one folder to another, are still unimplemented, among many other simple things.

It might have all those good features, but it lacks a practical user experience.

If you are willing to consider closed source, paid options there is also Mylio

I've used it for personal pics for years. I wish the UI were faster but the self-hosting of everything & automatic storage management is excellent.

Why not go for immich, and try adding the E2E on top? Immich will encrypt the pictures before sending them on the server, and decrypt them when trying to access them, local thumbnails, etc. That could work?

I think it’s much easier to take a system that has working, audited E2E encryption, and add photo management on top of that.

In other words, I think the E2EE is the bigger lift, and the photo stuff is the easier piece to re-implement.

> Some parts will be buggy though, like face detection, or memories.

Frankly, I have had issues with Google Photos already. For me, it simply stopped recognizing faces since last October. I tried disabling and then enabling face recognition multiple times, but to no avail. It starts recognition from scratch, but only for photos before October. Writing to the support didn't help (although I didn't expect it to anyway), so alternatives like this one are becoming more and more tempting.

I'm already self-hosting a bunch of things, but facial recognition (when it was working) was much better in Google Photos and a major reason why I'm paying for additional storage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com