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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

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 which are quite good.

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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.

I can 2nd Immich, nextcloud sync was just terrible for me also.

Immich is awesome for this and many other things. Automatic facial recognition feature in immich is also great.

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!).

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.

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/

There’s a demo account, that’s all I think

Immich warning from the home page :

"The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!"

And PHP project run as extension on Nextcould is not? Cmon.

I have nothing agains Immich or cheering for Memories. Just stating what Immich is saying on their homepage.

Hey, we run CLIP on the device at Ente[1]. Like you noted, the search experience is quite interesting.

[1]: https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/

Nextcloud has some neural network integrations so implementing something like that might be possible. The Memories app can already use the Recognize app for the smart tags for Photos.

Combining it with "The Search Page" app makes it a quite comfortable experience as is.

How easy are these integrations to setup? I use straight up Nextcloud sync and while it works most of the time sometimes it's a little finnicky (when I don't have cell service or something like that)

I belive the existing integrations typically use Openai compatible api's and just need a seperate docker image or bare metal deployment for the local instances.

Other than that it's just installing a Nextcloud app and pluging in a URL and API key

Google Photos can already do this pretty well. I use the feature daily without friction. Sometimes, but not always, it can even pull text from receipts I photograph, which is handy for expense reporting.

Makes me wonder whether Google is scanning all photos for text and making use of the data found.

Considering you're not paying for the product.. yes, they totally are.

Google photos charges if you want more than 15GB of storage.

Used to be infinite, until they got all the training data they needed

It still is.. if you use a pixel 5.

I still have my pixel 4a for that reason

Well, the GP comment already pointed out they do use it for Photos search. Generally if someone is paying for the disk space to store your data, that’s with some use in mind, at the very least serving it back.

Now, if you worry about some use you wouldn’t like… These are declared in open, if possibly too large, text in all the privacy policies. As a Googler I can tell you the internal bureaucracy for upholding these is dead serious. My product is used only by Google employees in their work duties, yet it took a couple months for us to get access to stats of our own UI. Something like an ads subsystem wanting to read a photos data field is likely to involve quarters of disputes with multiple lawyers.

You can literally search for text in photos so yes, they are.

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