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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I had the same problem. Lots of solutions out there I think PhotoPrism was the last one I tried but it involved docker. I really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was debating forking an existing project.

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I am a happy user of PhotoPrism. I use it with Podman. I initially hated the fact that it requires containers but then I realized this makes it much easier to work with multiple libraries simultaneously which was mentioned by OP. The Photos app on the Mac does not allow using multiple libraries simultaneously; I believe it needs to be restarted to switch libraries.

> I really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was debating forking an existing project.

If you want design help let me know.

Bu yes, this. There is no "in between" on linux. Photo apps either do everything confusingly, or it does nothing but show you the photo.

If Darktable had "simple" and "professional" settings it would be awesome. Sometimes you just want a quick edit and other times it needs to be more complex. But I have to wade through endless tiny crowded options in Darktable just to crop and change some basic levels.

Digikam gets a bit closer, but it still starts as complicated.

It would be great if the application gave you a simple interface at first, and then you can add on complexity if you need it. You want detailed curve manipulations? Great! Select "Add feature" and choose "Curves". This would help a lot with linux growth IMHO since it is the one thing I hear that frustrates just about everyone who does not want to use google photos.

The Photos App from Apple is only getting worse as well and Adobe is a horric mess of subscriptions and AI BS.

I think my issue is a lot of them slow down to a crawl and Digikam fell under this problem for me. Importing thousands of images and videos isnt easy. I did like that Photoprism had a WebUI made it easy to access the photos across my network.

Yep, the only photo library tool I’ve used that can handle 40K raws is Lightroom and Photomechanic. Everything else can’t handle ~2TB of photos.

I am genuinely curious of what a good solution would be to this problem, because I love Photos on Mac but its not perfect either, one key thing Photos does insanely well is face grouping.

I use Digikam on a 3 TiB collection and it works great.

What database are you using and did you slowly build it up or what?

The Digikam DB is SQLite on a fast NVMe drive. The photos are on a 4 TB SSD. I have been using Digikam for maybe a decads, so the collection has been growing with me, but no issues so far.

Photos also stuffs everything into a proprietary database... a blunder made by far too many photo applications.

What would be the alternative to easily search through meta data of thousands of photos? Is there a non-proprietary database (engine or schema?), or other format that is scalable enough? I doubt that storing everything as a sidecar would be fast enough.

Valid question. How fast does it need to be, though?

I see a lot of performance complains from people with 75k+ image libraries, so performance should be considered when storing image (meta)data.

Just for info, just did a quick test: the digikam 'proprietary' database is a normal sqlite database that you can easily open and query in standard tools like duckdb. So pretty accessible, much better than some proprietary binary file, or using exif tools on 1000s of photos.

If you really don't want to use containers, then it's possible (with sufficient OS knowledge) to install the software natively by looking at the Dockerfile and manually running the commands.

Look at Immich

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