Google Photos Alternative
What are you using as a Google photos alternative? Currently I'm using Nextcloud but I'm thinking of switching to a more dedicated solution.
I mainly need to upload photos from my device automatically, have an UI to see and classify them, albuns and sharing.
I set up Immich a week or so back. It's been a dream so far. The object recognition is really way better than expected. The App works really well.
I used this script to import my Google Photos dump. https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
I can't say I used every possible feature of Google Photos but I haven't missed anything yet!
Set Immich up a couple weeks ago and I'm surprised how good it is. Their docs included a simple cli tool to bulk import all my Google photos. Mobile app is working great. I'm really impressed with the search too.
Gonna set up Immich soon!
immich is the way to go
I’m kind of disappointed by the lack of encryption. It sounds great, but I don’t want to trust the server.
Where do you want the encryption? Data at rest? Or data in transit? Also, you have to host your own server. Would you not have trust on your own server ?
I want all data to be encrypted before it even reaches the server. Yes, I don’t want to trust even my own server for my image backups :), particularly since I would want to use something like Immich to provide photo backups for friends and family and I don’t even want to technically have access to their unencrypted photos unless they explicitly share them. I kind of want the attack surface for my photos to be as small as practical too. It’s almost certainly worse to have them available on my device unencrypted than a dedicated server, but it’s worse to have them unencrypted on both (and I want photos available on device so, thems the breaks).
I get that a lot of people won’t care about this and that they’d rather be able to run the image recognition features of Immich on the server and stuff, but I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to want encryption for this. If nothing else I’d love to be able to back up photos for friends and family and legitimately be able to tell them that it’s encrypted and I can’t see any of it. It’d be even sweeter if they could do image recognition on device and sync that metadata (encrypted) to the server as well.
I mean, you could still tell them their photos are encrypted 😉😉
(JK I wouldn't)
Oh I get your point. Coming from family and friends POV, I agree that the server administrator should not be able to open the photos.
Yeah, that’s my main concern. I believe the Immich developers have said they have no desire to implement it, though… Which is fair enough, it doesn’t work for my desired use case though.
+1 for Immich. It's the most complete and competent Google Photos replacement yet.
If you already run NextCloud, then NextCloud Memories (not photos) is very good.
I only just realized Memories existed, and man do I wish I knew about it when I started.
Memories allows you to view a timeline, improves loads using generated thumbnails, sorts by location, and even does facial recognition with the Recognize app installed. 1000x improvement over default photos app.
Proton Drive just recently came out with their photos feature, but it's still a relatively new product.
Does that include videos?
Yes
I'm trying it out since I just upgraded to proton unlimited.
It's pretty barebones. It has automatic uploads but only from the camera folder. It does have the ability to share links, but no folder or album support for sharing. No face tagging or object recognition that Google does
You can specify different folders for it to sync from, but yeah it's pretty bare bones right now.
It's buried in the settings, but you are right. Thanks for the tip!
If they could just add album sharing and maybe face/object tagging it would be pretty solid imo
Apparently Lemmy needs a better faq search.
Not OP, but FWIW I didn't realize until reading your comment that the "awesome-selfhosted software" under Resources was actually an FAQ/List. I thought it was a repo of maybe just a couple relevant apps.
I know that doesn't make a lot of sense now that I think about it, but I think it's easy to miss.
Synology Photos. I've heard Immich is quite good too.
If you need a UI to have albums and share them then yes, the previously mentioned Immich. I host it as well, and it is truly awesome.
One caveat though: it is still pretty early in development, there might be breaking changes. For example a few weeks ago you needed to update the docker compose file because they changed dependencies.
100% this. I recommend also setting up SyncThing to keep a completely separate backup of your photos (if you have the means). They even state that on their GH repo that, due to the highly active development, you shouldn't rely on Immich as the sole solution to backup photos and videos.
Ohh, I havent thought about backing it up with Syncthing! Thank you!
You are right, but they warned us about that few releases before in the mobile app and on the web. They reduced the number of containers again woop 🎇
Photostructure is a strong starter, but development is slow and it's still missing important features like sharing. Also, it's not ooen source.
Immich seems great but doesn't (yet) support digikam tags ( and since my 100,000 assets are tagged/organized via digikam, I don't want to move to immich yet and have to start over).
PhotoPrism seemed pretty good, though it also doesn't (yet) support digikam tags. Also, their self-hosted version doesn't have all the features of their paid versions.
My need for online photo galleries is just to direct friends and family to see them, I don't store photos in the cloud.
I used to put up my photos on deviantart, I have had a gallery there for almost two decades, but lately dA has become very slow to navigate, so I built my own site, I didn't need much, an index page linking to HTML galleries I export from digiKam.
After a few weeks of learning, designing and testing HTML and CSS, I have a nice index page that is responsive and easy to update and customize (in limited capacity).
This runs on a normal webhost, and is lightning quick to navigate, the galleries support browsing with the arrow keys, and just works.
There are three annoying things about it though...
To update a gallery, I need to recreate it in digiKam and upload it manually to the host.
I can't include notes with the photos.
I have to edit a link in every gallery to make it be able to go back to the index page and not 404...
Not self hosted but Ente photos works perfectly for me. Paid but cheap.
I have just tried it out for a quite limited time, but ente also looks great.
This might help you to choose https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
Immich: https://github.com/immich-app/immich
Thread is over, because this is the only correct answer.
Interestingly only one or two years ago, people seems tp recommend PhotoPrism
Nah. The Premium model is kinda bullshit. As a free tier open source user you will always be a second class citizen.
Also everyone who wants to commit code has to sign away his rights for them.
tl;dr maintainer gets money from open source contribution over the premium tier, but hinders everyone else to do the same with the AGPL licence.(kinda)
That's not a good foundation to start off.
Yep, until PhotoPrism revealed themselves to be the greedy cunts they are.
I sponsor my favourite tech projects annually, as I believe in supporting independent and responsible open-source development.
I became a paid Github sponsor for PhotoPrism because they promised features like multi-user were coming, and they indicated that paid sponsors would get access. After what seemed way too long a wait, they finally released the features many of us had been waiting for, only to stick them behind a monthly paid subscription. For self-hosted users. 🤨
So, I switched to Immich about 6 months ago. I've found Alex and the rest of the team to be very active, and quite responsive to support requests, including on Discord. Additionally, the development is fast-paced and new features are coming all the time.
My money's going to Immich. PhotoPrism can go get fucked.
The user feature is available for non paying users too. If you want a gui for managing that is now behind plus. I don't see exactly how wantng to make a living off of your work makes you a greedy cunt especially when it seems the features trickle down as they should. Am I missing something?
It's about expectation setting. You can't say "paid donators will get X" then say "actually you won't, give us more money for X".
Also, there's usually no reason as a user to pay monthly for a feature in a self-hosted application.
The Dev has no monthly costs for that feature. Let me buy the application/feature, and if you need money for a new feature, create a feature that is worth buying again. No need to bully the user into a monthly subscription...
It is great, but the mobile app becomes slow AF when I import all my google photos which are thousands of them. Even after indexing has finished.
Edit: Scratch what I said! Just gave Immich another shot, and the slow mobile app was due to the initial background sync running.
How many photos? It's a very good user experience for me, with 123GB library (23k+ photos, 1k+ videos). Fairly entry-level Samsung phone and iPhone 13, both work great.
Running on an Orange Pi 5 Plus.
Absolutely love Immich. Was previously running on an RPi 4 w/4GB RAM, but with the other services I had on there I needed to disable ML. Orange Pi 5 Plus (16GB RAM) and it's just a dream. Kicked off ML/facial recognition before bed and it was done in the morning. Migration from RPi to OPi was straightforward.
What is different about an Orange Pi compared to a Raspberry Pi? Thinking about taking the plunge into self hosting and I'm looking for something easy and powerful.
Big difference for me between the RPi 5 and orange pi 5 Plus is more RAM and m.2 NVME support on board. It also has four additional efficiency cores and dual 2.5G NICs, but that's less important to me.
Downside is it has a less polished ecosystem.
Overall though I've been happy! But I also love my collection of raspberry pis, so it's a matter of taste I guess.
My current self hosted setup is my OPi running Immich, an RPi 4 4GB running Home Assistant and Pihole, an RPi 5 4GB "off-site" (with family, via WireGuard VPN), and a VPS with public IP as my entry point from outside. It's a fun hobby :)
Currently using photoprism, butnot very happy with paywalled stuff and pretty outdated and weak image recognition
Want to try/move to immich, but nixos doesn't have it as a package(the only package i couldn't find out of thousands i've used)
Some people managed to rewrite what dockerfile does, but it look a bit too complicated, especially when i've never even tried it
So the only viable option is run it as an oci container, which i'm not a fan of, and it fails for me anyway
I'm using Immich in Nixos. It's simple. Takes about 10 mins. You need to set Docker up in your configuration.nix then set Immich up using docker compose. Let me know if you need a hand getting it going.
Omg, i forgot to reply to this one
I don't use docker, it's not fully opensource, and not secure by default
Also, setting up docker and running docker-compose is not the nix way of doing things
Ideally you want to translate docker-compose.yml to nix
Also, yesterday i tried to do this whole thing again, and broke even more than before
This time i was able to run all the containers, but the server couldn't resolve the redis container
Immich always breaks for me. Even on fixed version its a hassle. Tried it maybe 4 times during intervalls, hoping that some consistency would be implemented, but never seems to go out of alpha versions of trying out a completely different configuration..
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #397 for this sub, first seen 3rd Jan 2024, 18:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Piwigo yet.
Synology Photos has been a great alternative, not only to back up my photos/videos to my nas, but as an easy to way to search/organize/share them.
But for the absolute best subject recognition, tagging and search, I purchased Excire Foto (local AI, local database, etc.).
I have my own NAS with its native app and sync my phone directly to it.