So the final thing tethering me to macOS is Apple Photos, which is really a fantastic program.
PhotoPrism looks like it’s improving quickly, but I was curious to know how it’s going today with regards to:
- Search filters
- Date
- Place
- Object/person recognition
- Text recognition
- Live Photo support
- Ease of importing
- Album support, including smart albums
- Built-in touch ups
- General stability
I would suggest you have a look of immich.
- Search filters ✓
- Date ✓
- Place ✓
- Object/person recognition ✓
- Text recognition ✗
- Live Photo support ✓
- Ease of importing ✓
- Album support ✓, including smart albums ✗
- Built-in touch ups ✗
- General stability ✓
It also has mobile apps to do the backup and as a frond end on the phone. And what I really like is you can mount in your existing external libraries without copying all the pictures in and they will just be integrated automatically.
Usual precautions apply, the app does not bury the lede:
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!
Yes, I tried Immich but it’s basically a second job, no thanks. Photoprism is very good, but would need something like Syncthing to auto upload. So I ended up going with Libre Photo. It’s nowhere near as powerful as Immich in terms of features, but for my over 500K photos and almost 50K videos, works like a charm in ProxMox with the “UhuruPhotos” Android app.
Interesting. For me it was a set and forget. I check the change notes before updating every month or so, make a very small change to the yaml compose, and I am back in action in under 10 minutes.
Different experiences I guess.
Are you hosting in ProxMox too?
No, mine is just a docker container. Maybe there is something with that? Is your containerized in the VM?
I usually create 1 LXC and install docker to it to use it as a template for any other LXC in the future. So, docker on a Debian LXC is how I did it. ProxMox in on bare metal though.
Photoprism’s app space is pretty bad, but there is an completely hacky yet reliable solution for Android:
- PhotoBackup
- The PhotoBackup server on your Photoprism server
- A cron job that runs the
photoprism importcommand every few minutes.
Since I’ve had this set up, it’s worked as well as Google Photos ever did for keeping my phone snaps synced to the server. It’s been more reliable than SyncThing for my data, reacting and syncing faster, and it doesn’t mysteriously periodically just stop running like SyncThing.
I don’t know if PhotoBackup is available for iOS, but if it is, it works a treat.
Sweet. Never heard of this before. Thanks. I’ll take it for a spin over the weekend.
Good news is that it’s slated to go stable some time this year iirc.
In keeping an eye on it. I use a rinky dink asustor solution for my photo storage and backups. It’s cludgy as all heck.
I love that they clearly say that. IMO they should keep that notice around even later on.
Far too many people spin up some solution for photos or files, either selfhosted or some paid service, and use it as their only storage. Then they’re surprised when data loss happens.
Yeah I’m no data retention expert but that is a huge risk.
+1 for Immich, I tried photoprism and had a lot of trouble importing and organizing an existing library. Immich works much more intuitively and had all the features I needed.
Thanks for the suggestion I’ll follow it up!
Immich has been great, I’ve been running it for something like 1.5 years now I think.
This is a pretty accurate summary from my experience. The only thing I’d add is that (from what I’ve read at least) some form of ‘smart’ album functionality is high on the priority list and shouldn’t be too much further down the line. It may be a more advanced customizable logic type of solution (again from what I’ve read) but the functionality of putting person(s) ‘x’ into album(s) ‘y’ (or similar) should be achievable.
As someone who has and still used photoprism for over two years and donated heavily…steer clear. Their update cycle is slow and the things they keep adding don’t seem helpful. Still no multi-user support. If you don’t upload new photos via photoprism using WebDAV you have to make your own scripts to watch for changes and refresh which took a lot of time for me to setup.
I’m just going to start using Nextcloud and Memories app going forward.
Rsync
I’m uploading to a directory using syncthing. It’s working perfectly fine without any scripts. I’m running Photoprism in a docker container.
So you have photoprism pointed to a folder but you push photos into the folder witb syncthing. How do you trigger the re-index or its somehow automatic? I run my photoprism in docker and I always had to manually trigger the index after changes to the folder.
Yes, exactly. I push photos into the “import folder” of Photoprism. I don’t manually trigger the re-index but I restart photoprism at night using a cronjob. I am not using settings like “PHOTOPRISM_AUTO_IMPORT”. Contact me if you need me to investigate more.
As others have said. I left photoprism for immich and it’s much better
