1y ago

What are you using for photo storage and organization?

Hey, I'm wondering what everyone's solution is for self hosted "cloud" storage of photos? I've been running a PhotoPrism server on my Synology for a while but it's missing some features I'd like to have. While we've set up auto-uploading from different phones to the web server, I haven't found an easy way to share read-only access to the pictures or specific albums. There is an admin login, but no way (that I've found) to create multiple users with different permissions.

So SelfHosted lemmy, what's your solve for photo storage, sorting, and sharing?

107 comments

I have been using immich. It supports user accounts and album sharing. And recent updates on the machine learning part have made it a even more potent replacement of Google Photos imo.
- This looks promising. Thanks for sharing!
- Also using Immich, can recommend it.
  There are still some rough areas though. For example its not possible to further share/download photos sent to you in a shared album. And the ios app is a bit janky when swiping through photos. No slideshow mode either.
  Overall very usable though and getting updated constantly.

I'm a fan of Immich.
https://immich.app
https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Test driving NextCloud Memories. Looks nice, works inside Nextcloud (no need to set up and maintain one more service).
Main con so far - no mobile app
- Nextcloud itself does have an app, though. Don't know if you'll still be able to use those additions or not through it.
  
  No, you can't
- You can "install" it while it's open in your browser - good enough for me
  
  Yeah, that's what I'm using too
- I hadn’t heard of Memories before. I’ve just set up an Immich server and I’m not super impressed with it, if I can shut that down and use my pre-existing Nextcloud server instead that’d be great!
  What’s the development pace been like for Memories?
  
  I can't say I'm following all release notes, but development is active. You can take a look yourself https://github.com/pulsejet/memories

Have you looked at NextCloud? I have an instance running on an RPi that fits my needs (storage without sharing outside the home firewall). For anything that needs sharing, I just copy those images to an old Dropbox that I've kept and share from there.
- Nextcloud on it's own can't read images EXIF data so it can't sort them by date. I've tried Memories addon and it seems to work well, except for transcoding movies.
  
  Good to know, thanks. I generally sort by hand if they need sorting, but using EXIF would be a nice time saver.
- Nextcloud works well for general files. Immich is the way to go specifically for photo storing. It's got a whole lot of added features.
  
  I hadn't heard of Immich. I'll take a look. Thanks!

Immich. I recently set it up after having bounced around trying a few others, such as PhotoPrism and Synology Photos. Immich is truly excellent. I'm excited to see how it develops further!

I've been using Photoprism. Single-user is fine for me. I see lots of people switching to immich, but haven't checked it out myself.
Photoprism supports sharing albums via link to people who don't have accounts. Mine is remotely accessible using Tailscale. I would like to set up proper remote access via DNS, but haven't made that leap yet, I'm too nervous about opening ports up.
- I'm happy with photoprism too. I paid for the photosync plugins.
  I don't love the free-mium model, but you can edit your docker config to unlock it I hear.
  
  Not anymore it syncs up with their subscription server to enable features. If they don't enable proper multi user support soon I'm going to bail.
- Photoprism supports sharing albums via link to people who don’t have accounts.
  I am definitely missing this in Immich, but otherwise happy I switched over.

Yeah, seems like Immich is kind if taking over. It really is an excellent one stop solution for automated multi-user backup. Ive been using it for a few months and its solid.
The other option that I really like is a combination of software: Nextcloud + Les Pas. Nextcloud is the server where images are stored in a flat folder system, and Les Pas is an android photo album app that organizes and manages the albums. Its super nice and has some really advanced organization features. Worth checking out if you want to use nextcloud as the storage server.

Haven't looked into sharing read only access, but you can look into this list
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleries

Immich is pretty great. I used to use Nextcloud, but it isn't nearly as good for photos.

I'm a recent Immich adopter, but one thing that seems to be missing compared to Google photos is the ability to manually backup by picking and choosing individual photos. Am I missing something or can you only do "all or nothing" with folder backups?
- This is also one of my gripes with immich atm. Sometimes I just want to pick a specific photo that I want to upload
- I am also missing this. AFAICT there is no way to backup all photos yet.

I recently started dumping all my photos at Immich. WIth every release it becomes greater and greater. I donated to the developer to keep it going. And I need to make a script to automate the DB backup

Another person using Immich.
It supports importing existing photos, so I pulled in all my old folders of stuff.
Also has multi user with album sharing and all that.

I sync them to out local fileserver using syncthing and recently started using immich (since it supports custom libraries now)
- It sounds like we have similar setups. I do the same with syncthing, works great, and not only backs up my photos but everything else on my phone like custom ringtones, notifications, exported backups from many different apps along with full neo-backup exports... basically all the common /sdcard/ directories like: Audio, Backups, DCIM, Downloads, Pictures, Documents, Screenshots etc.
  I'm interested in immich for it's multiuser sharing so I can easily share photos with others in the house. I have a huge directory of images, all sorted in folders, so until I can add that read only, immich isn't an option for me. I tried setting it up with the monolithic docker image, and it didn't import the directory the way I wanted it to, and seemingly made full copies of all the images into it's own upload directory when I tried importing with the cli-tool. I was looking at it recently and the read only mode seems early stages. How do you like it so far?
  Immich seems like it's aim is to be firstly a phone photo backup solution... and that is not what I want... I already have a backup solution. All I really want is a mobile friendly way to look at all the photos I have already. PhotoPrism works exactly how I want but the one feature it lacks that I would really like is multiuser. I have seen there is a workaround for sharing with PhotoPrism where you can run individual instances for each user and then share a common directory... and right now that is preferable to immich for me unless they sort out the read only feature.

Like many people here I'm also planning on moving to Immich. It frankly looks amazing and it has a TrueCharts version, so it should be relatively easy to deploy on TrueNAS Scale. I'm going to wait a little longer though since it's still in relatively active development and there are quite a lot of breaking changes that I currently don't feel like dealing with.
- As somebody that already has an NFS share for their photos, is immich able to use my already existing photo location, or is it another one of those that requires an import process that copies them to its own storage?
  
  There is an experimental feature where you can have a read only share (mount point) and you can run a cli and import it into Immich
  
  I guess it depends on what you're looking for. You'll probably be able to configure it to display your photos, but when it comes to more "advanced" features like creating albums, sharing photos with other users and the like, it's understandably pretty difficult to find a system that would allow you to configure your own storage system.

Photoprism is one user only, maybe some day they wil implement multi user. You can donate to give them an incentive to work more on it. For me it is good enough.
- They do support multiple users, but they gated the feature behind a subscription.
  
  Ah, thanks for the heads up. Last time I looked the said they might implement it in the future.

Currently just using Synology photos but with an eye on immich, as others have mentioned and plan to switch now that it has facial and object recognition. At this point it can do everything I want and has the benefit of being open source.
You have a Synology and Synology photos will do the features you mentioned (multiple users, different permissions). While I wouldn't recommend it now over Immich I'm curious why you went with photoprism initially?
- Had the photoprism container set up before I moved to the Synology. That's really the only reason...

I just use a folder of photos and then use digiKam to manage them. But it's just me, I don't need to share photos with anyone else. I like digiKam but it doesn't play great with concurrent users out of the box. I think there's a way to use a shared database though.

I installed immich thinking I could use it to access my entire pictures collection that I had stored on my hard drives only to learn it currently does not support that.
Luckyly I saw the other day there is already a PR in the official repository trying to implement that, so I may wait for a bit to Immich to have this importer.
- So, what, it only lets you upload pics remotely but not view? I do not understand.
  I was thinking of trying it out but the huge banner saying not to trust it for anything important makes me hesitate every time.
  
  Sorry, my explanation was not very clear. Check this thread: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1006 this is what I was talking about
- It doesn't have that feature you linked but you can do a bulk upload if you wouldn't mind them hosted then in 2 places on your storage.
  https://immich.app/docs/features/bulk-upload

I just use Samba for now. I don't care much about viewing photos. also, I have an underpowered old server that overheats easily
- I use samba and digikam
  
  Same but NFS over Btrfs.

I’m using the PhotoSync app to backup to Dropbox and to my local HDD from multiple phones and tablets. Seems to work like a charm. Better than the shitty Dropbox iOS photos backup for sure.

immich!

Synology Moments, which is their older version of their photo app. I still use the older version because it supports object recognition. I just wish it had a map view.
- Fwiw I read that object recognition is coming back with 7.2
  There's a DSM docker that enables the use of Synology Photos without having to buy a Diskstation as well if others are scrolling through this
  
  There's a DSM docker that enables the use of Synology Photos without having to buy a Diskstation as well if others are scrolling through this
  Woah! I'll need to check that out!

Saw recently that Shadow, the cloud PC company, has now a next cloud based storage offer: shadow.tech
I'd be interested by any feedbacks if somebody gives it a try !
- I've never heard of this, but what happens if it shuts down? How is this really self hosting vs getting an generic we hosting service and storing files there ?
  
  Oh my bad, didn't see this was on self hosted. Then yeah, it's a hosting service like any other one

Prism is my go to ..it's allright but I am still looking for new options. Have heard good things about Immich so might look at that

Piwigo looks nice.
I'm trying to get it to run (in docker), but I can't get it to connect to my MariaDB

I have a Zyxel NAS server that just offers a SMB share. I'm just dumping my photos there under YYYY/MM/DD scheme, and converting all of my Nikon NEF files to DNG. (For importing photos to the NAS and generating backups, I have a PowerShell script and a PowerAutomate action. Also mild usage of Dropbox to transfer files from my cellphone.)
For actual management of photos, I use ACDSee Photo Studio Professional, and it just writes all tag information to the files themselves, so I can basically use any other software for photo management. For actual photo editing, I use DXO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo most of the time.

I'm currently on photoprism like you, but I am looking to switch to immich.
I solved the sharing problem by having a family-only instance locally (accessible via tailscale), connected via WebDAV to a public instance on a cheap VPS (which I also use for other things). We have to share twice, but I don't have any holes in my firewall. Currently I don't believe immich can do something like this, but I'd love to be proven wrong

I'm a recent Immich adopter, but one thing that seems to be missing compared to Google photos is the ability to manually backup by picking and choosing individual photos. Am I missing something or can you only do "all or nothing" with folder backups?

A synology NAS and dsphoto. Its a mess.
I have considered photprism, never set it up though (other things got in the way).
- There is also Synology photos and I like it but see a lot of people recommending immich, someone that has used both know if there is notable difference or benefits?
  
  I am migrating from Syno Photos, which had been the greatest solution I had found, now to Immich, which is so polished and sharing is 10x easier than in Syno. The only gripe to Syno Photos is their implementation of Public/Personal space which is confusing and if you want to share something you have to store duplicate photos in those spaces. I used conditional albums to share certain faces with the partner and it has been OK.
  Now it's 100% Immich for me:
  Clean, intuitive interface
  Easy sharing
  Very good face detection, better than Google (I compared the same pics I uploaded to both)
  Easy transition for a Google Photos user
  FOSS, you're in full control over the deployment
  Machine learning container to tag pictures
  CLI interface to mass upload
  Both galleries claim motion photos support, but for me neither actually works. Immich claims iPhone's Live Photos, which I don't care for, but Syno Photos say that in version DSM7 support Android Motion Pics, that I could not confirm.

I'm planning my homelab, and from the research I've done, Immich is the best but not ready for production and it can't use an already existing photo library. NextCloud memories is the next best alternative, and supports already existing libraries.
- Immich can use existing libraries, either by importing (copying) existing files, or just by adding an existing folder of files in place.
  
  Importing is another thing. But using an existing folder is exactly what I want. Is this feature new ?
- A PR was opened last week to add the biggest first element of external library support. Hopefully in the relatively near future it'll be merged. I'll be giving it a shot when it merges.

Pretty simple here, directory with my phpto's, which I renamed to show the subject, date and an id for that day. Simple script to show the images when on a website, manual viewing from disk when archived.
I pull them off the phone via a cable and adb pull command. All photo's are read only for my wife. (And by default for all when on the website)
No need to use software when you can write some small scripts, devise an ordering system and run Linux. ;)
- No need to use software when you ~~can write some small scripts, devise an ordering system and run Linux.~~ consign yourself to not having any of the modern QoL features everyone enjoys ;)
  FTFY
  
  No need to use software when you ~~can write some small scripts, devise an ordering system and run Linux.~~ consign yourself to not ~~having any of the modern QoL features~~ being forced to buy/be locked into products everyone ~~enjoys~~ hates. ;)
  Everything is a choice, for me, "one size fits somebody, hopefully, and the rest has to adapt" doesn't work at all. I started with MSX, then Atari ST, used a PC 1 game, went via OS/2 (BBS) to Linux in '94 and stayed there after a clash with Windows 95 during an internship. My current employer gave me an iPhone to use and after running rooted Android and Cyanogenmod/Lineage since 2012 I hate it with a passion, to restricted for me.
  Some will be totally happy to dump all their photo's on photobucket, google photo's,... it just doesn't work for me, as for one, my photos come from DLSR, compacts, scanned analog photos and a few from the phone. I have 24y worth of photo's on local disk (229G), I make almost no photos with the phone and when I do I usually want to put them online for own reference pretty quickly. For me, with almost no photo's on the phone (max 10), this works like a charm. (and once I made a few scripts, it costs me less time then trying to get my photo's back from all those apps)
  I suspect we're all a tad weary of companies offering 'free' storage for your data and then use it for other means or charge you when you want your data back. It's an option that works, but requires a tad more knowledge and time to setup. That free storage feels more like 'legal ransom ware' then anything else. When your not paying, you're the product being sold. (which doesn't guarantee that when you are paying you're not sold as well)
  When you want something you either have to:
  find the perfect product
  adapt the product to make it perfect for you
  adapt yourself to make you perfect for the product
  create something yourself
  The 1st is near impossible, 2nd costs time, sometimes to much, 3rd is most of the times a no-go here and that leaves 4. When you have the skills, 4 will become the option you use more and more. (Especially when you enjoy making your own solutions)

Android's Gallery application

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