1y ago

what is everyone using for photos?

Looking for an alternative to synology photos. I moved over to synology about 3 years ago and am now considering moving out of the synology ecosystem. I'm looking for something that has a decent android app, wifi syncing, shareable albums, all the standard stuff.

Edit: thanks for the many replies, I'll likely move to nextcloud as I was planning on deploying that anyway as a synology drive replacement. I'll look into immich as well.

82 comments

immich, alternative for google photos. there's a demo portal for it.
- Does Immich support deduplication of images? I have a large set of old scanned photos that I put on photoprism that has deduplication listed as one of its features. It puts photos in its own database.
  Also, how is the face recognition of Immich when compared to others like photoprism?
  
  if they have the same hash the deduplication thing will work. if they are different quality or other stuff no. thare are plans to implement something regarding more advanced deduplication but not anything implemented at the moment.
- Looks like a polished app but sadly it has issues on my Fennec/Firefox for Android
  
  You could try connecting the Android app with the demo portal.
  
  there is an app for mobile. that also offer continuous backup of photos (like gphoto)

I've tried everything. If you like a modern UI and simplicity, you want immich. The lead dev designs the app specifically so his wife is happy using it, and it shows.

Immich is still in relatively active development, but has a great feature set and is the only app that could reasonably replace Google Photos for me. Can recommend!
- Moved to immich from Google photos recently, it's an awesome replacement and the ml stuff works really well actually
  
  What was your migration process like?

I'm running Immich on an Odroid N2 and it's great! https://immich.app/
- Wow, what a terrible font choice!
  
  Don't judge the project based on that. It's genuinely a quality application once you get it up and running.
  
  Would you care to elaborate?

Jist moved from Photoprism to Immich. Glad i did. Mich better feature set, active development, and multi-user capability isn't locked behind a paid subscription.
- Immich seems to be really focused on pictures from phones. Which is probably useful for many, but not all people.
  
  Syncthing?

Nextcloud. It's definitely overkill for photos alone, but since you are likely to want it for other stuff anyway, why not use its gallery (which is decent) as well?
I personally use it for backup and sharing, and do the bulk of my photos/collections management in digikam (reading from a fast network storage).
- Use my nextcloud for calendar, contacts, RSS reader, photo sync from my phone, office suite and others.
- Does Nextcloud handle large numbers of photos nowadays? IIRC when I was comparing programs some years ago I read that both it and Owncloud struggled when you got to a few 10000s of photos.
  
  I have 3 times that much for just a single user, so I think you should be fine.
- You should try installing the Memories app in Nextcloud. The built-in gallery is very limited and can't read EXIF data.

Immich

Photoprism librephotos
Both have excelent android clients

I tested all of the top options listed on the FOSS photo galleries list. I settled on Immich, and so as of earlier today I currently have everything from GPhotos in Immich, with my phone backing up to both while I get my off-site backup set up. Immich has two drawbacks I consider minor enough for it to come out ahead, but major enough for it to still fall short of truly competing with GP. First, you can jnky select multiple things by tapping them one by one. No tap, hold, drag on mobile. No shift clicking on PC. Next, they have pretty good face recognition, but you can't...do anything with it? You can't set albums to auto add certain faces. You can't assign those people to contacts and auto share with them.
- For me all I really need in a photos app is reliable backup from my phone to my nas. My wife on the other hand, she takes lots of photos that she likes to organize into albums and share with family, so she's really the deciding factor, i don't think she really need the facial recognition, it may be useful but really it's just being able to make albums, sort by month or year, share content, that kind of stuff.
  
  Yeah your camera roll or whatever looks and feels exactly like GP. Albums are still a little lacking. No sorting options (currently limited to oldest at the top, newest all the way at the bottom), no comments. The sharing functionality appears to all be there, at least. The dev is very active on GitHub and Discord, implementing fixes and changes as people bring them up daily. Their entire thing is making a GP replacement their own wife is happy with. Future seems bright for it, but it isn't quite there yet....yet! Lol

Nothing beats Google Photos for me, personally.
So I bought a used Google Pixel 1 (first gen) and use Syncthing to sync my camera roll from my phone to the Pixel 1.
Google originally advertised the Pixel 1 as having unlimited cloud storage for life, so they have to stick to it. I don't pay for Google storage but I've got at least 500gb stored in Google Photos (including all my RAW photos and my digitised VHS tapes).
I'll abuse this system until the Pixel 1 dies and I can't get another one, then I'll cry.

For iOS PhotoSync is great for backing up.

I use PhotoSync to backup my iPhone to an SMB share on my NAS

The built-in gallery app on my samsung galaxy phone, in combination with syncthing.
As long as the phone has enough storage for all your images, this has been my favourite selfhosted solution so far.
I used Photoprism before, but I could never find an old picture quickly during a conversation. Now I can, 50% of the time 🫣

Photoprism, running on a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm just running it as a single user, and it's been working well for that. A couple of notes:
Video transcoding is a bit iffy on the rpi, but I'm running it under docker and might just move it all to a mini pc at some point
I don't have it accessible publicly, but get to it online via Tailscale
No app, but the Web interface is good.
I'm currently running it in "read only" mode (mainly out of initial paranoia when trying it out, but it seems fine) so I have syncthing backing up the photos from my phone wirelessly and occasionally do an import of new images in.
- There is an app activelly maintained unofficial android client and its great https://github.com/Radiokot/photoprism-android-client
  
  Thanks for the heads up, I will check that out!
- I'm super not knowledgeable about codecs and shit, but IIRC there's one that the rpi 4 is just garbage at dealing with. x265 I think it's called?

I actually got so fed up with image galleries that I made my own tiny PHP gallery https://p.drkt.eu/
- Did the same, but in perl and used a small javascript in the resulting page. (Made it ages ago)
  
  Did the same in python. Ages ago. And again in python half a decade ago. And again in python a few months ago.

Been backing up to NextCloud using PhotoSync on iOS and Android the last few years. I also recently implemented Immich, and although that means doubled up photo backup, it's nice to test out and witness firsthand just how much Immich is improving with every release.
- Do you feel immich is mature enough to be a primary photos app? I may go the route of nextcloud as I'm planning to migrate to nextcloud from synology drive. Didn't realize they had a photos backup app ad well.
  
  From immich.app:
  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!
- I'm using NC too with the Memory app and not Immich. You that are using both what do you think? Do you think that one is better than the other?
  
  I don't use the Memory app specifically, just a photos. As far as browsing my backed up gallery, Immich winds hands down between that and NextCloud. The gallery and tagging id the closest to Google photos I've come in a long time.
- Can you point both to the same directory or is that what you mean by doubling backup that you need everything twice now?
  
  You can, but only have one app (Immich or whatever you use to back up to NC) handle uploads. Right now I am doubling up but I have enough spare space that it isn't affecting me, so I don't mind.

Currently in the middle of a cutover between Flickr/Dropbox/iCloud mess to Photoprism. Immich, I'll keep in a test instance with a decent chunk of duplicate files but I'm not too keen on how it, along with others, disregards your file structure.

PhotoStructure
- I really think there's nothing better than Photostructure in terms of viewing and re-discovering your photos. It's still a young product going through growing pains, but the things it does, it does well.
  
  The deduping is very good, too.
  I've been meaning to spend some time setting up PhotoStructure last year, but never got around to it. I tried it on my desktop PC but want to install it on a server. Eventually :)

Photoprism

Nextcloud but that's just because it happens to have photos on it. I've not got an alternative to Google photos yet (And I'm halfway through my bloody storage!)

Nextcloud + LesPas. Works really well

Nextcloud, memories app for desktop, photos-nc for android

samba/ftp?

Immich is pretty great

Immich for personal photos and pictures I take
Lychee as an image host for funny pictures, memes, and publically sharing photos

If you have Prime and aren't insisting on self hosting: Amazon Photos gives you unlimited full quality photo backups.
- What sub are you on?
  
  Self hosted. Though hey someone may wind up here via all and scroll and wonder what else there is.
- Trying to move all my data out of big cloud providers. I moved to synology when Google started to limit photo storage. Don't want amazon to have my data either. And I'm not too thrilled with the direction synology is going trying to force proprietary drives on there customers so once again I'm going to move back to self hosted non proprietary solutions.

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