immich, alternative for google photos. there's a demo portal for it.
Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Immich
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.
For iOS PhotoSync is great for backing up.
Photoprism librephotos
Both have excelent android clients
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.
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
I use PhotoSync to backup my iPhone to an SMB share on my NAS
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)
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.
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.
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!)