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I recently started using https://github.com/immich-app/immich
It's basically a self hosted Google Photos and it's working really well. You can just mount your heap of photos into the container, declare it as external library and you're good to go.
After a few hours/days of training the face recognition, extracting meta data, generating thumbnails ans possibly transcoding videos you'll have a very responsive and easily searchable timeline of ALL your pictures and videos.
I love how they literally ripped off Google Photos' interface, including using the same Material icons. I could navigate it via muscle memory. 😅
Something like Immich or PhotoPrism is probably the way to go.
Get out of the anti container mindset. Getting started with docker takes half an hour. You need to learn 3-4 commands to use other people's services. Everything is easier than RPMs afterwards.
Wait, you don't use containers?
No. We exist.
Idea: ditch rpm and start using containers.
I don't want a research project. I just was hoping there was an easy to use program to make the viewing better than samba shares. Maybe I just need a set of programs that will display thumbnails over samba.
Yet here you are on a research project.
Except most people will use containers because they are easy to distribute and set up. Guess you could try hosting Immich?
You should learn docker if you care about self hosting stuff though. You might lose 1 day learning the basics of docker, but the practicity of being able to spin up services just to test them it's well worth it.
Personally I use Immich for photo management, but not sure it it's packaged as an RPM, and even if it is you'll need to setup the database yourself. Nextcloud also possibly works but again setting Nextcloud without containers is a PitA.
Someone asking for a service to self host that refuses to use docker is similar to a person who wants to run a server but refuses to learn CLI, yes it can be done, but you're making your life hard for no purpose and everyone else will just give you the simple solution.
Given the very specific dependencies that Immich has wrt. the Postgres plugins it needs, I'm certain that it's not currently packaged as an RPM and I would even bet that it never will be (at least not as one of the officially supported packages put out by the developers).
Fair enough, last time I tried docker, which was a long time ago, I had all sorts of issues with permissions and persistence. I guess it's probably better now.
Selfhosting may not be your thing if you don't like learning and researching new products.
There is. There are multiple. And to install all of them it's easiest to use docker. You won't find any program installable via rpm.
The answer to your question you didn't ask is: Immich if you want a full fledged photo library.
You download a compose.yml file and run docker compose up -d in the same directory. At first you have to install docker and manipulate the compose file but as you see, you don't need a degree for docker.
Install docker: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/centos/
Then running a container is just same as installing an RPM, except you don't have to download it first. You just docker run the container.
You can probably get regular old packages for a lot of stuff, but a lot of stuff is packaged as containers because it makes everything easier for both the maintainer and the user.
Docker (better use Podman!) Is, I am afraid, hard to avoid nowadays. I fully agree with you that bare-metal deployment should always be an option.
Its one of my biggest issues with immich/photoprism/librephotos but there is no way around that.
Immich is the only container I have on my system... A necessary evil (joking).
I know containers now, but still don't like them too much. I am old I am afraid.
But you shouldn't be FORCED to use containers, that's my point.
No one is forcing you to use containers for Immich. It's simply the most robust way to support it for the team.
You can just take a look at the dockerfiles and follow those steps on bare metal.
No, I am forced to use containers because... There are no instructions for bare-metal installation and they also do not provide any instruction on how to build from sources (and I tried...)
Also, there are no binary releases only docker-compose.
All in all, immich cannot be deployed but with containers.
No choice: not good.
Like I said, if you follow the dockerfiles you will end up with a similar result on bare metal.
It's your own decision if you want to deviate from what the developers want to support.
A project doesn't need to produce binary releases.
It is true that a project doesn't need to release binaries. But either those or the instructions on how to build from sources I think are somewhat expected.
Said so, I am hosting immich on docker because, specially on such fast evolving and kind of "beta" software its by far the fastest way.
A Dockerfile itself is the instruction set. There is a certain minimum requirement expected from a server admin that differs from end-user requirements.
The ease of docker obfuscates that quite a bit but if you want to go full bare metal (or full AWS or GCS, etc etc) then you need to manage the full admin part as well - including custom deployments.
Indeed I am a quite proficient sysadmin for my home server, while not a professional one.
I didn't consider a docker file as instructions for bare metal install, thanks for the suggestion. I am currently using podman with immich because its release cycles are too fast for me to catch up otherwise.
I am thinking to experiment with something different from immich because, while its a great tool, it's "just" (no pun intended) a backup solution for mobile devices and I need something more than that.
I was considering https://damselfly.info/ which looks more like the workflow I am looking to implement.
The simplest option is just connect via SMB, WebDAV, NFS, etc and browse using your normal file browser.
There are a ton of various web based photo galleries: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#photo-and-video-galleries
Some can be hosted on your basic Nginx+PHP+MariaDB stack which is more complex to set up, but most are going to be meant for deployment on Docker because that makes everything very easy.
What about nextcloud? With the memories app you have something like google photos with locally running face recognition and a timeline, etc etc. I really like it
Maybe try Stash, it has gallery support too https://github.com/stashapp/stash
Also, what about jellyfin itself? It also supports photos
Testing the Jellyfin photos thing out now. I don't know if it's working right, but when I first looked at it the issue was I thought it seemed very video focused. I guess otherwise I'm learning docker after all.
i think you will like pigallery2
while you could install node via rpm, you really want to run this in a docker container
There's also some web-based solutions but not sure setting up a webserver is any less complicated than using docker:
https://lycheeorg.github.io/
https://piwigo.org/
Alma 9
