What are you using as a Google photos alternative? Currently I’m using Nextcloud but I’m thinking of switching to a more dedicated solution.
I mainly need to upload photos from my device automatically, have an UI to see and classify them, albuns and sharing.
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My need for online photo galleries is just to direct friends and family to see them, I don’t store photos in the cloud.
I used to put up my photos on deviantart, I have had a gallery there for almost two decades, but lately dA has become very slow to navigate, so I built my own site, I didn’t need much, an index page linking to HTML galleries I export from digiKam.
After a few weeks of learning, designing and testing HTML and CSS, I have a nice index page that is responsive and easy to update and customize (in limited capacity).
This runs on a normal webhost, and is lightning quick to navigate, the galleries support browsing with the arrow keys, and just works.
There are three annoying things about it though…
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To update a gallery, I need to recreate it in digiKam and upload it manually to the host.
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I can’t include notes with the photos.
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I have to edit a link in every gallery to make it be able to go back to the index page and not 404…
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Synology Photos. I’ve heard Immich is quite good too.
Proton Drive just recently came out with their photos feature, but it’s still a relatively new product.
I have my own NAS with its native app and sync my phone directly to it.
Photostructure is a strong starter, but development is slow and it’s still missing important features like sharing. Also, it’s not ooen source.
Immich seems great but doesn’t (yet) support digikam tags ( and since my 100,000 assets are tagged/organized via digikam, I don’t want to move to immich yet and have to start over).
PhotoPrism seemed pretty good, though it also doesn’t (yet) support digikam tags. Also, their self-hosted version doesn’t have all the features of their paid versions.
If you need a UI to have albums and share them then yes, the previously mentioned Immich. I host it as well, and it is truly awesome.
One caveat though: it is still pretty early in development, there might be breaking changes. For example a few weeks ago you needed to update the docker compose file because they changed dependencies.
a few weeks ago you needed to update the docker compose file because they changed dependencies.
You are right, but they warned us about that few releases before in the mobile app and on the web. They reduced the number of containers again woop 🎇
100% this. I recommend also setting up SyncThing to keep a completely separate backup of your photos (if you have the means). They even state that on their GH repo that, due to the highly active development, you shouldn’t rely on Immich as the sole solution to backup photos and videos.
Ohh, I havent thought about backing it up with Syncthing! Thank you!
This might help you to choose https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
I have just tried it out for a quite limited time, but ente also looks great.
+1 for Immich. It’s the most complete and competent Google Photos replacement yet.
Synology Photos has been a great alternative, not only to back up my photos/videos to my nas, but as an easy to way to search/organize/share them.
But for the absolute best subject recognition, tagging and search, I purchased Excire Foto (local AI, local database, etc.).
Currently using photoprism, butnot very happy with paywalled stuff and pretty outdated and weak image recognition
Want to try/move to immich, but nixos doesn’t have it as a package(the only package i couldn’t find out of thousands i’ve used)
Some people managed to rewrite what dockerfile does, but it look a bit too complicated, especially when i’ve never even tried it
So the only viable option is run it as an oci container, which i’m not a fan of, and it fails for me anyway
Want to try/move to immich, but nixos doesn’t have it as a package(the only package i couldn’t find out of thousands i’ve used)
Immich always breaks for me. Even on fixed version its a hassle. Tried it maybe 4 times during intervalls, hoping that some consistency would be implemented, but never seems to go out of alpha versions of trying out a completely different configuration…
I’m using Immich in Nixos. It’s simple. Takes about 10 mins. You need to set Docker up in your configuration.nix then set Immich up using docker compose. Let me know if you need a hand getting it going.
Not self hosted but Ente photos works perfectly for me. Paid but cheap.
immich is the way to go
If you already run NextCloud, then NextCloud Memories (not photos) is very good.
I only just realized Memories existed, and man do I wish I knew about it when I started.
Memories allows you to view a timeline, improves loads using generated thumbnails, sorts by location, and even does facial recognition with the Recognize app installed. 1000x improvement over default photos app.
