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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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.
+1 for Immich. It’s the most complete and competent Google Photos replacement yet.
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.
I will get downvoted for this but a Synology Nas is simple and does 90% of what google will do. They also have their own DDNS or you can use whatever you like.
Downside is tou have to buy their hardware. Unless you do the Xpenology route.
Been using a Synology NAS for the past year for automatic photo backups. Take a photo, it gets copied to my drive at home so long as there’s internet access available. No issues so far. Turned off my backups to Google.
What happens when your Synology fails? Do you have offsite backup to Backblaze or something similar?
Not who you’re replying to but yes, Synology will let you automate backups to a cloud/service (and you definitely should!)
It’s a dual drive redundant setup. Unless something catastrophic happens, I doubt both drives will go out at the same time. I could do an offsite backup as well, but just haven’t.
I was very satisfied with their pricing for offsite backups, and the ease of setup. Definitely worth a look.
The number of redundant drives actually doesn’t make much difference, but it does “help”. Instead of picturing individual drive failures, picture a house fire.
Also picture the next step after one of the drives fails – you’ll be copying all of that data off of your 1 good drive, putting a lot of stress on it. That drive is likely from the same batch, same age, etc. as the failed drive. The likelihood of your good drive failing during the recovery process is higher than one might like.
What happens when your Synology fails?
I can’t speak for other users, but my Synology setup looks like this:
- NAS - 1 drive redundancy via hybrid RAID.
- Important folders have recycling bins enabled and I have versioning, too.
- Daily backup to a local external drive.
- Daily, encrypted backup to the cloud.
- Monthly, off-site HDD backup.
This is honestly a much more secure way of storing my photos than Google Photos.
This is my setup using the 3, 2, 1 rule:
3: Raid 5 setup with 2 unused drives and setup to automatically spool up and recover if one of the drives starts failing. 2: off-site at the father in laws house (using a Xpenology super tiny PC and an external drive) 1: Monthly Backblaze
While there is risk, it’s def safer if not safer than Google drive.
I have a Synology NAS, and while their Synology Photos is really good, it’s no match for Google Photos. It’s not their fault though, any self-hosted solution is going to be harder to share photos and do collaborative albums and such. And Google Photos image and face recognition is just not matched. I backup my entire photo library to Synology Photos but most of them are also in Google Photos for ease of access and sharing.
Google definitely has better face recognition. You can pick up a QNAP and put a Google coral and essentially do the same thing.
I also run a 3rd party software that does the tagging. But it’s annoying to do each time.
I set up Immich a week or so back. It’s been a dream so far. The object recognition is really way better than expected. The App works really well.
I used this script to import my Google Photos dump. https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
I can’t say I used every possible feature of Google Photos but I haven’t missed anything yet!
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External libraries do this, but fwiw when I tested Immich I ended up with a ton of missing thumbnails in my external library and there seemed to be no way to detect and repair them. That was a deal breaker for me and I went back to Photoprism. Immich looks really great though other than that.
It’s been added recently, in the form of External Libraries.
Set Immich up a couple weeks ago and I’m surprised how good it is. Their docs included a simple cli tool to bulk import all my Google photos. Mobile app is working great. I’m really impressed with the search too.
Gonna set up Immich soon!
Proton Drive just recently came out with their photos feature, but it’s still a relatively new product.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #397 for this sub, first seen 3rd Jan 2024, 18:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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
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.
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…
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!
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.
immich is the way to go
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.).
