My wife is using Google Photos, and I’ve been using Photoprism for a few months. I just had a baby, and I access to download the pictures that my wife takes. I’m not too sure of what I want. I guess I want two separate libraries, but I want to be able to view her pictures easily and add them into my library. I believe if I spin up a second photoprism instance, I’d have to download her pictures individually and reupload them into my instance.
What do any of you do? Do you even host photo storage for your family?
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Edit I R DUM and missed the self hosted part
Google photos does this. You can enable partner sharing where you can see all of their photos. You can choose to save them all by default, or selectively save them.
spoiler
How the fuck do you self host Google Photos ya dingus?
Whoops, missed that part lol.
Do you want it federated or no? If you want it federated, go for Pixelfed. If not, check out Immich.
Can you run pixelfed without federation?
That’s a good question. I am not really certain.
But then it’s Instagram without users. Maybe pointless unless some specific edge cases
Yeah you can.
Is Pixelfed for image storage, or is it more like Instagram?
It’s probably more like instagram.
Pixelfeds album feature is terrible.
Oh I had no idea. I was thinking of standing an instance up to explore it.
I was looking for something better than sharing pictures four at a time on Mastodon and checked out Pixelfed. I don’t understand it at all. It’s like the system is designed around sharing individual pictures. Even when an instance allows sharing a few pictures at once, other users will only see the first picture because multiple pictures is obviously an afterthought for the UI. Maybe it’s because I am too old and I want Flickr instead of Instagram. I’m still posting pictures up to four at a time on Mastodon.
Yeah exactly, I want federated flick, not Instagram.
Nextcloud would probably work as well
With a very small library it’s fine using the “memories” app, but I noticed in my experiments that adding thousands of pictures is a miserable experience
I would not trust Nextcloud tbh, the update process is wayyyyy too unstable.
I don’t use it for my photos because of the UI but the update process has been rock solid for the last couple of years since I moved and started uaing their snap. It updates itself automatically withot any of my interaction and never breaks.
omg I didn’t know if it was just me but I have the worst luck with Nextcloud updates. I’ve had to restore from backup like 6 times in the 4 years that I’ve been running an instance.
Using bare metal install? I always cried when I had to apply updates, but now that I moved on the docker image , I don’t get problems when updating (knocking wood)
That’s more difficult on my unraid server and I hear immich is better suited for the job anyway so I’m looking to try that
I’ve been using Immich, and while it’s under heavy development, it’s working amazingly well for myself and my wife.
Photoprism offers multi user for sponsors
Multi user but without unique libraries for each user. Just one big photo library for every user.
Yes but it costs almost like 2TB of Google photos + you need to take care of backups, updates, maintenance…
The main advantage is that it isn’t Google, but the price point imho it’s too high for something that I need to manage for family use
Does it work well? I haven’t checked in a minute, but does I believe they used to recommend two separate installs for multi library
Haven’t tried yet. I’m evaluating atm if I need it or not.
Immich by far
oh wow I’ve been using google photos but immich looks like a great self hosted open source copy! I’ll have to start this up
Tagging onto this: Does anyone know of the easiest way to backfill Immich with photos from Google photos all at once besides manually downloading them from the Photos site?
I believe that’s the only way… But I could be wrong. I had them all stored on an external hard drive, and used the CLI to upload them all.
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To add onto this, has anyone found a good way to combine the metadata back into the photos from Google takeout? I’ve found two solutions on Google, one was send it off to some company and pay them to do it and the other has me run some pre compiled exe file. 
I’m starting to think I’ll just have to live without the metadata or write my own solution.
I used rclone to get all my photos down, then I used Immich’s bulk import API to get everything into Immich just yesterday. I did about 14k photos.
Take note of the limitations of rclone though, it won’t get the original full resolution - https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations you need to use Google Takeout to get full resolution.
For your use case I would definitely recommend Immich. It has a “partner sharing” feature that allows you to view your partners photos from your account while still maintaining separate archives. You can then download or add to albums from there. Immich has been fantastic for my family because it supports android and iOS (being as I can’t get some members off Apple products.)
Here’s the description of the feature. Sorry it’s a Reddit post, that’s the only place I could find the developers summary of the update.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/13lbp2r/immich_selfhosted_photos_and_videos_backup/
Ooooo. This is new since I last used Immich. I’ll have to apin it back up.
Photoprism uploader.
