If you're thinking about self-hosting anything, my first recommendation is to get your backups in order now, before doing anything else. I wrote this a while back: <https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/>. Having a full, offline backup will only cost ~$20/TiB nowadays, which is cheap insurance if whatever app you try out doesn't quite behave as you expected it to.
The situation for self-hosting your photos just a couple years ago was pretty bleak--especially if you had hundreds of thousands (or more!) of photos. That may sound like a lot of photos, but for people shooting digital for 20+ years, it really isn't!
Whatever image manager you pick, make sure the app follows existing metadata storage standards, so in the (seemingly inevitable) future when the app is abandoned, your photos are in directory structures that make sense to you, and the work you've put into organizing them isn't locked up in unreadable databases or folder structures.
Spoiler alert: I got burned by this issue with prior apps, so I designed PhotoStructure from the ground up with exactly this in mind: <https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#open-stan...>. Unfortunately, many/most self-hosted solutions don't handle multiple source directories and configurable destination directories.
As a user (soon to be paid, life keeps getting in the way and I keep forgetting), I highly recommend Photostructure over Photoprism.
I don’t have my notes here, so I can’t elaborate much why. But the gist from my memory is that photoprism has a lot of features, and naturally no single user is gonna needs all of those. But the installation is quite a bit more painful, and it is slower as a result. I recalled it building tensorflow on my freebsd machine when installing (which failed, due to bazel failing to build, due to them hardcoding an url download of a library which recently got updated and the link doesn’t work, you get the idea).
Installing photoprism using docker is as easy as it gets. I'm curious to try photostructure too. Looks like more advanced duplicate detection and throwing random photos at you. Nice :)
> When you view your PhotoStructure library’s home page, you’ll see a random selection, or “sampling,” of images from your library. When you click When, you don’t see all photos in reverse-chronological order, but instead, a random “sample” of images from every year. Click on a year, and you’ll see a random sampling from each month.
It’s actually a nice feature that gives you exposure to photos you would not otherwise see. It’s one of the main things I miss from Photostructure (beside the speed) now that I use photoprism.
Enjoyed your article on backups. I was intrigued by the idea of NAS as a solution to bit rot, but when I looked at NAS products, sticker shock dampened my interest. I've been using git-annex so I looked into how it deals with bit rot. It shares the same backup philosophy as git: lots of copies to keep stuff safe.
Thank you for sharing, looks like an amazing project! Exactly what I’m looking for, and I love your flexibility about just making two separate instances for me&my partner to each have our own. (only way it would be better is if it were open source, or even just a contract making it become permissive open-source in case the company shuts down.)
Regardless, I’m in a bit of a weird situation for the next few months with regards to my home server setup, but I’m bookmarking this to come back & will be absolutely paying for the upgrades too. Thanks for your awesome work!
Do you have a demo for PhotoStructure? Didn't see anything on the site. I'm really looking more for a Picasa replacement that respects my file structure and displays it as such.
Sorry, it’s been on my todo list for a while. The UI is pretty simple (by design): there's only the initial welcome and settings pages, the asset page, and the tag gallery. Screenshots are all on <https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/>
I normally suggest people just try it out on their stuff—it runs pretty much everywhere. Hop into our discord <https://phstr.com/go/discord> if you have any questions or comments, I’m online.
Synology Photos doesn't get much of a mention here because it's tied to the Synology brand of NAS products, but I have to admit that it's one of the best Google Photos replacements out there even though it's lacking features that they've implemented in their previous app, Moments.
I really love it because it does Google Photos' backup workflow where it backs everything up automatically, and allows you to clean up local storage for photos saved in the NAS, and it works reliably for both Android and iOS.
It's a feature that's absolutely necessary when managing phones and tablets from family members who aren't tech-savvy but definitely need to back every photo up without clogging up their phone storage.
Is there an alternative to google photo without all the upselling?
I'm setting up setup a new phone which has google photo as the default gallery app, and if you're not in the US and/pr don't want to use the google services, most of the stuff you have in the menus is literally worthless.
The "print service", for one. It's right in your face most of the time, but there is no option to turn it off if you basically can't use it.
I've been using "Simple Gallery Pro", but it lacks basic video editing support. I don't need anything fancy, but trimming videos is something you often need to do for sharing.
Photorprism
Photostructure
Lychee
Digikam
Synology Photos (if you have a synology)
And probably a few others I am forgetting.