Slowly but surely trying to de google my life, but Google Photos is a hard one. I have a kid and seven pets, and I’ve come to rely on Google Photo’s search abilities to actually find anything I want to see in the hot mess of disorganized photos.
I tried a trial of Ente and filled it up to the free limit with pics. It was able to recognize my toddler in THREE photos, no one else. I don’t know how many or which photos are backed up because it doesn’t seem to show them separate from my un-backed up ones. It doesn’t learn to recognize pets as far as I can tell.
I’m too tired to learn to self host just to use Immich, even though I’ve heard good things, ha.
Not stable yet according to the devs but there is Immich.Lot of folks seem to think it’s stable enough though.
Only a sample size of one here, but I’ve used it for quite a while now and it’s definitely one of the more stable and reliable apps I self host. It’s a delight.
One of these days I’ll have the bandwidth to learn about self-hosting. It seems like there’s some real benefits and cool stuff out there. For now, I have a toddler taking up most of said bandwidth as well as copious amounts of photo space 😅
Immich is the best alternative I can think of. It runs about 2 years now on my raspberry pi.
And there is even a OpenSource Companion App which syncs Photos Automatically to the Server (https://droidify.eu.org/app/?id=app.alextran.immich&repo_address=https%3A%2F%2Ff-droid.org%2Frepo .
The Search is so good that I host another sever just for my meme-Collection! It even recognise Tags like NSFW out of the Box. And all that on your own hardware! You can search by people, cities, countries Dates, Devices and so on
You can selhost it on your own Hardware. Its pretty simple. You just have to install docker and docker-compose and follow the instructions on their site.
If you followed and learned that, you can pretty much host ANY other App just like that. Its pretty much always the same steps.
@GeraltvonNVIDIA @JustOneMoreCat a dedicated server for memes, what a great idea!!!
Thank you! Gone are the days were I said “Wait! I have a meme for that!” -> Since Immich it is just “Here is a meme for that!”
@GeraltvonNVIDIA I’m going to have to look into this. My meme and GIF management is atrocious. Does Immich handle GIFs? That would be a huge plus.
Does the app you listed have the ability to sync one folder to one server and another to the other? That would be cool
Is raspberry pi pretty easy to set up? Or if you were starting over would you go with something else? I have a windows laptop and an android phone, so that’s the extent of what I’m familiar with so far. But Immich does look so promising!
I would say it is, but to be fair, i work as a programmer and with Linux on a daily basis.
But there are plenty of tutorials which teach you to flash some OS to your Pi or even complete guides to build immich on top of a pi:( https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-immich/ )
The raspberry pi is the famoust single board Computer and therefore there are tons of projects and things you can do with it.
Link looks awesome, thanks! Do you also keep a separate cloud backup of your photos in case your server is damaged (like in a disaster or something)?
I should do that, but i dont do it at the Moment.
Maybe in the future. It should be pretty simple by running my attached drives as a RAID 1-Cluster or something.
They’re running on NAS 24/7 online-Drives. At the Moment I’m pretty confident that I am safe.
If you have a local copy of the photos, you can use DigiKam, which has a really strong facial recognition capability
It can also write the face data in to the keywords and EXIF data, so the will be searchable by tags in other apps.
I tried out Immich, but I prefer Nextcloud Memories.
Nextcloud also replaces a lot of other Google services like Docs, Drive etc.
And it’s very stable and solid.
You can host it yourself, but you can also pay for it there are many hosts like Hetzner for 4$ per month + tax
I’ve seen them recommended before and had been wondering about finding a trusted server to have it hosted. I’ll check out Hetzner, thx!
Immich is solid, you can play with the models used for face recognition and search too.
You might appreciate this post from earlier today.
It’s a bit unfortunate that there are options for tagging photos automatically and even on-device (Ente is a third, which will run on your local phone or any synced device, propagating data across other devices)… But nothing that runs exclusively on-device without syncing.
There’s no apparent reason an app couldn’t do the tagging on-device to device-exclusive photos.
Digikam?
That looks like a really interesting project, but the scope appears to be outside of what I was looking for. I think people here are looking for something more like Google Photos or Ente, something that operates more like a gallery app with extra features on top.
PhotoPrism. There’s a paid hosted option if you don’t wanna self host.
I had little issues with ente facial recognition myself and you should be able to search with keywords such as dog, cat or even maybe pet. To me it works well enough but it is indeed inferior to cloud based google AI for sure
Immich is a “one click app” on caprover, probably on coolify and the like too
