Google Photos Alternative
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.
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!
It’s been added recently, in the form of External Libraries.
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.
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!
+1 for Immich. It's the most complete and competent Google Photos replacement yet.
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.
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.
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.
Proton Drive just recently came out with their photos feature, but it's still a relatively new product.
I'm trying it out since I just upgraded to proton unlimited.
It's pretty barebones. It has automatic uploads but only from the camera folder. It does have the ability to share links, but no folder or album support for sharing. No face tagging or object recognition that Google does
Does that include videos?
Yes
Apparently Lemmy needs a better faq search.
Not OP, but FWIW I didn't realize until reading your comment that the "awesome-selfhosted software" under Resources was actually an FAQ/List. I thought it was a repo of maybe just a couple relevant apps.
I know that doesn't make a lot of sense now that I think about it, but I think it's easy to miss.
Synology Photos. I've heard Immich is quite good too.
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.
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!
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 🎇
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...
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.
Not self hosted but Ente photos works perfectly for me. Paid but cheap.
I recently adopted ente, and while the devs are active and enthusiastic, feature parity with gphotos is a long way off. IMO, the sub price should be half what it is.
The desktop app (the only practical/supported way to import your Google Takeout) has lots of little bugs and problems, not least of which is 100% CPU load for the the first few weeks you have it installed. Thats because (even after initial encryption and upload is complete) the machine learning and indexing (even the basic, opted out version) hobbles your system with aggressive CPU scheduling.
I'm going to stick it out for a second month, but I'm not without regrets. For me, I was just done feeding Google AI with my photos and wanted privacy first.
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.
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.
Omg, i forgot to reply to this one
I don't use docker, it's not fully opensource, and not secure by default
Also, setting up docker and running docker-compose is not the nix way of doing things
Ideally you want to translate docker-compose.yml to nix
Also, yesterday i tried to do this whole thing again, and broke even more than before
This time i was able to run all the containers, but the server couldn't resolve the redis container
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..
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]
I have my own NAS with its native app and sync my phone directly to it.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Piwigo 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.).
Immich: https://github.com/immich-app/immich
Thread is over, because this is the only correct answer.
Interestingly only one or two years ago, people seems tp recommend PhotoPrism
Uh, what about Pixelfed?
Definitely Immich.
There's a lot of these kinds of services, hosted or self-hosted that are labeled as a "Google Photos replacement"
But very few of said services have features like face matching and object recognition alongside automatic backups.
IMO it's not a legitimate replacement for Google Photos without those features and Immich really delivers on that without compromising your privacy.
Hi is there a guide for Complete Newbie like me , right from how to download this software(I could not find link or anything resembling.exe for installation,) upptill how doninput it on my zorin os laptop and setup my and my familys phone to upload photos to our own laptops via immich. Like a a book idiots guide to xyz... Kind of thing
It is great, but the mobile app becomes slow AF when I import all my google photos which are thousands of them. Even after indexing has finished.
Edit: Scratch what I said! Just gave Immich another shot, and the slow mobile app was due to the initial background sync running.
How many photos? It's a very good user experience for me, with 123GB library (23k+ photos, 1k+ videos). Fairly entry-level Samsung phone and iPhone 13, both work great.
Running on an Orange Pi 5 Plus.
Absolutely love Immich. Was previously running on an RPi 4 w/4GB RAM, but with the other services I had on there I needed to disable ML. Orange Pi 5 Plus (16GB RAM) and it's just a dream. Kicked off ML/facial recognition before bed and it was done in the morning. Migration from RPi to OPi was straightforward.
I have 1.8TB of pics and videos on my server and it all runs fine in browsers or the app. Perhaps you could look at disabling the machine learning portion of it to save some overhead? For reference, my setup is:
Server - HP Micro server G8 Phone - Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ Tablet - Samsung Galaxy S7+
None of these are high end anymore, hell the server is ancient by computer standards. But I did put a GPU in it for ex hardware transcoding as well as machine learning for Immich.
Looks interesting. Just wondering if anyone has tried Mylio which also looks promising and has many tools for de-duplication and tagging which I quite like in Google Photos.
In this community anything that isn't open source is not going to be relevant to the majority. It sure does look like a competent product though but I question it as an alternative to Google since it's going to be tough to survive when one is pre-installed and automatic without any user intervention on pretty much every android phone and the other I hadn't even heard about until now and I've researched alternatives...
I think they'd be smart to make their free version open source to assuage the concerns about risking that the product dies and all tagging etc becoming useless / wasted effort. Even though I understand the reluctance because the primary motivators for going premium aren't really open source compatible (pay for more devices etc.)
It really is. I absolutely love the shared link functionality, with the ability to easily set an expiration date and manage existing shared links.
It's made taking pictures a lot more fun for me.
Yep, Immich is tha bomb! Able to completely clear out google photos!
Anyone has a working nixos config for immich? I don't get the containers to communicate with the host database.
https://kressle.in/articles/2023/immich-on-docker-with-nixos.php This works for me
I've been on my 3rd install of linux mint and immich. I can't seem to make it work. I can't mount my second hard drive so immich can see it. I'm gathering up a strength for the 4th install.
Hey, not sure how in depth your linux/docker knowledge is. Please disregard if irrelevant. I would recommend you pick a fixed mountpoint for the drive and set up a systemd service to mount the drive for you (systemd .mount file). Then you add an extra line "RequiredBy=docker.service" (look for systemd RequiredBy) This way the drive always has to be mounted by the system before docker is started and should always be visible before you start a container.
Hope this helps :)
Pleased that I came to this thread looking for a good answer, clicked this link and opened in my preferred browser for project tracking and saw it was already starred in GitHub. Guess I need to actually deploy an image finally and stop lurking for an answer. Lol
I wish it didn't require docker :(
Why? Is docker hard to use?
Same here. I'm using mainly FreeBSD on my servers so docker is a no go due to lack of support. I have to stick with Photoprism for now as it offers a install without docker and it does the job for me. Anyhow, I'm not happy with the trend that most FOSS projects today limit the deployment on docker and do not offer a way of a plain install on you *nix system of choice.