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.
Interestingly only one or two years ago, people seems tp recommend PhotoPrism
Yep, until PhotoPrism revealed themselves to be the greedy cunts they are.
I sponsor my favourite tech projects annually, as I believe in supporting independent and responsible open-source development.
I became a paid Github sponsor for PhotoPrism because they promised features like multi-user were coming, and they indicated that paid sponsors would get access. After what seemed way too long a wait, they finally released the features many of us had been waiting for, only to stick them behind a monthly paid subscription. For self-hosted users. 🤨
So, I switched to Immich about 6 months ago. I’ve found Alex and the rest of the team to be very active, and quite responsive to support requests, including on Discord. Additionally, the development is fast-paced and new features are coming all the time.
My money’s going to Immich. PhotoPrism can go get fucked.
Nah. The Premium model is kinda bullshit. As a free tier open source user you will always be a second class citizen.
Also everyone who wants to commit code has to sign away his rights for them.
tl;dr maintainer gets money from open source contribution over the premium tier, but hinders everyone else to do the same with the AGPL licence.(kinda)
That’s not a good foundation to start off.
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
I think this is hard to answer because there’s no “one way” to do this.
Do you want it accessible only in your house, and you’re running something like a raspberry pi? That’s one set of instructions.
Do you want it accessible from anywhere in the world, with proper TLS? That’s a little more complicated, and there are a million ways to do this — do you want to self host and expose public IP? Self host using a VPN as the entry point? Host on a VPS?
I would recommend playing around with it first. This is easiest if you can get a well-supported environment, so something like a raspberry pi is best IMHO if you want to play around with minimal frustration.
It’s not a Windows app.
You can run it on Windows with Docker, but I would suggest a Linux server and a reverse proxy for the best experience (like most self-host solutions)
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 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.
What is different about an Orange Pi compared to a Raspberry Pi? Thinking about taking the plunge into self hosting and I’m looking for something easy and powerful.
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.
I saw some github issue where someone reported the same.
Trigkey S5 with AMD 5700U and 24GB ram. As I said, it is still slow, even after indexing has finished.
I’d really love to use it. Tested Photoprism, but the mobile app lacks almost everything immich offers.
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.
Anyone has a working nixos config for immich? I don’t get the containers to communicate with the host database.
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 :)
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.
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.
immich is the way to go
I’m kind of disappointed by the lack of encryption. It sounds great, but I don’t want to trust the server.
Where do you want the encryption? Data at rest? Or data in transit? Also, you have to host your own server. Would you not have trust on your own server ?
I want all data to be encrypted before it even reaches the server. Yes, I don’t want to trust even my own server for my image backups :), particularly since I would want to use something like Immich to provide photo backups for friends and family and I don’t even want to technically have access to their unencrypted photos unless they explicitly share them. I kind of want the attack surface for my photos to be as small as practical too. It’s almost certainly worse to have them available on my device unencrypted than a dedicated server, but it’s worse to have them unencrypted on both (and I want photos available on device so, thems the breaks).
I get that a lot of people won’t care about this and that they’d rather be able to run the image recognition features of Immich on the server and stuff, but I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to want encryption for this. If nothing else I’d love to be able to back up photos for friends and family and legitimately be able to tell them that it’s encrypted and I can’t see any of it. It’d be even sweeter if they could do image recognition on device and sync that metadata (encrypted) to the server as well.
+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.
What happens when your Synology fails? Do you have offsite backup to Backblaze or something similar?
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.
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 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.
