this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 10 months ago (25 children)
[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Thread is over, because this is the only correct answer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Interestingly only one or two years ago, people seems tp recommend PhotoPrism

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] bdonvr 6 points 10 months ago

Immich iirc has seen huge and rapid development in the past two years so no surprise.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (6 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Yep, Immich is tha bomb! Able to completely clear out google photos!

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[–] bdonvr 44 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (6 children)
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

+1 for Immich. It's the most complete and competent Google Photos replacement yet.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you already run NextCloud, then NextCloud Memories (not photos) is very good.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Proton Drive just recently came out with their photos feature, but it's still a relatively new product.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Apparently Lemmy needs a better faq search.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Synology Photos. I've heard Immich is quite good too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I'm using Autosync on Android for backing up my stuff, but have no gallery service on my NAS yet. I'm thinking about Piwigo, can anyone share some thoughts on it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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...

  1. To update a gallery, I need to recreate it in digiKam and upload it manually to the host.

  2. I can't include notes with the photos.

  3. I have to edit a link in every gallery to make it be able to go back to the index page and not 404...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Ohh, I havent thought about backing it up with Syncthing! Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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 🎇

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