Ask HN: Personal photo library recommendations? Open source, browser-based

Shameless plug: I&#x27;m currently working on a solution called Photonix, though it&#x27;s still very much pre-1.0 at the moment.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;photonix.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;photonix.org&#x2F;</a><p>Installation is fairly simple with Docker, frontend is web-based (React), backend is Python with a sprinkling of Tensorflow. So far auto-tagging of photos by location, object detection and colour is fairly decent. UI is progressing and is useable on most devices, though quite minimal.<p>Please feel free to check out the demo site and the GitHub issues. I&#x27;d really appreciate feedback and help. Thanks.

Personal plug: I&#x27;m working on PhotoStructure, after trying many, many open source photo projects (and being a committer for years of one of the most popular, &quot;gallery.&quot;)<p>PhotoStructure is browser-based (using Vue), and scales to hundreds of thousands of assets over millions of files. Your library can be created on a Mac, saved on your NAS, then later opened and managed by a Linux box, seamlessly. Raw images have highlight restoration before rendering previews. Videos are auto transcoded for mobile and desktop web use. Corrupt images are detected automatically and culled. Image source sets are used to minimize network data and maximize viewing quality. XMP sidecars are imported for metadata. Importing aggressively coalesces duplicate images and videos using direct and inferred metadata, so even your downsized Google photos takeout will be deduped with your originals.<p>Once you&#x27;ve got a huge library, though, it needs a novel UX. Scroll-reverse-chron and a search bar shouldn&#x27;t cut it. PhotoStructure has a couple novel and unique approaches to navigation, which you can read about here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.photostructure.com&#x2F;introducing-photostructure&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.photostructure.com&#x2F;introducing-photostructure&#x2F;</a><p>It scales down to odroids, and up to as many CPUs as you can throw at it, and self-throttles CPU during library sync so the machine is still useable. Installation takes under a minute, and updates are automatic.<p>It&#x27;s closed-source because it&#x27;s how I want to pay for my food and clothing, but it&#x27;s a corporate mandate to open source in case of business closure, which is also explained in that blog post.<p>I&#x27;m sending out another wave of beta testers later today, and during the beta it&#x27;s free. I&#x27;m giving heavy discounts to my beta testers that share feedback.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear what you think.

I created NasPics specifically for this reason. I wrote it in pure Go with no dependencies for ease of cross compilation since my NAS runs a weird old Debian based distribution of Linux on ARM. Running it is just cross compiling a binary, copying over and executing. For restart across boots, I just added a simple SystemD service file.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;srinathh&#x2F;naspics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;srinathh&#x2F;naspics</a><p>(edit: some data destination paths are probably hard coded since I wrote it for myself but can be easily broken out into command line options if needed)

I&#x27;d love to find one that incorporates the functionality that Picasa (windows desktop) circa 2000 i.e. face recognition&#x2F;matching.<p>It was way ahead of it&#x27;s time, and actually worked!<p>Best of all, it did everything locally... not cloud based and thus retained privacy of your personal photo collection.

Not specifically for photos, but I have been a user of Perkeep, a long running project from one of the golang maintainers that focuses on long term storage of one&#x27;s data:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perkeep.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perkeep.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;</a>

I did exactly that a couple of months ago. After exporting my pictures, I ran fdupes to find duplicates and then imported all images into Shotwell.<p>I can still take pics on the phone which will be synced via Dropbox and Shotwell picks them up immediately. The sync is faster than I’m used to on iCloud and finally I just have files that I can tag, again.<p>Shotwell is also super fast, has a similar UI to photos.app (automatic events for example), but it also had hierarchical tags which it can even write to the files itself. So it’s very simple and yet portable without lock-in. Couldn’t be happier. Of course ymmv.<p>Good luck!

I&#x27;ve been using Lychee [1] on a vps with good results.<p>It looks pretty good, has multi-user capability, metadata editing, etc. It would be nice if it had some geotagging integration and ability to group albums into sets.<p>I filed a bug report and the developers&#x2F;maintainers fixed it very quickly.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LycheeOrg&#x2F;Lychee" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LycheeOrg&#x2F;Lychee</a>

Do any of these open-source solutions support Apple&#x27;s Live Photos and videos alongside ordinary photos? I don&#x27;t really want to have multiple applications for my family memories stuff. Just want to toss them in a directory and let on-photo&#x2F;video-file metadata tags sort it out. Face auto-tagging and geo- and time-based grouping a must. Otherwise, can (ideally, would, in fact) just serve up dead-simple ugly HTML, if it&#x27;s gonna be a web-tech thing, to minimize the developer workload if I have to take it over because the project dies.

I was excited about MediaGoblin[0] for a while, but it seems development has mostly stalled. The last release was in March 2016(!). Things were going smoothly until they seemingly started devoting their resources to implementing federated sharing instead of developing the core media hosting functionality.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mediagoblin.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mediagoblin.org&#x2F;</a>

I haven&#x27;t tested it but <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;photoprism&#x2F;photoprism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;photoprism&#x2F;photoprism</a> looks promising.

One more option...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hooram&#x2F;ownphotos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hooram&#x2F;ownphotos</a><p>Have not had that weekend to try these options myself.

I tried out a few options a couple of years back and I&#x27;ve stuck with Piwigo since then. It seems to work well enough for my needs and the export functionality built into digikam seems to make it simple to sync up photos between my desktop and server.

Is there any of these that can be pointed at a photo library on a NAS or harddrive, instead of having the application copy all the images into it&#x27;s own location&#x2F;database (which therefore required double the harddrive space)?

I’m looking for the exact same thing. Seems to be few and far between. I have a Synology which has two photo products but they can be a little clunky. The challenge seems to be a sensible way to add an import.

I should explain what I&#x27;ve tried.<p>Nextcloud photos is not a photo application. It&#x27;s basically a shared gallery with thumbnails. There&#x27;s no metadata support or editing. No true multiuser access other than granting sharing through Nextcloud like Dropbox. The only good part is you can autoupload from your phone.<p>I&#x27;ve looked at several webapps, like Piwigo. Most of them feel like a single user application or have limited upload and metadata support.<p>The closest I have found is Digikam using external SQL, but this requires a local application carefully configured with a DB and a fileshare.

I use Lychee: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lycheeorg.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lycheeorg.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>easy to set up, looks decent, even shows exif data like exposure time, lens used etc.

For those willing to use local (non-browser) apps, Photosync (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS) will transfer photos between mobile&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;cloud and a private central NAS. From there, you can mount the NAS or sync folders to another mobile&#x2F;desktop device, for use with local apps.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photosync-app.com&#x2F;home.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photosync-app.com&#x2F;home.html</a>

Try digiKam. Its GPL-licensed and runs on GNU&#x2F;Linux, Windows and Mac OSs. The developers are readily available via a mailing list and a new version just came out. I&#x27;ve used it for years and find is quite good. It is very full-featured though, so you might need to spend some time getting to know it.

I really like thumbsup: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thumbsup.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thumbsup.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>It generates a static web site, creates thumbs, etc. I just run it on my laptop and rsync to my personal nginx server. You could probably host the output directly from S3 or similar.

Seems like a lot of people have their own solution, I&#x27;ll add mine to the pile: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pR0Ps&#x2F;PhotoFloat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pR0Ps&#x2F;PhotoFloat</a><p>Screenshot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;F6w8Ixz.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;F6w8Ixz.png</a> (just took it now so I redacted some info)<p>It consists of 2 parts:<p>- a Python script to parse metadata from photos into json files and create thumbnails.<p>- A JS-based frontend that consumes the json files and thumbnails to provide a UI.<p>Features:<p>- Can be hosted completely statically making it ideal for low-power servers<p>- Serves up your photos in the same file structure as they are on the disk<p>- Works with many types of photos, including most raw files<p>- Parses and displays common EXIF data<p>- Works well on slower connections (minimal HTML+CSS+JS, small thumbnails, placeholders, preloads images as you view, etc)

If you don&#x27;t end up finding what you want, then you could start with scoping out what you intend to find or create (..and post it somewhere find-able :)<p>For example, I&#x27;ve gone back to Shantsel&#x27;s UX research several times over the course of thinking through app designs, eg:<p>* <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shnatsel.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;08&#x2F;irc-client-new-tab-mockup.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shnatsel.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;08&#x2F;irc-client-new-tab-mock...</a><p>* <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shnatsel.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;03&#x2F;true-app-center.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shnatsel.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;03&#x2F;true-app-center.html</a>

Bonus question: I, like a lot of other people, did a full Flickr export due to the reduction in hosted pictures. I now have all the metadata - is there a way I could import or use this locally?<p>(I did take a brief look at it, it&#x27;s fairly normal json)

I&#x27;ve been unable to find an open source multiuser local photo product. I&#x27;d love for my whole family to upload cell phone photos and SD cards to a central place we could share and tag from, without it belonging to Google.

I’ve been tinkering on something adjacent, to replace my Instagram usage rather than Photos.app. I was thinking of a sort of “album as a blog post” concept using Ghost, which could be a single image per entry, or a series of images with optional prose interspersed. The idea is to take an album and auto-generate a blog entry with inline photos that can be edited in Ghost. It can also pull out photo metadata and create a map, etc.<p>Unfortunately Ghost isn’t as modular as I hoped so it is involving lots of edits to the source, and automatically extracting album metadata from Photos.app has also turned out to be difficult.

Any particular reason for the browser-based requirement?<p>I’ve used Lightroom and CaptureOne to manage my photo library but ended up using digiKam in the end because I can just mount a volume and use it from any desktop.

Many years ago I was dumping all my photos into Coppermine [1]<p>It was&#x2F;is very good. But patching it and PHP became a chore and I eventually migrated away to a messy matrix of Dropbox, Flickr, Google Photos and Apple Photo...<p>I should look into consolidating them all. Always tempted to write my own, aimed at photo albums for non-photographers... but it will probably not move beyond a readme.md...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coppermine-gallery.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coppermine-gallery.net&#x2F;</a>

Check out Koken. Pair it with Lightroom for editing if desired. Self hosted and quite powerful.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;koken.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;koken.me&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been looking for the same thing. An Apple Photo clone would be perfect, as I like this product very much, but I would like to have control over my photos.

Try Shimmie2. It works like the danbooru or ouroboros style imageboards. Requires LAMP stack and php-gd, and ffmpeg if you want video thumbnails.<p>- Stores files by md5 hash and doesn&#x27;t allow duplicates.<p>- Database is used to store tags and support searching and is not very large.<p>- Can tag pictures and search by tag.<p>- Is fast. Can handle large number of images and large number of search results.<p>- Can enable pools feature and arrange pictures in a pool.<p>- Can enable wiki feature, which while primitive, is nice for adding notes.<p>- Is multiuser.

Shameless plug: if you are want a library for videos, I created an MIT open source <i>Video Hub App</i> - nearing version 2.0.0<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;whyboris&#x2F;Video-Hub-App" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;whyboris&#x2F;Video-Hub-App</a><p>Sorry unsure about good photo alternatives, but my first place to research is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net</a>

I used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galleryserverpro.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galleryserverpro.com&#x2F;</a> many years back. It was one of the better ones back then. I switched to Amazon Photo as I didn&#x27;t want to deal with another server and backing up my precious family photos. Looks like it&#x27;s open sourced now, which is even better, if you don&#x27;t mind .Net and SQL Server.

With online photo galleries either private or work related for many years I&#x27;m always relaying on piwigo. It&#x27;s great, handy and easy to setup after the first try. We&#x27;re hosting even big internal photo archives with upload via ftp, and piwigo does a great job at handling it.

Is there one that can import Mac photo libraries an remove duplicate pictures by the way?

I haven&#x27;t tried <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agile-leaf&#x2F;50mm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agile-leaf&#x2F;50mm</a> yet. But am curious about it and similar solutions.

I wrote Photobomb to solve this need for myself:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidbanham&#x2F;photobomb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidbanham&#x2F;photobomb</a>

I wish iOS photos app would allow me to sync to my server (SMB, sFTP, whatever). It is the only app allowed to sync in the background without using the location hack.

Drawing Parallels - really would be happy if there was an application that could use Object storage as backend.. and could be hosted with AuthN and AuthZ

Out of all these tools posted here, are there any that provide a way for you to authorize friends to also upload photos to your library?

I&#x27;m surprised none of the suggestions seem to have anything for user-inputted tags.