mobile-massive-gallery

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nextcloud

docker-compose -f compose-nextcloud.yml up -d docker-compose -f compose-nextcloud.yml down -v

docker-compose -f compose-nextcloud.yml exec --user www-data app php occ app:enable files_external

docker-compose -f compose-nextcloud.yml exec --user www-data app php occ files_external:create photos local null::null -c datadir=/srv/Photos

docker-compose -f compose-nextcloud.yml exec --user www-data app php occ files:scan --all root@marcos:/etc/docker# docker-compose -f compose-nextcloud.yml exec --user www-data app php occ files:scan --all Starting scan for user 1 out of 1 (admin) ^CInterrupted by user +---------+--------+--------------+ | Folders | Files | Elapsed time | +---------+--------+--------------+ | 103298 | 112298 | 00:16:44 | +---------+--------+--------------+

root@marcos:/etc/docker# docker-compose -f compose-nextcloud.yml down -v --rmi all Stopping docker_app_1 ... done Removing docker_app_1 ... done Removing network docker_default Removing volume docker_nextcloud Removing image nextcloud

Nextcloud Yaga might be an acceptable alternative?

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/previewgenerator https://rayagainstthemachine.net/linux%20administration/nextcloud-photos/

https://gitlab.com/steviehs/digipics might help in fixing the "albums"?

possibly alternative by bohwaz https://github.com/kd2org/karadav/ https://mamot.fr/@bohwaz/109890893734823557

photoprism

https://www.photoprism.app/

lack of mobile app https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/1666

incompatible flutter app https://github.com/thielepaul/photoprism-mobile

new app in f-droid works somewhat okay. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ua.com.radiokot.photoprism/ (source code) problems are mostly that images that don't load and there are performance issues, and jumping around dates is confusing. there's no offline mode either.

whole thing has an opencore vibe, some features are locked behind paywall, including in the above mobile app.

requires mariadb, sqlite not recommended

https://docs.photoprism.app/getting-started/docker-compose/

https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/first-steps/

root@marcos:/etc/docker# docker-compose -f /home/anarcat/compose-photoprism.yml exec photoprism photoprism index --cleanup

root@marcos:/etc/docker# docker-compose -f /home/anarcat/compose-photoprism.yml up -d

root@marcos:/etc/docker# docker-compose -f /home/anarcat/compose-photoprism.yml exec photoprism photoprism passwd

INFO[2023-02-20T00:25:26Z] indexed 81,622 files in 3h59m47.915792756s

next run:

INFO[2023-02-20T16:15:19Z] cleanup: removed 50 index entries and 100 sidecar files [1.964059441s] 
INFO[2023-02-20T16:15:19Z] cleanup: searching for orphaned thumbnails   
INFO[2023-02-20T16:15:20Z] cleanup: removed 449 thumbnail files [766.178938ms] 
INFO[2023-02-20T16:15:20Z] cleanup: removed 549 files in total [2.930403997s] 
INFO[2023-02-20T16:15:20Z] indexed 82,628 files in 26m41.307215045s

noop run:

INFO[2023-02-20T16:21:20Z] indexed 82,628 files in 3m46.58783669s

calendar issues (missing parts of 2022): https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/discussions/3214

no support for XMP tags: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/1143 or 5-stars https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/713 (major blocker) does not write metadata back to disk https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/402

rescan --force

INFO[2023-02-20T17:54:11Z] indexed 82,692 files in 1h10m28.674348629s

somehow failed to find photos from my camera (but found my phone!) in august 2021, possibly missing all high quality photos from that camera. possibly an issue with https://docs.photoprism.app/getting-started/troubleshooting/#missing-pictures

bumped two settings, then:

INFO[2024-08-17T14:35:52Z] faces: updated 231 markers, recognized 151 faces, 81 unknown [16.252126634s] INFO[2024-08-17T14:35:52Z] index: updated 5,047 files [30m47.140279115s] INFO[2024-08-17T14:37:57Z] indexed 100,808 files in 32m51.738153382s

  PHOTOPRISM_ORIGINALS_LIMIT: -1               # file size limit for originals in MB (increase for high-res video)
  PHOTOPRISM_RESOLUTION_LIMIT: -1

added videos, amazingly, it was super fast:

INFO[2024-08-17T20:15:07Z] indexed 101,914 files in 20m37.481057559s

another full indexing run:

INFO[2024-08-17T22:14:28Z] purge: removed 82 files and 12 photos [2m26.029346119s] 
INFO[2024-08-17T22:14:28Z] indexed 102,615 files in 1h48m21.693727003s

others

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives-to-google-photos-showdown/

https://photonix.org/

interesting, has a mobile app (not in f-droid, but source available, also desktop app (probably Electron). main app is Python + JS.

https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos mobile apps immature.

lychee no mobile app

piwigo has a mobile app but is struggling to keep it up to date.

photochiotte

PhotoChiotte has an awful name but seems like a clever solution. All the logic is inside the mobile app and the server is a "dumb" web server with pregenerated thumbnails. It could be a great solution except the user interface is absolute shit. And I don't mind using such a strong word since it's literally the name of the software in French ("chiotte") so I guess it's self-assuming. It's barely usable, even with just local images. There are weird labels (the folder names I think?) under each image that take up needless space, dragging the images around lets you drag into nothingness, it's really, really hard to use. I haven't actually attempted to generate the thumbnails.

ente

ente just (March 2024) just open-sourced their server and it's interesting: a relatively generic API (Go + PostgreSQL) server backed by MinIO object storage backends. They're mostly a business that wants to host your data, but now it's also clearly an option.

Desktop app is Electron (appimage, not on Flathub), but they have a decent web app as well. Trick is we have a large collection that would cost somewhere between 13$ (500GB) and 30$/mth (2TB) to host on their servers, so that might be impractical for us, even cost-wise.

Best would be if they would have some sort of CLI sync that would allow us to sync a local copy, but then maybe that's exactly the mentality we need to switch away from: just don't keep everything locally and sync as needed.

Unclear how the mobile app works, but it does have a very exciting "free up device space" button that probably removes files that were already uploaded remotely. This would really help with the phone-to-archive workflow.

I haven't tried submitting the stack to the entirety of my collection just yet, as I only tested the 1GB free trial. It looks pretty fast though, and the interface feels snappier than Photoprism's, especially since there's a native app for the phone.

Still, this would mean a major shift (away from git-annex, specifically) for photo management, towards object storage (basically), fully encrypted (which means keys are suddenly a huge concern). Not sure.

I like the simple design (one golang app + postgresql) especially when compared to Immich (2 microservices in Typescript/Dart, Redis, PostgreSQL).

immich

complicated, lots of microservices, unsure if i want to embark on testing again.

update, 2025-09-09: bit the bullet. microservices are somewhat swept under the rug in the new docker compose file which is just 4 services:

I can get behind that, I guess.

So far, I've made a user, and duct-taped it into the docker-compose file. It caused some issues, because (e.g.) the postgresql container expects to run under user 999 otherwise it fails to start when trying to change the ownership of the data directory, so now I have those files owned by systemd-coredump, which is weird.

The valkey container has the same issue.

I hadn't set a PostgreSQL password in the .env file which broke everything once I did set a random one. Logging into the pg container with:

docker exec -it immich_postgres psql

... and \password fixed the issue.

In general, this works pretty well! The web app is shiny and generally works well, but shares the same problem as other "smart" (or "single page"?) apps that wrong state can persist and I often have to open a private tab to actually see changes. For example, /admin/jobs-status would see no active job in one window (even after force-reload), but a private tab would show active jobs.

ML features don't work out of the box. This might be due, again, to my weird docker setup, but the containers can't dial out, so i had to download the repos by hand:

mkdir /srv/immich/model-cache
chown immich /srv/immich/model-cache
cd /srv/immich/model-cache
mkdir clip facial-recognition
cd clip
sudo -u immich git clone https://huggingface.co/immich-app/ViT-B-32__openai
cd ../facial-recognition
sudo -u immich git clone https://huggingface.co/immich-app/buffalo_l

Then the compose file was hacked to point at that volume. This was guessed from this comment.

I thought the models would be stupidly large, but they're about a dozen gigabytes, not bad.

A few things are missing, I feel like. While, in theory, Immich seemed to support EXIF ratings out of the box, in practice there doesn't seem to be a way to search or filter for images matching a given rating.

Also, I can't login the android app and thumbnail generation is only 50% done after a couple hours of processing.

Upgrades are another issue: presumably, i'll be notified of new upgrades and will need to kick the compose file.

Finally, I haven't started indexing videos yet. So, next steps:

photoview

refreshing: single go binary

setup complicated for no good reason, separate .env file complicates things, stripped it down to just a docker-compose with sqlite (which should really just be default).

started scan at 2024/08/17 00:38:23 local ended around 2:54:11, but no clear "scan finished" message that i could find - end of the log is flooded with SQL queries.

had to fiddle with user permissions in /srv/Photos because that was just accessilbe to my user, made a photoview user/group, photoprism container now uses the same group which has +rx on the folder.

interface much more minimalist than photoprism.

no mobile app, on the roadmap at least https://github.com/photoview/photoview/issues/701, prototype in https://github.com/photoview/photoview-android

nice in-site progress bar after about 10-20 minutes... lots of errors about videos.

each folder is treated as an album, which in my case is a bad match as each folder is a day, typically, which makes it hard to share all images from "a trip", say.

ultimately went back to photoprism after figuring out fix for missing images. deal breaker is lack of arbitrary album sharing and mobile app.

current status

another solution I tried is to use the plain Simple Gallery to browse a remote folder, but this is explicitely not supported as they don't want their app to access the network (and rightly so, I guess). But there was this comment which pointed me at the Amaze file manager which actually supports SFTP! Unfortunately, in my tests it didn't work so well and of course didn't leverage existing thumbnails...

for now, photoprism it is... big blocker with missing images.

consider tls client certs.

update: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories seems to do what we need

https://bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2/

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