Looking for an alternative to synology photos. I moved over to synology about 3 years ago and am now considering moving out of the synology ecosystem. I’m looking for something that has a decent android app, wifi syncing, shareable albums, all the standard stuff.
Edit: thanks for the many replies, I’ll likely move to nextcloud as I was planning on deploying that anyway as a synology drive replacement. I’ll look into immich as well.
The Immich app does not support self signed ssl certs which is unfortunate for a self hosted app since many home users have ISP imposed restrictions which makes getting a cert from a commercial provider difficult or impossible.
Most other selfhosted apps do not have this problem.
Like the peer comment mentioned. just drop nginx in front and let it so the TLS handoff. always recommend to put nginx in front of any open source docker project as you can finetune many of the security controls there.
This only works of you have open ports to obtain and renew the cert from the commercial provider, many self hosters do not have this option.
Try a reverse proxy (like the nginx-proxy-manager)
Why don’t you use LetsEncrypt? You shouldn’t be self signing certs these days
To use lets encrypt or any other acme client you either need port 80 or 443 open. As I mentioned, this is not an option for many self hosters who have these poets closed by their ISPs.
If you own a domain name you can use DNS challenge for obtaining the ssl cert, no need to open ports to get a cert issued. Nginx proxy manager has this feature built in and has support for many DNS name registrars.
Do those restrictions cause issues with getting certs from Let’s Encrypt?
Getting certs from Let’s Encrypt should work fine with any provider, even if you can’t open any ports, since they do support DNS challenge.
It definitely does. I have some internal-only sites that use Let’s Encrypt certificates. I use acme-dns and Certbot.
Jist moved from Photoprism to Immich. Glad i did. Mich better feature set, active development, and multi-user capability isn’t locked behind a paid subscription.
Immich seems to be really focused on pictures from phones. Which is probably useful for many, but not all people.
Syncthing?
Sorry, I’m not sure what your question refers to.
Try syncthing
To do what?
Sync pics and video from mobile to Nas, pc or anything capable.
Oh. I just run an rsync script for that. It updates an archive that’s on a NAS. Which will be replaced by a TrueNAS system next year.
The built-in gallery app on my samsung galaxy phone, in combination with syncthing.
As long as the phone has enough storage for all your images, this has been my favourite selfhosted solution so far.
I used Photoprism before, but I could never find an old picture quickly during a conversation. Now I can, 50% of the time 🫣
samba/ftp?
Nextcloud. It’s definitely overkill for photos alone, but since you are likely to want it for other stuff anyway, why not use its gallery (which is decent) as well?
I personally use it for backup and sharing, and do the bulk of my photos/collections management in digikam (reading from a fast network storage).
You should try installing the Memories app in Nextcloud. The built-in gallery is very limited and can’t read EXIF data.
Use my nextcloud for calendar, contacts, RSS reader, photo sync from my phone, office suite and others.
Does Nextcloud handle large numbers of photos nowadays? IIRC when I was comparing programs some years ago I read that both it and Owncloud struggled when you got to a few 10000s of photos.
I have 3 times that much for just a single user, so I think you should be fine.
I suppose “a few” is quite open to interpretation, but I have 50k photos now so if it can handle 100k without getting sluggish it’ll probably be fine for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for the recommendation, I don’t think it would help with my workflow (I do the classifying and curating in Digikam and then export to timestamped folders), but I’m sure many will find it useful :)
Photoprism
Currently in the middle of a cutover between Flickr/Dropbox/iCloud mess to Photoprism. Immich, I’ll keep in a test instance with a decent chunk of duplicate files but I’m not too keen on how it, along with others, disregards your file structure.
I tested all of the top options listed on the FOSS photo galleries list. I settled on Immich, and so as of earlier today I currently have everything from GPhotos in Immich, with my phone backing up to both while I get my off-site backup set up. Immich has two drawbacks I consider minor enough for it to come out ahead, but major enough for it to still fall short of truly competing with GP. First, you can jnky select multiple things by tapping them one by one. No tap, hold, drag on mobile. No shift clicking on PC. Next, they have pretty good face recognition, but you can’t…do anything with it? You can’t set albums to auto add certain faces. You can’t assign those people to contacts and auto share with them.
For me all I really need in a photos app is reliable backup from my phone to my nas. My wife on the other hand, she takes lots of photos that she likes to organize into albums and share with family, so she’s really the deciding factor, i don’t think she really need the facial recognition, it may be useful but really it’s just being able to make albums, sort by month or year, share content, that kind of stuff.
Yeah your camera roll or whatever looks and feels exactly like GP. Albums are still a little lacking. No sorting options (currently limited to oldest at the top, newest all the way at the bottom), no comments. The sharing functionality appears to all be there, at least. The dev is very active on GitHub and Discord, implementing fixes and changes as people bring them up daily. Their entire thing is making a GP replacement their own wife is happy with. Future seems bright for it, but it isn’t quite there yet…yet! Lol
Photoprism, running on a Raspberry Pi 4. I’m just running it as a single user, and it’s been working well for that. A couple of notes:
- Video transcoding is a bit iffy on the rpi, but I’m running it under docker and might just move it all to a mini pc at some point
- I don’t have it accessible publicly, but get to it online via Tailscale
- No app, but the Web interface is good.
- I’m currently running it in “read only” mode (mainly out of initial paranoia when trying it out, but it seems fine) so I have syncthing backing up the photos from my phone wirelessly and occasionally do an import of new images in.
There is an app activelly maintained unofficial android client and its great https://github.com/Radiokot/photoprism-android-client
Thanks for the heads up, I will check that out!
I’m super not knowledgeable about codecs and shit, but IIRC there’s one that the rpi 4 is just garbage at dealing with. x265 I think it’s called?
I actually got so fed up with image galleries that I made my own tiny PHP gallery https://p.drkt.eu/
Did the same, but in perl and used a small javascript in the resulting page. (Made it ages ago)
Did the same in python. Ages ago. And again in python half a decade ago. And again in python a few months ago.
PhotoStructure
I really think there’s nothing better than Photostructure in terms of viewing and re-discovering your photos. It’s still a young product going through growing pains, but the things it does, it does well.
The deduping is very good, too.
I’ve been meaning to spend some time setting up PhotoStructure last year, but never got around to it. I tried it on my desktop PC but want to install it on a server. Eventually :)
I’m running Immich on an Odroid N2 and it’s great! https://immich.app/
Wow, what a terrible font choice!
Would you care to elaborate?
The immich logo is undoubtedly ugly
Why is the “H” bigger than the res?? Truly top tier hideous, it’s like they’re trying to make it terrible.
The logo plus every screenshot on iOS uses that same font. There’s not much else to it. It’s simply an ugly font.
Don’t judge the project based on that. It’s genuinely a quality application once you get it up and running.
Photoprism librephotos
Both have excelent android clients
Nextcloud, memories app for desktop, photos-nc for android
Nextcloud + LesPas. Works really well
