Google Photos Alternative

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

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.
  
  only to stick them behind a monthly paid subscription. For self-hosted users.
  
  holy shit
  
  The user feature is available for non paying users too. If you want a gui for managing that is now behind plus. I don't see exactly how wantng to make a living off of your work makes you a greedy cunt especially when it seems the features trickle down as they should. Am I missing something?
  
  It's about expectation setting. You can't say "paid donators will get X" then say "actually you won't, give us more money for X".
  
  Also, there's usually no reason as a user to pay monthly for a feature in a self-hosted application.
  The Dev has no monthly costs for that feature. Let me buy the application/feature, and if you need money for a new feature, create a feature that is worth buying again. No need to bully the user into a monthly subscription...
  
  I missed that bait and switch. Thank you for the response.
- 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.
  
  So you think it is bad cause others can't take their work and make money off of it? Seems to be a real problem in open source right now that others are doing exactly that and something I don't begrudge a small development team doing.
  
  Not affiliated with them just been using and happily subscribed for a year+ now. Better than Google getting my money.
  
  No, i think it is bad that the owner takes away the rights from the contributors.
  
  AGPL alone does already solve the problem.
  
  But both, is not sustainable.
  
  Also the trademark owner can relicense the code anytime and just close the source. It is not community project
  
  I think many developer feel like me. Just look at the contributor list on both projects.
  
  That's a fair point. I think you are right that it is not a community project. Something for me to consider. Thanks for the response.
- Immich iirc has seen huge and rapid development in the past two years so no surprise.
Uh, what about Pixelfed?
- Pixelfed is an Instagram alternative and not a Google photos alternative afaik

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.
  
  Hi thanks for your reply. I have laptop with external drive that i use as server at home. Ideally as easy part1 i would only upload pictures home, and would access them home only. This is not a public intelltual property, it's our photos so no public IP needed.
  
  What i am looking is
  
  My and familys phones are getting full of pics and videos, so instead of using Google Photos can we upload it our own server at home easily and wirelessly. If need be we can watch them on tv . That's it.
  
  “IP” in this context means “internet protocol address”. A public IP is one that can be accessed from outside your home (what you see when you go to https://whatismyipaddress.com/). A non-public, or internal, IP is the one your router gives your computer, frequently starting with 192.168. This can be accessed by other computers on your network but not from outside your network.
- 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)
  
  The installation documentation is here
  
  And here
  
  Hi Thanks for reply, I would be putting it in zorin os laptop (that is linux) , What do I reserve proxy för ?
  
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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.)
- I get what you're saying and usually I would prefer open source myself. However, Mylio has self hosting facility as well as end to end encrypted cloud storage option too. Does seem like a good product.

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.
  
  Big difference for me between the RPi 5 and orange pi 5 Plus is more RAM and m.2 NVME support on board. It also has four additional efficiency cores and dual 2.5G NICs, but that's less important to me.
  
  Downside is it has a less polished ecosystem.
  
  Overall though I've been happy! But I also love my collection of raspberry pis, so it's a matter of taste I guess.
  
  Thank you!
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.
  
  Dang, that's too bad. It really is the best alternative out there.

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

Anyone has a working nixos config for immich? I don't get the containers to communicate with the host database.

https://kressle.in/articles/2023/immich-on-docker-with-nixos.php This works for me
- Why docker though?
  
  Because it's easy. For other services I use nixos containers, but for immich Docker was just so simple
  
  For virtualization.

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 :)

Pleased that I came to this thread looking for a good answer, clicked this link and opened in my preferred browser for project tracking and saw it was already starred in GitHub. Guess I need to actually deploy an image finally and stop lurking for an answer. Lol

I wish it didn't require docker :(

Why? Is docker hard to use?
- It's hard for me. I've tried, but not had much success.
  
  I'm a noob still regarding self hosting (started last year) but maybe I can help? I struggled with it too but eventually got it working on my unraid server and I love it.
  
  I appreciate it. I have all my stuff at home running on Yunohost. I'm quite happy with it, but I have tried docker-based projects in the past including dockstarter. I always ended up confused. I don't have much extra time at the moment for messing with it again, but it's very kind of you to offer.
  
  No problem. If you do ever want to get it running I believe it's in the RunTipi store. That solution is similar to Yunohost in that it aims to make standing up a server with several services easy and available with a "single" click. I tried it and it's pretty neat. Only thing I didn't like is how updates to the apps themselves were handled.
  
  Awesome, saved.
  
  you should really take some time and learn it. It's a godsend.
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.