Hey, I’m wondering what everyone’s solution is for self hosted “cloud” storage of photos? I’ve been running a PhotoPrism server on my Synology for a while but it’s missing some features I’d like to have. While we’ve set up auto-uploading from different phones to the web server, I haven’t found an easy way to share read-only access to the pictures or specific albums. There is an admin login, but no way (that I’ve found) to create multiple users with different permissions.
So SelfHosted lemmy, what’s your solve for photo storage, sorting, and sharing?
Immich is pretty great. I used to use Nextcloud, but it isn’t nearly as good for photos.
Prism is my go to …it’s allright but I am still looking for new options. Have heard good things about Immich so might look at that
Saw recently that Shadow, the cloud PC company, has now a next cloud based storage offer: shadow.tech
I’d be interested by any feedbacks if somebody gives it a try !
I’ve never heard of this, but what happens if it shuts down? How is this really self hosting vs getting an generic we hosting service and storing files there ?
Oh my bad, didn’t see this was on self hosted. Then yeah, it’s a hosting service like any other one
immich!
I have been using immich. It supports user accounts and album sharing. And recent updates on the machine learning part have made it a even more potent replacement of Google Photos imo.
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This looks promising. Thanks for sharing!
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The docker compose file should work fine I’d imagine? IIRC Unraid supports docker.
Yes, but the Readme says it requires postgresql14 or 15 external. I don’t see how to set that up. I usually go through the app store that is included in unraid. Usually there are good guides but I don’t see one for this.
Their docker compose file has postgres in it: https://immich.app/docs/install/docker-compose
If unraid doesn’t support docker compose for some crazy reason, you should be able to bypass the webUI of unraid and just run docker compose files directly via CLI.
Actually ignore my other comment, they have an unraid guide for docker compose: https://immich.app/docs/install/unraid
Also using Immich, can recommend it.
There are still some rough areas though. For example its not possible to further share/download photos sent to you in a shared album. And the ios app is a bit janky when swiping through photos. No slideshow mode either.
Overall very usable though and getting updated constantly.
Like many people here I’m also planning on moving to Immich. It frankly looks amazing and it has a TrueCharts version, so it should be relatively easy to deploy on TrueNAS Scale. I’m going to wait a little longer though since it’s still in relatively active development and there are quite a lot of breaking changes that I currently don’t feel like dealing with.
As somebody that already has an NFS share for their photos, is immich able to use my already existing photo location, or is it another one of those that requires an import process that copies them to its own storage?
I guess it depends on what you’re looking for. You’ll probably be able to configure it to display your photos, but when it comes to more “advanced” features like creating albums, sharing photos with other users and the like, it’s understandably pretty difficult to find a system that would allow you to configure your own storage system.
Perhaps, but there are a few that do it, such as photoprisim and photostruct.
There is an experimental feature where you can have a read only share (mount point) and you can run a cli and import it into Immich
I’m planning my homelab, and from the research I’ve done, Immich is the best but not ready for production and it can’t use an already existing photo library. NextCloud memories is the next best alternative, and supports already existing libraries.
Immich can use existing libraries, either by importing (copying) existing files, or just by adding an existing folder of files in place.
Importing is another thing. But using an existing folder is exactly what I want. Is this feature new ?
I think it’s pretty new, in the last month or so. It’s currently something you have to run manually with the CLI to do an import, but they should eventually have it added into the web interface and run automatically.
https://immich.app/docs/features/bulk-upload#importing-existing-libraries
The important thing is the
--importflag which adds files without copying them.Personally I run the CLI command inside the
immich-servercontainer, here’s the full command to make life easier since this took me a bit to figure out, make sure the directory is mounted into both theimmich-serverandimmich-microservicescontainers. You can mount it as:roif you want (I did) to make sure Immich can only read the files and not change them.immich upload --key apikeygoeshere --server http://localhost:3001 --recursive /some/path/to/existing/photos --importAmazing ! Thanks for sharing!
A PR was opened last week to add the biggest first element of external library support. Hopefully in the relatively near future it’ll be merged. I’ll be giving it a shot when it merges.
Another person using Immich.
It supports importing existing photos, so I pulled in all my old folders of stuff.
Also has multi user with album sharing and all that.
Haven’t looked into sharing read only access, but you can look into this list
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleriesPhotoprism is one user only, maybe some day they wil implement multi user. You can donate to give them an incentive to work more on it. For me it is good enough.
They do support multiple users, but they gated the feature behind a subscription.
Ah, thanks for the heads up. Last time I looked the said they might implement it in the future.
You used to be able to PHOTOPRISM_SPONSOR: “true” but they plugged that hole. They poor-mouth on reddit and GitHub. People that self-host are trying to get away from subscriptions, you think they’d see that
Thanks for the effort but i might just toss them the coins.
For the rest of your life?
You can add a line to the docker compose to unlock it, let me see if I can find it
Have you looked at NextCloud? I have an instance running on an RPi that fits my needs (storage without sharing outside the home firewall). For anything that needs sharing, I just copy those images to an old Dropbox that I’ve kept and share from there.
Nextcloud works well for general files. Immich is the way to go specifically for photo storing. It’s got a whole lot of added features.
I hadn’t heard of Immich. I’ll take a look. Thanks!
Nextcloud on it’s own can’t read images EXIF data so it can’t sort them by date. I’ve tried Memories addon and it seems to work well, except for transcoding movies.
Good to know, thanks. I generally sort by hand if they need sorting, but using EXIF would be a nice time saver.
I just use a folder of photos and then use digiKam to manage them. But it’s just me, I don’t need to share photos with anyone else. I like digiKam but it doesn’t play great with concurrent users out of the box. I think there’s a way to use a shared database though.
I’m currently on photoprism like you, but I am looking to switch to immich.
I solved the sharing problem by having a family-only instance locally (accessible via tailscale), connected via WebDAV to a public instance on a cheap VPS (which I also use for other things). We have to share twice, but I don’t have any holes in my firewall. Currently I don’t believe immich can do something like this, but I’d love to be proven wrong
Android’s Gallery application
