Hi all!
I’d like to share some slow, but steady progress I’ve made on my self-hosted personal photo gallery - a Google Photos alternative. It’s been a while since I last posted any updates - the last time was about v0.9.2 on /r/selfhosted, so it’s actually my first post here.
What’s new?
Lots of things! Here’s a quick summary:
- New website! photofield.dev - bonus, it’s embedded in every install, in fact, even the website is just hosted from the app itself. 😎
- UX polish - lots of small improvements, like better interaction & fixed video controls and better error messages & autoreloading config.
- Zoomier than ever - since v0.15.0 when you zoom into a photo, it zooms the whole scene! This wasn’t the case for a few versions due to a technical detour, but I found a way to get it back without too many compromises.
- Related image search - you can Find Similar Images now, using the same AI functionality as the semantic image search.
- Map view - you can see your photos on a map. Still has some quirks, so make sure to zoom in first. To be improved.
- Reverse geolocation - you can see the location of a photo in the timeline view. Completely local, using tinygpkg.
- Tags (alpha) - you can tag your photos now. Quite basic for now, but should be a good foundation for things to come.
- ARM Docker images - since v0.14.1 the published Docker images are multiarch - x64 and arm64, including photofield-ai. Makes it possible to run on cheaper, ARM-based servers, and faster on M1/M2/M3 Macs.
Show me the demo
Now hosted on Hetzner’s arm64-based CAX11 - 2 vCPUs & 4 GB of RAM - the cheapest one.
The photos are © by their authors. Since migrating to the CAX11, it only uses one size of internally pregenerated sqlite-based thumbnails, taking up roughly 4% of the disk space of originals. Support for Synology Moments thumbnails is still there, but doesn’t seem as crucial as before.
How do I try it out?
It’s very low commitment, a single executable or Docker image that you can mount with read-only access to an existing file structure, see Quick Start (also on GitHub if the website is dead).
Another one??? Why?
It’s a conspiracy to increase fragmentation and increase shareholder value of big tech companies. 😄 Jokes aside, I think there is some space for a fast, self-contained, extremely easy to deploy solution. But mainly, it’s to scratch my developer itch and I get to learn new things.
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who’s been using it, contributing, and giving feedback! See also foss_photo_libraries for alternatives if this doesn’t fit your needs.
Let me know what you think and what you’d like to see next! 🙏
Interesting, i might give it a try when i finish setting up my new servers, havent been satisfied with other picture solutions, usually feels like they’re doing too much haha. I just want simple and fast, so this might be it.
Wow wow! Just trying the demo out feels super snappy and good, also crazy how fast the images load compared to other solutions i’ve tried! Will defo give this a shot when available on Unraid (Unless i do it myself).
Here’s a 🌻 as my appreciation for your work!
Thanks!
Unfortunately I have no idea about the Unraid ecosystem, so I’m not sure what’s the best way to approach that. It seems like you can run Docker images, so that’s probably one way to go? Let me know if you get it to work!
Will do! 👌
Looks great, I got to admit I am a bit commited to Immich now but one cannot have too many good alternatives to fall back on if things don’t work as needed.
It’s quite impressive how much the Immich folks have achieved in a relatively short period of time! I’m glad you found something that works for you :)
Is this for families to share photos privately?
Depends on what you mean by sharing, but if you put all your photos on a local NAS and run this on it for example, then everyone with access to it would be able to see them through a browser.
There’s no explicit sharing feature though.
No I meant putting it on a vps and giving family members login access so they can all save their photos and share within the network
Ah, I see! This is more of a solution for viewing existing photos, it’s not a fully fledged multi-user photo management solution.
If you had family members access and share photos via a file share though, you could use this to set up a common gallery that everyone could access via the browser.
It’s mostly meant to run on a local NAS though.
Do you have any plans for user Auth and uploading via the web app?
No concrete plans for auth yet, but there’s an feature request for this. I didn’t really want to give a sense of false security with a half-baked solution.
For uploading, I thought about it briefly and it could be interesting. How would you expect it to work?
I imagine you would configure a sort of a target folder structure, then it would dump all uploads based in that structure? Or fully managed like GPhotos/Immich where the app hashes, dedupes and owns the files directly? 🤔
I haven’t tried it yet, just moved and waiting for the internet to be installed.
I suppose any type of upload would work really, depends how “lightweight” you wanted to stay.
It’s just a convenience feature
The demo instance doesn’t show any images when using android+Firefox. Android+chrome is working.
Hmm, it seems to work for me. Which Android/Firefox version do you have?
Android 13.
Miui 14.0.11.
FF 122.1.0.After forcing a Firefox restart it works. Weird hiccup
Ah cool! Maybe the server broke for a sec? 🤷♂️
This looks like a way better interface over Synology photos which is fine, but missing the search and map feature. You need to see if they are hiring 😂
Ha, hiring only account managers 😅 It does have search and maps, but they are a bit rudimentary right now. Also I have to find some sample geolocated photos to put in the demo, it doesn’t have any right now.
