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?
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.
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.
This looks promising. Thanks for sharing!
Really can’t find a good guide on how to host this on unraid. Any tips?
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.
I’ve been using Photoprism. Single-user is fine for me. I see lots of people switching to immich, but haven’t checked it out myself.
Photoprism supports sharing albums via link to people who don’t have accounts. Mine is remotely accessible using Tailscale. I would like to set up proper remote access via DNS, but haven’t made that leap yet, I’m too nervous about opening ports up.
I’m happy with photoprism too. I paid for the photosync plugins.
I don’t love the free-mium model, but you can edit your docker config to unlock it I hear.
Test driving NextCloud Memories. Looks nice, works inside Nextcloud (no need to set up and maintain one more service).
Main con so far - no mobile app
I hadn’t heard of Memories before. I’ve just set up an Immich server and I’m not super impressed with it, if I can shut that down and use my pre-existing Nextcloud server instead that’d be great!
What’s the development pace been like for Memories?
Nextcloud itself does have an app, though. Don’t know if you’ll still be able to use those additions or not through it.
No, you can’t
Thank you for checking! I don’t have a readily accessible server yet.
Currently just using Synology photos but with an eye on immich, as others have mentioned and plan to switch now that it has facial and object recognition. At this point it can do everything I want and has the benefit of being open source.
You have a Synology and Synology photos will do the features you mentioned (multiple users, different permissions). While I wouldn’t recommend it now over Immich I’m curious why you went with photoprism initially?
I installed immich thinking I could use it to access my entire pictures collection that I had stored on my hard drives only to learn it currently does not support that.
Luckyly I saw the other day there is already a PR in the official repository trying to implement that, so I may wait for a bit to Immich to have this importer.
It doesn’t have that feature you linked but you can do a bulk upload if you wouldn’t mind them hosted then in 2 places on your storage.
So, what, it only lets you upload pics remotely but not view? I do not understand.
I was thinking of trying it out but the huge banner saying not to trust it for anything important makes me hesitate every time.
Sorry, my explanation was not very clear. Check this thread: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1006 this is what I was talking about
Followed that guide. Got redis and postgresql14 installed. When installing immich I get an error in the log that says "error:password authentication failed for user “postgres”. I’ve trirled every combination of changing password, no passwords whatever. It never works.
Have you tried logging in with a simple postgres client?
I’m not sure how I would do that. What sort of application would I use? Postgres doesn’t have a webui to log in through. So not sure how else I could test it.
Are you comfortable in command line? There’s psql or there’s https://www.pgadmin.org/
Yeah, seems like Immich is kind if taking over. It really is an excellent one stop solution for automated multi-user backup. Ive been using it for a few months and its solid.
The other option that I really like is a combination of software: Nextcloud + Les Pas. Nextcloud is the server where images are stored in a flat folder system, and Les Pas is an android photo album app that organizes and manages the albums. Its super nice and has some really advanced organization features. Worth checking out if you want to use nextcloud as the storage server.
I’m using the PhotoSync app to backup to Dropbox and to my local HDD from multiple phones and tablets. Seems to work like a charm. Better than the shitty Dropbox iOS photos backup for sure.
Photoprism 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.
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 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.
Synology Moments, which is their older version of their photo app. I still use the older version because it supports object recognition. I just wish it had a map view.
Fwiw I read that object recognition is coming back with 7.2
There’s a DSM docker that enables the use of Synology Photos without having to buy a Diskstation as well if others are scrolling through this
There’s a DSM docker that enables the use of Synology Photos without having to buy a Diskstation as well if others are scrolling through this
Woah! I’ll need to check that out!
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 --import
