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Comment by arendtio | Hacker News Reader

There are two projects I would mention in the same spirit:

- https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

While I think photoprism has a very similar scope, pixelfed has stronger emphasis on federation. The project website gives a nice overview over different providers:

https://pixelfed.org/

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Photoprism looks great, thanks! I've been looking for a project like this, but my biggest requirement is that it doesn't move my photos from where they are, which no project I've found can satisfy. Everything insists on moving things to its own store.

I have the exact same issue. I've been looking for something that will just work and have both facial detection and "object" detection (dogs mostly). I think I tried photoprism a long time ago and it failed on my requirements unfortunately.

Which requirement did it fail, do you remember? I just installed it and it's indexing, and it found both faces and dogs fine so far (hasn't indexed much yet, though).

It was maybe 1 year ago, it was failing any recognition, it was just unable to index anything. I'll try again today and will test these other alternatives listed in other comments too, hopefully something will actually work now.

So, my memory failed me. The one which I couldn't make work was Photonix not PhotoPrism. It is still indexing my pictures and it kinda succeeded identifying some things (and others with lots of errors, eg. Dog as Hummingbird!). I'll wait it finish to confirm, but I feel already the need of two things: - fix tags & retrain? - face tags to identify and search for persons

Photoprism doesn't move photos around, I ran it in a docker container and just mounted my existing folder to /photoprism/originals and it worked fine.

Yep, I installed it and it seems quite good so far, thanks!

There is another interesting project. It's more of a lightweight and simple photo gallery. - https://photoview.github.io - https://github.com/photoview/photoview

Love seeing Pixelfed mentioned here. I've thought of it as an Instagram replacement but if it's practical as a Google photos alternative that's an added bonus.

I also know of it as an Instagram-type experience, and it's quite good at that, too. From my limited usage, I don't think it could replace Google Photos, though.

Right, that's what got me wondering. I've got an account on the flagship Pixelfed instance, and I started thinking whether that's a plausible use case - setting all uploads to private (or, I guess "unlisted" is the only available option) and effectively using it like Google Photos.

I guess it's a bit of a stretch but my preferred attitude is to be open minded and generally to cheer on the activitypub projects. They are, in the end, a force for good.

Certainly, but it's a free service hosted by volunteers, and I think uploading gigabytes of private photos would hurt the service for no benefit to them.

It's a Fediverse program (uses ActivityPub) which lets people follow Pixelfed servers from any Mastoson, Pleroma or other server that implements ActivityPub. PeerTube is a similar service for video hosting.

The Fediverse is the future, and the future is distributed.

Oh, I'm very aware, and very happy that this is the case. This to me is a major advantage that Pixelfed has over basically everything else in the thread.

I had never considered Pixelfed as a google photos alternative but am glad that something in the activitypub universe might be used that way.

Can you _hide_ everything? Because my main goal is to share within my family, but surely it must not be accessed from others without my authorization first

Thanks for posting these links.

What I miss in those solutions is the possibility to add text to your photos like it is done in Google Photos. The ability to give albums contextual background with a nice and simple typesetting is a key differentiator from the classic solution to keep picture files in folders (on-/offline). photoprism seems to have such functionality. The text, however, is associated to a photo, and not to an album like Google Photos.

I've been using the Beta version of Photostructure[0] for a while and am generally very happy with it.

It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, no ML etc, but it's also much lighter. Running on my Synology NAS inside a docker container just fine (with ~30k photos).

I also heard about Mylio[1] which looks nice, but haven't tried it. Somehow the privacy policy left me a little more concerned compared to the bold promises elsewhere. The pricing model also feels a bit off to me.

Neither are open-source though.

[0] https://photostructure.com/

[1] https://mylio.com/

I've been using photostructure for a while, but it lacks everything related to albums which is the most important part to me.

Howdy! I'm the author of PhotoStructure.

The next release (I expect alpha builds to be available in a week or two) has album support: including automatic album importing from Google Takeouts.

https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-for-manually-crea...

This next release is a biggie, btw:

https://photostructure.com/about/2020-release-notes/#vnext

Which Synology NAS model did you go with, and how are you finding the performance? Thanks

I built and installed PhotoPrism including the TensorFlow lib, but had to do some link-hacking to get TensorFlow to start on Debian, in my case. Once it was working and ingested a few thousand home photos, searching for color names was fun.

Shortly thereafter, the site was "bombed" with uploaded pictures. I tore the whole thing down. Beware.

How is the album sharing? All i really want is to be able to build albums and create a link to send to family members, possibly password protected and optionally with expiration. Or just the ability to share/unshare in some way.

Pixelfed though is more of an Instagram replacement. It's for publishing photos as opposed to archiving and managing them.

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