Selfhosted @lemmy.world d00phy @lemmy.world 1y ago

Photoprism or Immich

I’ve seen a lot of recommends for Immich on here, so I have an idea what the answer here is going to be, but I’m looking for some comparisons between it and Photoprism I’m currently using Synology Photos, and I think my biggest issue is it’s lack of metadata management. I’ve gotten around that with MetaImage and NeoFinder. I’m considering moving to something not tied to the Synology environment.

55 comments

Immich vs Photoprism.

Winner = Immich

Best comparison ever
- It’s succinct. I’ll give you that!
  
  Correct, too.
- Isn't Photoprism more stable?
  
  In what sense? Never had problems with Immich.
Throwing another possible contender out there: Nextcloud Memories. Seems like an interesting solution if you're already running Nextcloud.
- There's an FOSS android gallery app for Nextcloud that's super nice too
Photoprism better for single user. More stable, prettier, more free license.

Immich has support for multiple libraries, and sharing with your other users. Immich has better ai tools. I'm using immich because I just had a baby and want to see the pictures my wife takes of her.

I also vastly prefer having a single, canon source of photos. I syncthing my library to my laptop for full control (and backup). It's happened before when migrating my server app that I need to reimport all my pictures into a new database. It's super easy if they're all in one spot.

When Photoprism adds multi library, I'll probably switch back. With the main reason being license.
I've been using PhotoPrism for the past couple of days and have really liked it.

I was considering Immich, but the rapid development cycle turned me off of it for now. I don't want to have to deal with keeping up with patch notes and potential breaking changes. Immich also seems more focused on photo backups from your phone, which isn't quite what I wanted. PhotoPrism just let me upload all my existing photos on the web ui.

I'd say give both a try. Both provide a docker-compose file, so you should be able to bring them up fairly quick.
Honestly im all about nextcloud photos.
- How many photos do you store there that you recommend it? Like 500? With any serious number of photos Nextcloud starts loading for minutes and the android app autoupload goes tits up.
  
  That bug is open for years and if with so many users affected and a commercial entity behind this project nobody has fixed it yet, I doubt it's fixable without a very major rewrite.
  
  Such a good point. I'm honestly surprised people recommend Nextcloud so frequently. I've used it in a commercial environment and it sucks ass. It broke numerous times when upgrading, it was buggy and slow. At the time their GitHub page had like 4k open issues and another 8k closed. Looks like it's somewhat better now. Many of issues we've experienced were reported but no movement for years. It's like least stable OSS I had dealt with.
  
  I asked someone about this a few days ago, and they claimed to have over 30000 photos in Nextcloud without issues
  
  With any serious number of photos Nextcloud starts loading for minutes
  
  What is this serious number you have in mind? I'm the first one thinking that some of the design choices behind nextcloud are laughable, and that their attitude towards code quality and best practices is inadequate, but even then I don't think this threshold is easily reached.
  
  I've got something in the region of 80gb of jpeg and raw files.
  
  Probably 8000-9000 photos.
  
  Yeah syncing from my phone was a bear, but I just let it run overnight.
  
  Also not using iOS for what it's worth. iOS is a shithole when it comes to overaggressive battery optimisation.
- Do you mean Memories?
Both great projects I would also put librephotos to the equation with its feature rich unofficial android client Uhuru photos

All have great android apps and great Dev base

Have tried all three and also tried every other selfhosted image gallery

Photoprim is overall the most mature and complete in features

Yes it requires a third party app to sync your assets but the auto index feature if you sync to their webdav endpoint is killer. This means the proccess from the moment of taking a picture till it shows up in your photoprism gallery is "instant"

Also the unofficial android client is super great and almost android TV compatible

So

To be honest there is not a fair answer You really have to hey them all

:-)
- What are the great android apps for photoprism? Last time I looked there were two unofficial ones which were both not great and neither allowed you to upload from.
  
  https://github.com/Radiokot/photoprism-android-client
  
  Is under partner apps
  
  https://www.photoprism.app/partners
  
  You can only upload from the pwa
  
  Partner app photosync syncs with "import" folder which is a webdav endpoint photoprism exposes
  
  I use foldersync for sync
I'm sorta in the same boat as you. I run Synology all my photos and manage 5 different family members photos.

So I have different use cases for them and myself.

**For them: **They only care about the ability to see where they took their photos and its uploading correctly. The built in face detection is average at best but its enough for them to find the photo they are looking for.

They will never use the full extent of all the metadata that is available to them if I had it.

The tradeoffs are the ease of deployment and account management. I only have 5 members and if I had to teach each one which website or page to go to so they can view their images, it would drive me nuts. I simply give them credentials and a link to download from Apple Store and Playstore and off they go. New phones? No problem. Add it to their AppleTV? Don't need to bother me.
** For Me: ** I use Excire Foto and it scans each photo and helps me manage everything with a very powerful AI tool for tagging. I use it for the majority of my photo management. The downside, its not very remote friendly. So if you're working remote, you will not be able to manage your NAS photos from afar.

This way I keep both Synology Photos and use Excire when I'm needing to do some real work.
- I think I have a very comparable workflow to yours, I have a master repository of RAW+JPEG on a NAS which I index and curate from Digikam, and I export smaller/de-exified photos into topical folders for sharing with members (generally over nextcloud).
  
  May I ask why you export and de exify photos? Synology Photos does this work for you.
I would vote for Immich. It has more features (mobile app with automatic backup), and seems to use less resources on the server side.
I'm happy with photoprism for a single user. I don't like their subscription model, and will never pay an on-going fee. There's a chance they will move more features behind that paywall. I did pay the one-time unlock for the automatic upload companion app, but that seems like a core feature they should implement.
I want to use Immich because it works and looks great, but the lack of even basic editing features (like image rotation or EXIF editor) is deal breaker for me.
I've been using Photoprism for a while, but found it very resource-heavy for my poor little NAS. Even after finishing ingesting my photo library, and finished tagging all the faces, it still occupies about 50% CPU routinely. However, I can't install Immich because apparently the CPU on my NAS doesn't support AVX required by typesense.. Anyone know of some work-around?
- For now you could remove Typesense from the Docker image. Just edit the .env and remove the # in # TYPESENSE_ENABLED=false
  
  Then go to the Dockerfile and comment out the Typesense service.
What about syncthing + pigallery2?

It uses 10x less RAM
immich, is on active development and new features are being added continuously.
Immich without a doubt
The biggest factor that decided which one for me all fell down to the mobile experience. I take all my photos on my phone, and I want a solution that will auto upload and allow me to browse them like Google Photos. Immich does a fantastic job with this. I haven't found a better solution than it yet

55 comments