2d ago

Photos alternative with good recognition / search?

Slowly but surely trying to de google my life, but Google Photos is a hard one. I have a kid and seven pets, and I've come to rely on Google Photo's search abilities to actually find anything I want to see in the hot mess of disorganized photos.

I tried a trial of Ente and filled it up to the free limit with pics. It was able to recognize my toddler in THREE photos, no one else. I don't know how many or which photos are backed up because it doesn't seem to show them separate from my un-backed up ones. It doesn't learn to recognize pets as far as I can tell.

I'm too tired to learn to self host just to use Immich, even though I've heard good things, ha.

20 comments

Immich is a "one click app" on caprover, probably on coolify and the like too

I tried out Immich, but I prefer Nextcloud Memories.
Nextcloud also replaces a lot of other Google services like Docs, Drive etc.
And it's very stable and solid.
You can host it yourself, but you can also pay for it there are many hosts like Hetzner for 4$ per month + tax

I had little issues with ente facial recognition myself and you should be able to search with keywords such as dog, cat or even maybe pet. To me it works well enough but it is indeed inferior to cloud based google AI for sure

Not stable yet according to the devs but there is Immich.Lot of folks seem to think it’s stable enough though.
- Only a sample size of one here, but I've used it for quite a while now and it's definitely one of the more stable and reliable apps I self host. It's a delight.
- One of these days I'll have the bandwidth to learn about self-hosting. It seems like there's some real benefits and cool stuff out there. For now, I have a toddler taking up most of said bandwidth as well as copious amounts of photo space 😅
- I installed immich on a rasperry pi 4 with docker a few days ago. Works quite well. The context search option really impressed me. I didn't expect it to work at all on a pi.

Immich is the best alternative I can think of. It runs about 2 years now on my raspberry pi.
And there is even a OpenSource Companion App which syncs Photos Automatically to the Server (https://droidify.eu.org/app/?id=app.alextran.immich&repo_address=https%3A%2F%2Ff-droid.org%2Frepo .
The Search is so good that I host another sever just for my meme-Collection! It even recognise Tags like NSFW out of the Box. And all that on your own hardware! You can search by people, cities, countries Dates, Devices and so on
You can selhost it on your own Hardware. Its pretty simple. You just have to install docker and docker-compose and follow the instructions on their site.
If you followed and learned that, you can pretty much host ANY other App just like that. Its pretty much always the same steps.
- @GeraltvonNVIDIA @JustOneMoreCat a dedicated server for memes, what a great idea!!!
  
  Thank you! Gone are the days were I said "Wait! I have a meme for that!" -> Since Immich it is just "Here is a meme for that!"
- Is raspberry pi pretty easy to set up? Or if you were starting over would you go with something else? I have a windows laptop and an android phone, so that's the extent of what I'm familiar with so far. But Immich does look so promising!
  
  I would say it is, but to be fair, i work as a programmer and with Linux on a daily basis.
  But there are plenty of tutorials which teach you to flash some OS to your Pi or even complete guides to build immich on top of a pi:( https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-immich/ )
  The raspberry pi is the famoust single board Computer and therefore there are tons of projects and things you can do with it.

If you have a local copy of the photos, you can use DigiKam, which has a really strong facial recognition capability
It can also write the face data in to the keywords and EXIF data, so the will be searchable by tags in other apps.

PhotoPrism. There's a paid hosted option if you don't wanna self host.

It's a bit unfortunate that there are options for tagging photos automatically and even on-device (Ente is a third, which will run on your local phone or any synced device, propagating data across other devices)... But nothing that runs exclusively on-device without syncing.
There's no apparent reason an app couldn't do the tagging on-device to device-exclusive photos.

Sadly, all that glitz of Google comes at a price, basically selling your soul and your data bits. I use a linux desktop as my photo storage, so open source Syncthing backs up my photo folder to my PC, which in turn I have backed up to a hard drive in case of PC failure. Syncthing (open source) backs up any file or folder to any device via your wifi, used it for years. You can also use a Window$ PC as well, works on every platform. However, on Linux, I then use Digikam (open source) which has face recognition and a lot of the bells and whistles of photo storage and viewing, awesome program. Just my two cents.

You might appreciate this post from earlier today.
https://hexbear.net/post/4729811

. You can contact their support to see report this, they answer pretty quickly. This will also help others potentially

20 comments