https://immich.app/ https://ente.io/ https://photonix.org/ https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
Have you tried all of these? How are they with very large photo collections?
Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
11–20 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#12I think Immich checks a lot of these https://immich.app/
This. It's a fascinating project, it is hard to believe how can an FLOSS project be so high quality. In my book it's on the level of Postgres (although it's a smaller project, probably).
Their frontend is amazing, their apps are not as performant, and the backend is (IMHO) the worst of them all.
No hate here, I'm really grateful for what they've achieved so far, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement (e.g: proper R/W query split, native S3 integration, faster endpoints, ...). I already mentioned it in their channel (they're a really welcoming community!) and I'm working on an alternative drop-in replacement backend (written in Go) [1] that will hopefully bring all the needed improvements.
TL;DR: It's definitely good, especially for an open-source project, and the team is very dedicated - but it's definitely not Postgres-good
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#13It looks as you are primarily using a phone to view and share? We often (visually) share via our living room TV (via attached computer). Is that something you're looking to incorporate?
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#14There are some spectacular local models for generating text descriptions of images now. I suggest starting with Mistral Small 3.2, Gemma 3 and Qwen 2.5VL - all available via Ollama.
I expect we will see a Qwen 3VL soon.
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#15I have used https://www.photoprism.app/ and have found the face recognition to work quite well.
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#16I have used https://www.photoprism.app/ and have found the face recognition to work quite well.
Photoprism is ok, but the AI features of immich are far superior
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#17https://immich.app/ https://ente.io/ https://photonix.org/ https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
Have you tried all of these? How are they with very large photo collections?
I've used PhotoPrism and Immich. Everyone's definition is different I have about 100k photos and videos which are a bit over 1 TiB (original data, not thumbnails and previews). Nether had any performance issues with a few minor exceptions on Immich (I don't recall anything from PhotoPrism but it has been a while now since I switched)
1. The Immich app's performance is awful. It is a well known problem and their current focus. I have pretty high confidence that it will be fixed within a few months. Web app is totally fine though.
2. Some background operations such as AI indexing, face detection and video conversion don't work gracefully when restarted from scratch. They all basically first delete all the old data, then start processing assets. So for many days (depending on your parallelism settings and server performance) you may be completely missing some assets from search or converted videos. But you only need to do this very rarely (change encoding settings and want to apply to the back catalog or switch AI search model). I don't upload at a particularly high rate but my sever can very easy handle the steady state.
1 is pretty major but being worked on and you can work around it by just opening the website. 2 is less important but I don't think there is any work on it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#18Photoprism and Immich
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#19I would try the Qwen models before LLaVa Do you need the embeddings to be private? Or just the photos?
For photo indexing I'd run CLIP directly and save on compute, no need to use a whole language model.
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#20This may not interest you, but Ente checks most of these boxes for me. It has face recognition and AI-based object search out of the box, and you can self-host their open-source server without any restrictions. The models they used might be useful for your project.
Their pricing page doesn't say anything as far as I can find but do you still pay pay Ente if you self host the server as well as the photos ("S3-compatible object storage")?
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