Haven’t tried it yet (I’d love to find something like this too) but I saw a conference talk on https://docs.voxel51.com/ that looked pretty interesting. It is kind of a data frame for images with a GUI for exploring them. They make it pretty easy to rip various models over your images to add tags, and to evaluate the results.
Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
41–50 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#42It's not self-hosted, but https://ente.io/ is an independent commercial solution with E2E encrypted cloud storage and local AI (EDIT: apparently you can also self-host)
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#43I built this same solution for myself last year, used Hugging Face's "SmolVLM". It works surprisingly well. I use the model to generate verbose descriptions of each image, embed the descriptions using another model, which I also use for the query embedding.
The stack is hacky, since it was mostly for myself...
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#44i swear the single best feature for me would be:
take my photo catalog stored in google photos, apple pictures, Onedrive, Amazon photos. collate into a single store, dedupe. Then build a proper timeline and geo/map view for all the photos.
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
Why the focus on S3 for a self-hosted app? Anyway kudos for the effort, I'm not experiencing performance issues in my locally self-hosted Immich installation but more performant software is always welcome.
I'm wondering the same thing. He had me until he said "S3".
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#46It's not self-hosted, but https://ente.io/ is an independent commercial solution with E2E encrypted cloud storage and local AI (EDIT: apparently you can also self-host)
You can, in fact, self host it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the focus on S3 for a self-hosted app? Anyway kudos for the effort, I'm not experiencing performance issues in my locally self-hosted Immich installation but more performant software is always welcome.
I'm wondering the same thing. He had me until he said "S3".
Likely means S3 compatibility so it can be used with anything, be it a cloud provider or a locally hosted solution like minio
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#48i swear the single best feature for me would be: take my photo catalog stored in google photos, apple pictures, Onedrive, Amazon photos. collate into a single store, dedupe. Then build a proper timeline and geo/map view for all the photos.
(and semantically index/search, face recognition... what else does AI get us these days?)
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#49I think Immich checks a lot of these https://immich.app/
Immich is what I'm using right now. I'm running it in a Docker container on my Synology. It was very advantageous to spin up another docker container on my laptop to do the face recognition work because the Synology was going to take forever on it. We no longer are auto uploading to Google or Apple. So far, I really like it. I haven't quite gone 100%, as we're still uploading with Synology's photo app, but Immich pro…
If you want a solid "just upload the photos" experience, PhotoSync on iOS is really great.
I think you can use Immich to just look at a folder and not use the backup from phone bits.
Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
#50i swear the single best feature for me would be: take my photo catalog stored in google photos, apple pictures, Onedrive, Amazon photos. collate into a single store, dedupe. Then build a proper timeline and geo/map view for all the photos.
iPhoto used to do this. The Mac photos app that has replaced it since is nowhere near as good.
In fact I would go so far as to say my personal photo management never really recovered from the transition.