Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 124 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#51

Post by darknavi »

gavin_gee wrote: post #44

i 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.

Take a look at something like rclone and it immediately becomes clear that the photo app vendors you listed have no interest in allowing their users to easily access their data programmatically from their services in any meaningful way.

Example: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

Glaring example:

> The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#52

Post by wooben »

I've been running Nextcloud in Docker with the Recognize and Memories apps for about a year and half now. It's in an off-lease refurbished Dell Precision tower from 2018.

I'm using docker compose to include some supporting containers like go-vod (for hardware transcoding), another nextcloud instance to handle push notifications to the clients, and redis (for caching). I can share some more details, foibles and pitfalls if you'd like.

I initiated a rescan last week, which stacks background jobs in a queue that gets called by cron 2 or 3 times a day. Recognize has been cranking through 10k-20k photos per day, with good results.

I've installed a desktop client on my dad's laptop so he can dump all of the family hard drives we've accumulated over the years. The client does a good job of clearing up disk space after uploading, which is a huge advantage in my setup. My dad has used the OneDrive client before, so he was able to pick up this process very quickly.

Nextcloud also has a decent mobile client that can auto-upload photos and videos, which I recently used to help my mother-in-law upload media from her 7-year-old iPhone.

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#53

Post by oth001 »

ProfessorZoom wrote: post #7

I'm also curious as to the best local high quality background removal, such as for gradation images where people are wearing tassels

Stable Diffusion (Web UI or whatever) has add-ons (e.g. rembg) that are really good at this last time I checked

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#54

Post by denysvitali »

bargainbin wrote: post #47
rkagerer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

S3-compatible storage. In my case, Backblaze B2. The idea is to make the backend compatible with rclone, so that one can pick whatever storage they want (including B2 / S3 and others)

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#55

Post by nullify88 »

ranger_danger wrote: post #3

https://immich.app/ https://ente.io/ https://photonix.org/ https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

I wanted to like Photoprism because unlike Ente and Immich, it supports SQLite databases and doesn't require postgres (I want to keep home lab maintenance to a minimum) but the UI was difficult to like and I couldn't get hardware encoding working on my Intel N100 GPU.

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#56

Post by sneak »

I believe Ente supports all of this, and can be self-hosted. All of the AI stuff is done locally.

I pay them for service/storage as it’s e2ee and it doesn’t matter to me if they or I store the encrypted blobs.

They also have a CLI tool you can run from cron on your NAS or whatever to make sure you have a complete local copy of your data, too.

https://ente.io - if you use the referral code SNEAK we both get additional free storage.

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#58

Post by jan_tse »

wooben wrote: post #52

I've been running Nextcloud in Docker with the Recognize and Memories apps for about a year and half now. It's in an off-lease refurbished Dell Precision tower from 2018. I'm using docker compose to include some supporting containers like go-vod (for hardware transcoding), another nextcloud instance to handle push notifications to the clients, and redis (for caching). I can share some more details, foibles and pitfal…

I run a pretty similar configuration on a pi 4 mounted to an external hard drive which I offload to other hard drives from time to time. The mobile app auto sync specific folders when my phone is connected at the home network. It's not flying performance wise but I mainly need a backup solution.

Gonna check the apps that you mentioned. Feel free to share more details of your set up. Why are you running 2 instances? Edit: I see, probably for the memories app.

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#59

Post by old-gregg »

sircastor wrote: post #23
crobibero wrote: post #4

I 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…

May I ask: why not use Synology's own photo stack? The web UI is pretty good, the iPhone app is great, it runs locally without depending on Synology servers, and does have face recognition and all other features.

Re: Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

#60

Post by jasonjayr »

darkwater wrote: post #33
denysvitali wrote: post #12

Earlier 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 have and love my self-hosted immich install. If self-hosted could also use S3 storage, that allows me to use Garage (https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage) , which also lets me play games with growable/redundant storage on a pile of second-hand hard drives. IIRC it can only use a mounted block device at the moment, (unless there is a nfs-exposed s3 translator ....)

A lot of existing tooling supports the s3 protocol, so it would simplify the storage picture (no pun intended).

Post reply on HN