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

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

#61

Post by idatum »

mossTechnician wrote: post #28
akho wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ente self-hosting proposition seems strange. Why would I want to e2e encrypt my photos that I self-host? Sounds like it will only make life more difficult.

1. "Self-hosted" doesn't always mean "on your own hardware." Some people rent VPSes. This helps keep their data safe. 2. The software is provided without modification; I think it would be stranger to remove the encryption.

> Some people rent VPSes. This helps keep their data safe.

This is exactly how I self-host Ente and it has been great.

Machine leaning for image detection has worked really well for me, especially facial recognition for family members (easy to find that photo to share).

I have the client on my Android mobile, Fire tablet (via F-Droid), and my Windows laptop.

My initial motivation was to replace "cloud" storage for getting photos copied off the phone as soon as possible.

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

#62

Post by joesweetsox »

Are any of these systems doing true image based entity resolution? It seems like its only pair-wise similarity checking. If you are trying to index say 20 years of family photos how do they do linking kindergardeners to thier adult images?

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

#63

Post by jamesxv7 »

mossTechnician wrote: post #2

This 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.

Ente is a tremendous proposal. I don't know why I hadn't heard of it before, but I don't think it meets what I'm looking for. But the fact that the software is completely open is impressive.

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

#64

Post by ibizaman »

akho wrote: post #26
mossTechnician wrote: post #2

This 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.

The Ente self-hosting proposition seems strange. Why would I want to e2e encrypt my photos that I self-host? Sounds like it will only make life more difficult.

You may want to self-host for your family or close friends while guaranteeing them privacy.

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

#65

Post by gerdesj »

Nextcloud with a few addons. Now this might look like overkill for your use case but I get the impression that you might want to go further in future.

Stock NC gets you a very solid general purpose document management system and with a few addons, you basically get self hosted SharePoint and OneDrive without the baggage. The images/pictures side of things has seen quite a lot of development and with some addons you get image classification with fairly minimal effort.

The system as a whole will quite happily handle many 100,000 files with pretty rubbish hardware, if you are happy to wait for batch jobs to run or you throw more hardware at it and speed up the job schedules.

NC has a stock phone app which works very well these days, including camera folder uploads. There are several more apps that integrate with the main one to add optional functionality. For example notes and voip.

It is a very large and mature setup with loads of documentation and hence extensible by a determined hacker if something is missing.

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

#66

Post by toomuchtodo »

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.

S3 compatible means one can point it at any storage that talks S3, which is a lot more flexible than POSIX or NFS.

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

#67

Post by mlunar »

It's a pretty deep rabbit hole. For semantic search CLIP and cosine similarity are just fine. SmolVLM(2) mentioned by spacecadet looks interesting though. I haven't integrated face recognition myself, but [deepface] seemed pretty complete.

I focused more on fast rendering in [photofield] (quick [explainer] if you're interested), but even the hacked up basic semantic search with CLIP works better than it has any right to. Vector DBs are cool, but what is cooler is writing float arrays to sqlite :)

[deepface]: https://github.com/serengil/deepface

[photofield]: https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield

[explainer]: https://lnar.dev/blog/photofield-origins/

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

#68

Post by washadjeffmad »

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

Flux Kontext is probably the best for local for a few reasons, but it's slow, uses a lot of VRAM, and changes the quality and resolution. Amazing results if you want If you need a detailed mask for editing in another application, florence2 or SAM. Or rembg for decent all purpose one shot removals, as long as you have a touchup process or don't mind rerunning the failures.

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

#69

Post by itsdrewmiller »

old-gregg wrote: post #59
sircastor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried Immich? It is extremely polished and has every feature you mentioned, along with being open source with tons of community energy and no lock in.

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

#70

Post by weird-eye-issue »

esseph wrote: post #27
sz4kerto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Looking at the world around me, so much of it is driven by open source. In fact, I can't name a single piece of electronics around me that isn't using it.

Most tend to be backend only or much lower level. Open source projects with complex UIs and mobile apps is pretty rare I think
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