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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?

#71
post #26

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.

Because you want to access your photos remotely, or give access to more people to certain albums. If the point is to just store them locally and no remote access is needed, a hard drive would probably be enough.

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

#72
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would find that argument plausible if the comment I replied to didn't mention Postgres as the bar.

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

#73

I think Immich checks a lot of these https://immich.app/

Been running Immich for a couple years now and it has been awesome. There are a few rough edges but I’m sure most of them will be smoothed out by the first stable release.

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

#74

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.

I didn’t want to be attached to the Synology system or hardware anymore. Synology Photos is great (and we’re still using it for the upload atm), but Immich lets me control the whole thing, top to bottom.

I’m running a DS1813+. It’s stopped getting new feature updates. This approach lets me keep the storage running while migrating away the server components.

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

#75
post #73

I think Immich checks a lot of these https://immich.app/

Been running Immich for a couple years now and it has been awesome. There are a few rough edges but I’m sure most of them will be smoothed out by the first stable release.

Haven't had great results with the AI portion though, even with the recommended model. Embeddings seem really poor, and has lots of misses and false positives.

Given how good the new multimodal models are, I've been thinking it would be much better to just have a multimodal model describe the image, and let the searching be done by the already included melleisearch.

That said, due to reasons I haven't had time to mess with it past couple of months, so perhaps something drastic has changed.

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

#76
post #58
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? E…

Memories and Recognize work fine with the base Nextcloud docker image. My host has a GPU so I use go-vod to leverage hardware transcoding. The base NC docker image can't access Nvidia cards (probably other GPUs as well). I could script in a way to do this but would need to run it after each update. Recognize runs fine on my CPU so I haven't explored this yet.

I have an OpenMediaVault VM with a 10tb volume in the network that runs the S3 plugin (Minio-based) which is connected through Nextcloud's external storage feature (I want to migrate to Garage soon). I believe notify_push helps desktop clients cut down on the chatter when querying the external storage folder. Limiting the users that can access this also helps.

I was having issues getting the notify_push app [1] to work in the container with my reverse-proxy. I found some similar setups that did this [2], so I added another nextcloud container to the docker-compose yaml like so:

    notify_push:
    image: nextcloud
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 7867:7867
    depends_on:
      - app
    environment:
      - PORT=7867
      - NEXTCLOUD_URL=http://:8081
    entrypoint: /var/www/html/custom_apps/notify_push/bin/x86_64/notify_push /var/www/html/config/config.php
    volumes:
      - /path/to/nextcloud/customapps:/var/www/html/custom_apps
      - /path/to/nextcloud/config:/var/www/html/config 
[1] - https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/notify_push

[2] - https://help.nextcloud.com/t/docker-caddy-fpm-notify-push-ca...

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

#78
Slightly Off Topic: I have always wanted (old) Apple to make Time Machine / Personal Cloud where Data is stored and processed in my property. While only offering Subscription based storage as long term storage Cloud backup and software update.

For Features. I dont know why there's isn't a tag for Screen Caps. I made lots of them and I want to group them together.

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

#79
post #26

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.

e2ee makes it easier to sell their hosted version, and there's probably not enough incentive to justify the additional overhead of having an unencrypted option.

Also, my house is less secure than commercial data centers, so e2ee gives me greater peace of mind about data safety.

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

#80
post #26

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.

If there's a server involved, there's no reason not to have sensitive files and information end-to-end encrypted, whether self-hosting or not.
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