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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?

#91

Post by lylo »

elevaet wrote: post #81

I think a really valuable feature in a photo library app would be something that can identify sets of very similar or identical photos and decide which one is the "best" and offer to discard the rest. I must be wasting so much storage on the 4 photos I took in a row of the family pose, or derivatives that got shared on whatsapp and then stored back to my gallery, and so on, and I know I'm not the only one.

Yeah. Lots of “culling” software out there but agree it would be a good feature for standard photo organisation apps

https://imagen-ai.com/

https://aftershoot.com/

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

#92

Post by graealex »

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.

To avoid the same debacle that already happened once with Video Station?

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

#93

Post by indigodaddy »

wooben wrote: post #76
jan_tse wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 netw…

Who's your host?

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

#94

Post by darkwater »

denysvitali wrote: post #54
bargainbin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I backup my immich photos in B2 with rclone but I prefer having it as a separate process (also, the backup is append-only). I don't need "hyperscale", and storing directly on S3/B2/remotely breaks a bit the 3-2-1 rule I want to follow.

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

#95

Post by fwn »

jamesxv7 wrote: post #63
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.

I currently use Ente.io as a secondary photo syncing service in addition to Google Photos.

While I really like it — snappy and encrypted — I was surprised by how much the missing Ultra HDR implementation affects me. Photos are currently uploaded with brightness information but not displayed with it. Therefore, my photos look great in Google Photos but far less vivid in Ente.

For what it's worth, I found a discussion about Ultra HDR. It doesn't seem to be a priority right now, though: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/779

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

#96

Post by denysvitali »

darkwater wrote: post #94
denysvitali wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I backup my immich photos in B2 with rclone but I prefer having it as a separate process (also, the backup is append-only). I don't need "hyperscale", and storing directly on S3/B2/remotely breaks a bit the 3-2-1 rule I want to follow.

On B2 (and S3 storage in general) you can set a retention policy for what happens after you delete an object (e.g: object lock with persistance for at least 30 days). Of course this is not a substitute for a backup - but it's better than discovering that you deleted your whole 1TB library when it's too late

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

#97

Post by itsgabriel »

elevaet wrote: post #81

I think a really valuable feature in a photo library app would be something that can identify sets of very similar or identical photos and decide which one is the "best" and offer to discard the rest. I must be wasting so much storage on the 4 photos I took in a row of the family pose, or derivatives that got shared on whatsapp and then stored back to my gallery, and so on, and I know I'm not the only one.

Both Immich and PhotoPrism do have this feature: https://immich.app/docs/administration/system-settings#dupli... https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/library/duplicates/

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

#98

Post by i-am-gizm0 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #86
lucideer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been running immich on my home server for about a year now. Near zero maintenance stack, incredibly easy to update, the client mobile apps even notify you (unobtrusively) when your server has an update available. The UI is just so polished & features so stable it's hard to believe it's open source.

This seems in stark contrast to others complaining enough about breaking updates that I haven't bothered to try it until it is deemed "stable". Is it really that stable and flawless in terms of updates? Because I'm sat here with ZFS, snapshotting and replication configured and wondering why people scare others off of it when the tools to mitigate issues are all free and should be used anyway as part of a bog-standard…

I've also been running it for a year or two now. There used to be a lot more "breaking" releases but that's slowed way down recently as they approach a "stable" release. As long as you don't use Watchtower or other tools that blindly update containers immediately, you're all set. When there are breaking changes, they are extremely clearly marked in the release notes with migration steps included. So as long as you read those you're all set

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

#99

Post by akho »

zzyzxd wrote: post #79
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.

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.

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

I think you overestimate security of data centers.

At rest, you use full-disk encryption anyway, so the extra layer just makes things harder.

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

#100

Post by akho »

prophesi wrote: post #80
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.

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.

You do want to have things encrypted in transit and at rest. e2ee means server admins (I) cannot access the user's (mine) photos.
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