PhotoPrism: AI-powered photos app for the decentralized web

The deal breaker for me was that there was no way to share the entire inventory of my photos without providing admin access. Does anyone know if that feature has been provided?

(*) I used to be able to find some pictures using simple keywords like "dog" but Google finds far fewer pictures with those keywords any more. OTOH, it is amusing to see the interpretation of some of my photos in Photoprism, but I suspect that will get better with time.

Docker is the one thing that works on MANY flavors of Linux.

If I want to provide a tool I want to spend my time on building the tool, not building an rpm, a snap, a deb, ...

The Docker build process is significantly easier. For example, I can just pull in NodeJS 20. I can't do that on Ubuntu. It's not available on packages.ubuntu.com.

Building a deb/snap/rpm is a whole other language to understand how dependencies are set up.

And then I need to test those. I've never even ran CentOS.

Unfortunately, if you've used Google Takeout or other systems that can both downsample your photos and videos, as well as actually deleting _or changing_ metadata, deduplicating becomes a big wad of heuristics.

My first approach was to build a UID based on a series of metadata fields (like captured-at time, the shutter count of the camera body, and the geohash), but that breaks when metadata is missing or edited from their sibling variants.

Just finding what assets to compare against by time proved to be problematic in some edge cases. By storing in UTC (which is how I've built systems for the last thirty years!) made any file that didn't encode a time zones be wrong by whatever the correct offset was--almost all videos, and many RAW file formats don't have timezones. The solution I came up with was to encoding captured-at time _in the local time_, rather than UTC. I also infer or extract a milliseconds of precision for the date stamp, so files with more or less precision will still overlap during the initial captured-at query.

If you're interested, more details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplica...

My main point here is to expose how deep this rabbit hole goes—I'd suggest you think about these different scenarios, and how aggressive or conservative you want to be in duplicate aggregation, and what you want to do with inexact duplicates.

Most importantly: have full offline backups before you use any deduping or asset management system. When (not if) the tool you're using behaves differently from how you expected, you won't have lost any data.