Live data from Hacker News

Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

photobox.dev

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#21
post #14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immich is self hosted and open source

My only gripe with Immich is it renames the files to UUIDs, and stores them in its own directory structure. This works ok if you are only backing up images from your phone as file names don't make sense anyway, but if you have existing backups it makes it harder to sync them. I am planning to use NextCloud for the sync, as I like its YEAR/MONTH/FILE structure, and configuring it as an external library in Immich. I co…

Immich has a concept of storage template, which you can use to set the directory layout using year and month and maintain the original filename.

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only gripe with Immich is it renames the files to UUIDs, and stores them in its own directory structure. This works ok if you are only backing up images from your phone as file names don't make sense anyway, but if you have existing backups it makes it harder to sync them. I am planning to use NextCloud for the sync, as I like its YEAR/MONTH/FILE structure, and configuring it as an external library in Immich. I co…

I’ve been playing with it the last week and there’s an option to load “external libraries” as read only. It seems to work nice for my existing photos.

External libraries are no longer readonly in the latest release as many users wanted to be able to delete photos in external libraries, but you can mount the Docker volume containing your external library as readonly if the readonly aspect is important to you.

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#23
post #19
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only gripe with Immich is it renames the files to UUIDs, and stores them in its own directory structure. This works ok if you are only backing up images from your phone as file names don't make sense anyway, but if you have existing backups it makes it harder to sync them. I am planning to use NextCloud for the sync, as I like its YEAR/MONTH/FILE structure, and configuring it as an external library in Immich. I co…

copying and renaming files would be an immediate fail criteria. there is no way that i am going to let it copy and rename 1TB of photos. but you say it can also use external libraries? so it does not copy those?

> but you say it can also use external libraries? so it does not copy those?

Yes, it only renames files automatically sync'd from your phone. My understanding is it creates a separate metadata file for each external file, but doesn't touch the actual files in an external library.

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#24
post #10

Does anyone know of an offline photo manager with object detection search? All I want is an app which I can point at a folder and then search for "cat" or whatever and have it show all the pictures with cats. Seems like all the photo apps I look at are either vastly over-engineered or lack this kind of visual search/tagging.

Digikam

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only gripe with Immich is it renames the files to UUIDs, and stores them in its own directory structure. This works ok if you are only backing up images from your phone as file names don't make sense anyway, but if you have existing backups it makes it harder to sync them. I am planning to use NextCloud for the sync, as I like its YEAR/MONTH/FILE structure, and configuring it as an external library in Immich. I co…

Immich has a concept of storage template, which you can use to set the directory layout using year and month and maintain the original filename.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Do you know why it is disabled by default? The docs say "for stability reasons" but don't elaborate further.

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#26
post #10

Does anyone know of an offline photo manager with object detection search? All I want is an app which I can point at a folder and then search for "cat" or whatever and have it show all the pictures with cats. Seems like all the photo apps I look at are either vastly over-engineered or lack this kind of visual search/tagging.

immich did this perfectly. see https://www.reddit.com/r/immich/comments/1bdi3dz/immich_is_a...

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#27
It is often good for the ecosystem that we have choice of tools for a given task, so I applaud the general effort gone into this additional "Google Photos 'Clone'".

Here the challenge is to actually understand what "Google Photos" is before claiming that this is a Clone.

In order to successfully clone Google Photos, one needs:

1.- A backing storage.

2.- A web application.

3.- A mobile application (and optionally a desktop application).

4.- A data synchronization model to maintain a 2-way sync between backing storage and each locally installed application.

5.- A data model of pictures, timeline, and albums, that does not depend on where the picture is physically stored (for example, I can create an album on my phone offline, and whenever I come online the sync happens and the same album appears on the web application view).

6.- AI features (eg. face detection) sprinkled on top of the backing storage, and available on both web application and locally installed applications.

From a cursory review, this current attempt only satisfies 1 and 2.

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immich has a concept of storage template, which you can use to set the directory layout using year and month and maintain the original filename.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Do you know why it is disabled by default? The docs say "for stability reasons" but don't elaborate further.

Historically there were integrity issues with the storage template, these should now be resolved however. The reason is disabled is quite simply that most users don't need it and it can cause a lot of IO in some scenarios, for example if your upload and library directories are on different mount points.

Re: Photobox – Free Open Source Google Photos Clone

#30
post #27

It is often good for the ecosystem that we have choice of tools for a given task, so I applaud the general effort gone into this additional "Google Photos 'Clone'". Here the challenge is to actually understand what "Google Photos" is before claiming that this is a Clone. In order to successfully clone Google Photos, one needs: 1.- A backing storage. 2.- A web application. 3.- A mobile application (and optionally a de…

7.- A method to proactively decrease quality of all images to save storage, and delete all images if you don't look at them for 2 years or have too many.

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791

Post reply on HN