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Self-hosted Photo Gallery

Last modified: Mar 21st, 2024

Problem

Photos are deeply nested in many different folders. There is some organization to the folders but not in a way that easily maps to albums. I want a photo gallery service that will recursively scan all the photos in a directory, ignoring their storage location, then sort them into a timeline using the EXIF datetime stored within. The stored photos should not be modified or copied somewhere else. All other features are negotiable.

Options

Taken from https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/photo-and-video-galleries.html

• Home Gallery
  • Type/JavaScript
  • Heavy size client (bad), light for features (good)
  • Demo looks good
• Lychee
  • PHP
  • I’ve seen it before
  • Docs seem bad?
  • Doesn’t seem to support FS scanning, only upload?
• LibrePhotos
  • Python
  • Allows for scanning photos from the filesystem
  • Can’t disable ML stuff
• Photoview
  • Typescript + Go
  • “Scan-based approach”
  • Reason for creation closely matches what I’m looking for
  • “organised in the same way as on the filesystem” - maybe a no go
• PhotoPrism
  • Many people seem to use this, including people I know
  • Most GitHub stars
  • Allows for scanning photos from the filesystem
  • Supports feature flags for disabling tensorflow stuff
  • Has some payment-gated features like advanced multi-user

Decision

I use PhotoPrism and it works well.