Ask HN: What are some self-hosted photo organizing/sharing programs?

+1 for Synology photos. I back up automatically to my NAS, and sharing is a breeze.

If you're going down the "self-hosted" path, Synology will be the answer a lot of the time. All your music and videos, etc. There's even a Google Docs-like office suite.

I'm have kiwix on mine via docker and have self-hosted Wikipedia.

Seconding plex. I was able to share photos with family, even grandparents, by giving them access to our plex share.

I always thought Serviio was a much better option than Plex, and has the benefit of working much better with any DLNA client.

I thought they removed this functionality awhile ago. It appears I am mistaken.

I have both configured. Photoprism doesn't have a native app but I would recommend using PhotoSync if you are on iOS. It works infinitely better than Immich's upload for camera rolls that have 50k+ photos/videos in them. It also works in the background much better than Immichs app.

Does the Monument device have the option to share albums/folders across the Internet? Do I need to open a hole in my firewall for this?

Edit: I've reached out to the Monument team as well.

Don't recommend this. Bare metal install is very outdated nowadays. You surely want to use your server for multiple purposes down the line. You shouldn't install every app directly on your main OS - any misconfiguration or problem will bring down all other services, or make a machine-wide security issue. Also an attacker of one app will gain instant access to your whole server.

- Either use something simple and user friendly, like Synology with it's marketplace apps - Or use virtualisation host OS that allows you to install multiple containers/virtual machines, each for your own application, like Proxmox - Add containers via some container manager like Portainer or CapRover

Maybe these options seem like a bit more complicated first, but you will be very thankful for the invested time.

Neat! I'm the solo developer of PhotoStructure.

Know that there's a very active community of PhotoStructure users on Discord: https://photostructure.com/go/discord/ -- although I opened it as just another support channel, it's evolved to include discussions about future feature work, self-hosting, digital archival, privacy news, hardware, and photography, too.

I self-host https://forum.photostructure.com/ that uses Discourse, but it has 10-20x fewer posts on it than Discord.

OP: Make sure you get backups in place (and one offline) before trying any of the software suggested here--it reduces your risk from "oh-no-what-have-I-done" and "what-in-the-actual-heck-is-this-app-doing-and-where-did-all-my-files-go" to zero.

I have been hosting it locally for a couple of months now.

Stuff I like:

  - The mobile app is quite friendly
  - It supports "automatic upload" (after opening the app)
  - It supports deleting pictures from the device after uploading (to save space... much needed on the wife's old iphone)
  - The pictures are stored hierarchically on the filesystem
  - Very lightweight (the whole docker setup uses less than 128MB of RAM)

Stuff I'm not a fan of:

  - The web interface is "okay". It could use some modernizing.
  - When there's no more space on the device, the app fails to upload new pictures, but gives no error message.

All in all, Piwigo is a solid 7.5/10 for me, but I'm watching and testing some other active software such as https://immich.app/

I'm a fan, especially the virtual folders that can be based on tags, that I add with digikam.

I'm a fan, makes it super easy to go on vacation with family, suck in all the photos from 5 cameras, and tag them all. It's particularly good at things like select 2 weeks of photos, tag them with the vacation location, then pick ranges to tag bears, rainbows, avalanches, people, flowers, waterfalls, etc.

Granted I suspect 90% of my tag usage is grand parents finding all the grand kid photos. It works really well with piwigo mentioned on another thread.

I use DigiKam as well, under Windows 10. Recently the facial recognition has gotten better, and it's far less crashy than it used to be. I've got about 400,000 photos taking 650 Gigabytes.

If you’re feeling adventurous you can run the synology dsm os in a vm (qemu/kvm in my case). You use tinycore[0] as a boot loader to bootstrap the official Synology image[1]

It can be a bit of a pain to setup but once it’s up and running you can run all synology apps, including photos and even their nvr software, backup your home pcs to it, etc. If you pass through pci sata controllers you can bypass any disk virtualization layer and let synology manage raw disks exactly like a metal install in one of their nas machines would do. You could even swap the disks into an official nas later on if you wanted. The synology apps are highly polished and worth the setup imo.

There’s also a docker image that makes it all trivial, but it’s too many layers of abstraction for my tastes[2]

0. https://github.com/pocopico/tinycore-redpill

1. https://www.wundertech.net/how-to-install-xpenology-on-proxm...

2. https://github.com/kroese/virtual-dsm

Howdy! I'm the author of PhotoStructure.

PhotoStructure does exactly what you're asking: https://photostructure.com/getting-started/automatic-library...

Note that this is a paid feature, but I give free trials (without giving a credit card!), and discounts to a ton of people--including equalization for living in a country with less buying power, open source developers, and "making the world a better place." Details are here: https://photostructure.com/about/pricing/

If you can't make it work for your situation, please post to the support forum https://forum.photostructure.com/ or hop into the discord channel https://photostructure.com/go/discord : we'll try our best to get you set up.

Owncloud Infinite Scale is a rewrite of Owncloud which NextCloud forked from.

Any of these. You can access your server locally via its IP address (disclaimer: some might require additional configuration as they require a pre-set hostname)

That's not really "photo organizing / sharing", that's just a directory listing.

What you want from a photo specific software is things like thumbnails, exif info, powerful search, maybe indexing the content of the pictures (Searching for "dog") etc.