Photoprism as Google Photos Replacement - My Experience

arkadi · December 4, 2020, 11:26pm

Anybody else heard of, or using Photoprism? GitHub - photoprism/photoprism: Photos App powered by Go and Google TensorFlow 🌈

Since Google is starting to charge for storage starting in June, I installed it on my Yunohost server to check it out.

If interested in my setup, click below.

If you guys don’t use Photoprism, do you use any other self-hosted photo program?

Nesakko · December 5, 2020, 12:47am

A very nice post, I didn’t know Photoprism at all, I’ll take a look at it on my side.
For self-hosted photo programs, I use Piwigo, it’s clearly not as advanced as Photoprism, even if the web interface and themes looks old, it’s more than enough for my general use. Whether it’s to store my photos and images, or to share, it works very well and requires few resources

Tho · December 6, 2020, 9:00pm

Are you interested on packaging it for Yunohost ? I think many people would be grateful

arkadi · December 7, 2020, 6:56am

Sadly, I don’t know the first thing about packaging things. It is also run through Docker, so I don’t think it would be very worthwhile to ‘package’ this.

To get the snazzy tile in the Yunohost online part, I think I just need to install this: https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/redirect_ynh

arkadi · December 7, 2020, 7:24am

What I will do, is write a setup guide for dummies like me using Yunohost. I just about finished setting up mine the way I like it.

Tho · December 7, 2020, 11:26am

Yeaaah thank you !!

arkadi · December 13, 2020, 1:32am

Here is a setup guide for Yunohost

I still can’t get it to properly redirect with NGINX. I am terrible at NGINX. Maybe somebody else can help me figure that out.

But if you follow my guide you’ll be having it working locally.

tituspijean · December 13, 2020, 10:55am

Thanks for the tutorial! Based on my experience with Photoprism and YunoHost on a small VPS:

Open Ports in your Router/Firewall
sudo yunohost firewall allow Both 2342
Router, do it like you did before for Yunohost.
NOTE: Is this necessary? Not sure.

It is indeed not necessary, and actually dangerous since people could go to yourdomain.tld:2342 and bypass the SSO.

ERROR: I can access domain.tld/photos but just shows a massive Photoprism logo.

My guess is that PhotoPrism expects to be installed at the root of a domain, so if you install the Redirect app on photo.domain.tld, path /, it will work. I have just tested that on my server.

Maybe you could have it working by setting domain.tld and path /photo for the Redirect app while having set PHOTOPRISM_SITE_URL: "https://domain.tld/photo" in the docker-compose.yml. I will leave it to you to test it.

arkadi · December 14, 2020, 6:49am

Got it! Will update my tutorial. Thanks!

polochon · December 15, 2020, 8:49am

Thanks for sharing!
I also use piwigo, but photoprism seems very interesting!

2 questions:

is it possible to see .mp4 videos? Photoprism talks only about AVC1 https://docs.photoprism.org/user-guide/organize/video/
how is the android app? Piwigo’s one is (almost) only a viewer, and bulk upload is not possible.

Polochon

arkadi · December 16, 2020, 1:37pm

AVC1 is a codec for mp4s. It uses ffmpeg internally to transcode movies to mp4 with AVC1 codec. The only problem I’ve had with videos are my MJPEG videos from about 2017 made with my old Canon powershot.
There is no app yet, but it works just great in a web browser though.

polochon · December 17, 2020, 8:27am

Thanks for your repy, I should test it!

arkadi · December 22, 2020, 4:09am

Updated tutorial:

Remove Floating Yunohost Button
The floating navigation button is very intrusive when using Photoprism on mobile. It gets in the way, so the best thing is to disable it.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/photos.domain.tld/redirect.conf

Comment out these lines:

#Include SSOWAT user panel.
#include conf.d/yunohost_panel.conf.inc;
#moreclearinput_headers ‘Accept-Encoding’;

henicosa · November 29, 2021, 4:17pm

Hey arkadi,
any long time experience? I would like to take a look at your guide but it is not available anymore… Would it bother you to bring it online again?

arkadi · November 30, 2021, 5:00am

Sorry. I recently switched my blog to Hugo. I updated the links above.

Photoprism is working splendidly for me. We have facial recognition now!

DaniJohni · December 12, 2021, 11:23pm

Hey,
The links are still not working, would love to read your blog .

arkadi · December 13, 2021, 2:48am

link up! any questions, let me know.

agichim · December 13, 2021, 10:15am

Hi,

This question is more related to docker.

I can’t install docker by simply doing sudo apt install docker-compose. Reading through docker docs it seems I have to first install Docker engine and continue with the repo installation.

Any advice on this?
I don’t want to just simply install docker on a VPS with Yunohost installed. I’m too new to this and I’m unsure of what could break.

On the other hand, I’m very keen on installing docker as I’d like to install another app, paperless-ng and your tutorial, @arkadi for Photoprism is really good to try and replicate for paperless-ng.

Cheers

arkadi · December 13, 2021, 12:01pm

Docker won’t break Yunohost, don’t worry. Docker is quite self-contained. If it does mess something up, reboot, and uninstall docker.

As many docker services will caution, make sure you don’t set your docker apps to ‘autorestart’ until you’ve tested it works.

Zinkie · January 10, 2022, 3:31am

I’m really interested in PhotoPrism mainly for it’s ability to automatically recognize people. Most of my photos are on my Yunohost Nextcloud install, which is accessible via webdav. I see that Photoprism can access webdav mounts. Do you know if it’s possible for Photoprism to just tag images in a way that Nextcloud can read? I’d love for my family to just be able to click on the “Kids” tag in Nextcloud and have it automatically show all of the photos of my kids…