I think their actual multi-user story is somewhat lacking, but if you want a shared picture dump with some features that help sorting through a bunch of random images it should work well.
I've tried most of these tools at home and I tried to get on with Photoprism, but once I got to the point where I'd increased the VM RAM size all the way to 32GB and it was still eating it all, I gave up; the experience wasnt quite right particularly for multi-user; what's the use in a family photo library if my wife can't access it too?
Right now I'm working on a desktop tool (Linux-first because that's what I run) to take a bunch of folders as input, find duplicates and let you clean up the duplicates or "merge to destination" because this has been one thing I've struggled to find something nice to use for.
It's early days and I'm only so far at the point of hashing images and detecting and counting duplicates, but as an experienced backend software engineer the UI tools are a real learning curve.
I'm also trying to make the UX clean and simple with next to no UX nouse.
I'm using Wails + Svelte; I've not worked with Node, Svelte or Wails before so I may or may not end up switching techs but the backend is in Go.
It's not one of these photo gallery/management tools but I've been finding that really, all I honestly need for my family photos that are reaching terabytes in size is: that I'm not waating space and I have a good archive of everything in one place.
I'm curious if this is a tool others might be interested in.
Weird. I'm interested to know your setup. Did you use MariaDB or the built in SQLite?
I have photoprism running on docker, which is running as a VM on a proxmox server that is a 13 year old Dell Optiplex 9020. Only 6Gb ram dedicated to the VM (2GB initial, ballon to 6GB), and photoprism uses 2 workers. I have a large 50k set of photo's from starting from when my daughter was born till now (17). I have never sorted through these photo's other than to dump them from my phone every 6 months (camera before smartphones become common). Initial import took less than 45 minutes and that was before tweaking settings. Full manual index with all options, still takes less than 45. Initial face recognition was about 33 people, once I tweaked settings, it's recognized 97 people with little input from me other than tagging the name correctly for a few photo's per person.
The only difference in my docker file vs the official are optimized settings, and I'm using a separate VM for the database server as I find multi tendency and backups easier with a VM. (VM only has 2GB ram allocated to it)
I'm extremely happy with it, as I always put off organizing my photo collect due to how massive it is. It's made the task so much easier.
I am however always looking for other tools. I'm interested in give yours a try, just wanted see what could be the massive difference in experiences.
I don't remember specifics, though I can find out; I have it seemed in Kubernetes with hand written manifests. I had to tie Photoprism to a specific node which had had more resources than it's peers; I would have to refer to the manifests to recall which DB I used. All storage was over NFS (meaning the storage speed was limited by my 1Gb network backbone), which probably created some of the resource issues.
Edit: as for my tool, it won't replace Photoprism, its primary goal is to deduplicate your photo library.
Not sure about the memory requirements. My container currenty uses 128MB RES memory. But I also only have a couple thousand images. Not sure how strictly in memory some DB/structures are.
I assume importing an existing library takes a lot, as it does the inference/training for face detection and auto-tagging.
I've seen that it uses a lot of CPU at least, haven't looked into the memory.
Multi-user is lacking to missing. I'm not 100% sure which state photoprism is in, as I was shopping for a self host service.
OTOH I don't care about that for family. I'm not hosting anything for untrusted people, or to default backup everything, but as common library. So I'm fine if everyone sees everything and expect people to play nice.
But I do agree that multi user (and maybe integrated auto-sync for phones) are major missing features. I'm just in the situation that it doesn't really matter to me currently.
That's fair enough. Same situation for me really I don't need the auth functionality.
The way I had Photoprism set up is that mine and my wife's phones would sync images nightly to the server, the photos would be rsyncd from the public facing sync server to an internal one (not in the DMZ) then I'd have the server send me a link to the import page on Photoprism because it lacks the feature to autosync when new files are added; I think having to open the page while on LAN (link was internal only) and click a button was the straw that broke the camels back here for me.
I think I also had something like 10-12 cores dedicated to it, which alongside the RAM use that constantly crept up, and the manual intervention, was just too much for a photo management tool that wasn't really even managing the photos in a way that was useful to us.
I haven't tried PhotoPrism, but I'll give it a whirl. In my case, I'm looking for the best way to enable multiple family members to upload, tag, and effectively browse tens of thousands of photographs as we all continue digitizing family albums.
I'm currently using HomeGallery[0] behind Authelia[1] for authentication to view so many images effectively. For uploading, I'd been using Nextcloud, but it began to lag noticeably after a few thousand photos. I switched to FileRun[2] with symlink'd photo directories and a user for each family.
With HomeGallery, I get the desired performance on mobile devices with de-duplication and tagging. My instance detects objects fine, but I owe it troubleshooting time to figure out face recognition. The "similar images" feature can be fun with so many photos. A nice tagging modal on keybind per image would be a nice-to-have.
Using FileRun for uploads works fine, but I also needed a continuous cron job for docker exec to generate any missing thumbnails.
I tried it, but was surprised by the way it imports pictures.
It does it in few steps, like reading metadata, creating thumbnails, transcoding for browsers, face detection, nudity detection (lol they really do have it) etc etc. The thing is _all_ the steps are performed for each picture/video in your library. Picture 5 won't be even visible in your library until pictures 1,2,3 and 4 don't have all the thumbnails, optimized versions, labels from TF model, detected nudity and many other things.
My 10yo two-core celeron nuc begged for help, I couldn't see it suffer.
I tried to contact devs on github, the response was "go import all your 40K pictures manually, subfolder by subfolder". I checked, it's now marked as "accepted answer", haha.
I think their actual multi-user story is somewhat lacking, but if you want a shared picture dump with some features that help sorting through a bunch of random images it should work well.