I’ve seen a lot of recommends for Immich on here, so I have an idea what the answer here is going to be, but I’m looking for some comparisons between it and Photoprism I’m currently using Synology Photos, and I think my biggest issue is it’s lack of metadata management. I’ve gotten around that with MetaImage and NeoFinder. I’m considering moving to something not tied to the Synology environment.
Throwing another possible contender out there: Nextcloud Memories. Seems like an interesting solution if you’re already running Nextcloud.
There’s an FOSS android gallery app for Nextcloud that’s super nice too
The biggest factor that decided which one for me all fell down to the mobile experience. I take all my photos on my phone, and I want a solution that will auto upload and allow me to browse them like Google Photos. Immich does a fantastic job with this. I haven’t found a better solution than it yet
Immich vs Photoprism.
Winner = Immich
Best comparison ever
It’s succinct. I’ll give you that!
Both great projects I would also put librephotos to the equation with its feature rich unofficial android client Uhuru photos
All have great android apps and great Dev base
Have tried all three and also tried every other selfhosted image gallery
Photoprim is overall the most mature and complete in features
Yes it requires a third party app to sync your assets but the auto index feature if you sync to their webdav endpoint is killer. This means the proccess from the moment of taking a picture till it shows up in your photoprism gallery is “instant”
Also the unofficial android client is super great and almost android TV compatible
So
To be honest there is not a fair answer You really have to hey them all
:-)
I’m happy with photoprism for a single user. I don’t like their subscription model, and will never pay an on-going fee. There’s a chance they will move more features behind that paywall. I did pay the one-time unlock for the automatic upload companion app, but that seems like a core feature they should implement.
Honestly im all about nextcloud photos.
Do you mean Memories?
How many photos do you store there that you recommend it? Like 500? With any serious number of photos Nextcloud starts loading for minutes and the android app autoupload goes tits up.
That bug is open for years and if with so many users affected and a commercial entity behind this project nobody has fixed it yet, I doubt it’s fixable without a very major rewrite.
Nextcloud Memories is very fast. Photos is indeed a nightmare.
I’ve got something in the region of 80gb of jpeg and raw files.
Probably 8000-9000 photos.
Yeah syncing from my phone was a bear, but I just let it run overnight.
Also not using iOS for what it’s worth. iOS is a shithole when it comes to overaggressive battery optimisation.
It was around 10k-15k photos that the server stopped working well. I’m surprising syncing on Android worked well for you with 8k photos though, there are so many bug reports on Github with cases like mine where it just stops working with 2k photos. Not slow, but failing to sync at all.
With any serious number of photos Nextcloud starts loading for minutes
What is this serious number you have in mind? I’m the first one thinking that some of the design choices behind nextcloud are laughable, and that their attitude towards code quality and best practices is inadequate, but even then I don’t think this threshold is easily reached.
Well. It just stopped working after the 2k items mark for me. Had to increase php memory and all for almost 6GB to make it work. Still sluggish AF. It’ll be just my file bucket for now on. EDIT: I will like to add, Immich is now with 32k assets for me, working flawlessly and only using 300MB when active of memory.
I am about 3 orders of magnitude beyond you in terms of content, and I host that on 2GB RAM and a CPU that scores 440 on CPU benchmark.net . You might want to check your configuration, perhaps starting from the database (I use PG), then server (php-fpm). I don’t even use redis for caching, just the basic APC.
Some people have luck like this and guess they’re the ones advocating. I first had a hand-installed instance with all the recommended optimizations like Redis, and then I started fresh with Docker + Redis. In both cases, after 10-15k files it was extremely slow. Both on server hardware with plenty of RAM.
To be totally fair, in my long history with it, I’ve been complaining more about the bad performance of nextcloud than the opposite (I still do), but things improved quite significantly after I moved (a long time ago) to postgresql+pgbouncer, which made it acceptable. Tuning did the rest.
There can be several reasons why your experience with nextcloud is not optimal. For instance, if you have a slow mechanical drive and a weak 2-cores CPU like I do, it’s enough to hit a large folder with many pictures for the first time to have it grind to a halt: the server will become IO and CPU starved while php-fpm fork bombs (on a default config) way too many imagemagick processes to render miniatures of the photos, which, when those are large, will make sure to eat the little amount of RAM you had left, further pushing you into swap and memory-compression territory, making things even worse IO & CPU-wise. This is easily mitigated by rendering the miniatures asynchronously via a cronjob and making sure that there is a reasonable limit to php-fpm’s parallelism to keep your app, navigation and overall system responsive.
Honestly, this is basic sysadmin/tuning stuff, that only you (with the knowledge of your hardware) can do right (and should do, the reward is immense). And it might very well be that nextcloud is (much) more demanding than other apps due to its inherently bad design & stack. It does the job, though, and isn’t afraid of taking hundreds of thousands of files.
I’ve got the cron job and used Postgres in my previous instance. Limiting fpm concurrency is good insight, Ihavee not done that.
But do you know what works without all that and loads instantly? Photoprism.
Photoprism better for single user. More stable, prettier, more free license.
Immich has support for multiple libraries, and sharing with your other users. Immich has better ai tools. I’m using immich because I just had a baby and want to see the pictures my wife takes of her.
I also vastly prefer having a single, canon source of photos. I syncthing my library to my laptop for full control (and backup). It’s happened before when migrating my server app that I need to reimport all my pictures into a new database. It’s super easy if they’re all in one spot.
When Photoprism adds multi library, I’ll probably switch back. With the main reason being license.
