PhotoPrism

Best photo management app i used!

Someone who is not familiar with Docker may have difficulty using this.

Photoprism could be great but it has two major issues:

1. the default database it uses doesn’t work with the product, and they know it. If you go to their documentation, you’ll find a whole section about migrating from SQLlite to MariaDB and how SQLlite doesn’t work and they recommend MariaDB. Ok… sure… why are you using SQLlite then? It makes it so much harder to use if you have to set up your own database, and if you’re like me and you don’t see this info before importing all 30,000 of your photos, you have to worry about how tedious and technical it is to migrate from one database to another.

2. you can’t batch edit metadata. This is such basic functionality that it’s kinda mind blowing it isn’t included yet, especially since the GitHub ticket about this issue was opened in 2021, it’s been two years and still not implemented. How the hell am I supposed use labels if I can’t batch edit them? We’re talking orders of magnitude more time to do the work I need to do.

These are huge problems. It doesn’t help that the AI doesn’t work nearly as well as it would need to to justify these problems. For instance, I uploaded about 30 photos of my girlfriend the other day and it recognized her face in one photo. It didn’t even recognize that there was a face in the rest, and btw you can’t manually add a face to the photo if it doesn’t recognize one 😮‍💨

Face detection was very efficient. The navigation speed is fast. I try the new nextcloud feature (September 2022) and it was very slow and not efficient.

I have updated this comment. It's not that easy to find the 'sponsored information' on their website (it's not listed on the 'feature comparison' between versions for example) but in the app to change the theme I was sent to Patreon where the options are £2/mo contribution (no 'sponsor' features, including no theme changes) or £6.50/mo for contributor features and theme changes. There is indeed a single payment option for those that want to do that, the only place this is available however is via GitHub.

Given my experience was installing the app, expecting it to look like the screenshots available everywhere (that's not the install you'll get, more of a 'grey and white' looking main interface, rather than the white on black featured in screenshots) and then ending up on Patreon looking at the prices I felt this was disingenuous, especially as this is where I ended up looking for how to be a contributor.

In the effort of transparency, my original comment is below, which I updated after seeing the links written in a reply and have modified it based on that. For whatever reason I didn't find the Single Payment option (which is $20) and my comment was written from that perspective of frustration, it was not my intent to upset anyone but rather describe my experience so it is not repeated.

Original Comment ~ Early March, 2022:

The software seems okay, but apparently changing the theme of the interface to a dark mode skin is a "sponsored only" feature, which costs £6.50/month on patreon to be given the instructions on how to enable it.

This is not made clear in any of their "getting started pages" so I feel it's quite dishonest, and personally I cannot afford £6.50 a month just so I can have an interface that doesn't make my eyes hurt.

Rather upsetting, really. I can't make this much of a financial contribution to a project. Normally how I contribute to open source software is by reporting issues and if it's written in a language I can code, I can create pull requests for fixes, because I can't afford a financial contribution given I'm on a low income.

I'm gonna have a look at librephotos and try that out and maybe see if I can contribute to their code.