PhotoPrism is a self-hosted, free and open-source photo and video library manager, which can replace services such as Google Photos or Apple Photos. It requires a bit more leg work than those other services to set up, so I have put together this short guide about how I recommend getting started.
When I did my migration, I set up PhotoPrism to work alongside Google Photos so that my photos were available in both services at the same time, and new photos were uploaded to both. That way I could evaluate the services comparatively without committing either way. After I felt good that all my data had been copied over and was accurate, I stopped using Google Photos, and eventually deleted my account data.
First you have to decide where you want to run PhotoPrism. Unlike a commercial cloud service, your photos (and all the software managing them) will live on infrastructure that you own. However, these days it is pretty easy to rent servers online and not have to deal with the inconvenience of server administration.
There is an even simpler option which is to select a fully managed server rental. I decided to go with PikaPods because they are officially recommended by PhotoPrism. You just sign up for an account, ask for a server running PhotoPrism, and they give you one. You don't have to do any installation or software updates.
PikaPods bills hourly, so you only pay for what you use, based on the resources needed by your server. The minimum for PhotoPrism is 2 cores CPU, 8 GB memory, 10 GB storage, for $6.50/month. This is quite cheap as far as servers go so I am pretty happy with it. You can increase the storage later if you need, without any disruption. I personally pay for 150 GB storage, for an extra $1.80/month or so.
You probably want to start by creating a server with the minimum required resources, get things set up, then increase the resources later and add a credit card with autopay if you decide you like it. Don't forget two-factor authentication, that is good to enable on every website, especially ones where you can get billed for people buying things on your account.
Most of the settings in PhotoPrism you can configure through the UI,
there are just a few low-level things that are configured through
PikaPods via "environment variables". Mostly you need to set your
initial password in the PHOTOPRISM_ADMIN_PASSWORD field when
creating your server. Generate a random password and put it in your
password manager. You'll login with that password initially and can
change it later if you want.
One thing to note with PikaPods is after creating the server, it seems you can only change one setting at a time. You have to wait a few minutes after saving changes before you can make more changes. If you get an error about that, try waiting a bit and refreshing the page, then making the change again that you were trying to make.
By default you'll get a randomly generated domain name for your
PhotoPrism server, something.pikapod.net. You can change the
something if you want. Or if you have your own website, you can use
that. For example I have a personal website at
https://intuitiveexplanations.com, so I set up my PhotoPrism server
to be located at https://photos.intuitiveexplanations.com. That way
if I ever decide to move my server to another provider instead of
PikaPods, I can keep using the same domain name.
If you want to set a custom domain you can configure that in the settings. You just have to have access to create DNS records for your website following the instructions in the settings UI. There are guides for this from PikaPods and from other providers because this is a common task. The main thing you have to know is who you are actually renting your domain name from, because that is where you will have to go to manage DNS records.
It'll take a few minutes after configuring a custom domain before things start working, because DNS records take time to propagate and then PikaPods has to provision a TLS certificate which can take a bit of time. If it is still not working after an hour something is probably wrong.
Gotcha: The interface for PikaPods configuring a custom domain is
a little weird. When you enable the checkbox for using a custom
domain, the option for changing the something in
something.pikapod.net goes away, which makes you think it is no
longer relevant. Actually, it is still relevant, just in a less
obvious way. It's used internally for some things like the
administrative database interface, so you will still see it from time
to time. So what I recommend is first changing the something to a
value that makes sense, like yourname-photos, saving your changes,
waiting a few minutes (see above), and then enabling custom domain and
following the directions for that.
Once you have your PhotoPrism domain name set up you should login
using the username admin and the password you entered when creating
the server. You probably want to spend some time clicking around the
UI and seeing how things are laid out.
Things you might want to adjust in the settings page in PhotoPrism:
- General > User Interface - what features are enabled. I turned on
Deleteto make it possible to permanently delete photos, and disabledPlacesandMomentsbecause I don't care about those things particularly. - Library > Index - the Quality Filter option is a bit surprising if you are not expecting it. I turned this off because I found that many of my photos were not showing up after I imported them, which turned out to be because they had been flagged as "low quality" (lol). There's documentation here about the quality filter, maybe it will work better for you.
- Advanced > Global Options - if you run into inexplicable errors when trying to perform an operation then it can be useful to go to PikaPods and check the server logs, which you can do from the server settings page. Oftentimes if an operation shows an error message then there will be more information printed in the logs about what happened. If you aren't getting anything useful from there, you can turn on Debug Logs and maybe get even more info.
- Account - you can upload a profile picture and set your name if you want. Since PhotoPrism is self-hosted nobody will see any of this except you, but maybe you just like filling out form fields.
- Settings > Users - you can create user accounts for other people on your PhotoPrism, so they can e.g. view/edit all your photos even without you sharing them. Maybe if you are using PhotoPrism as a family photo album this would be relevant.
Things to be aware of about the UI that I didn't realize at first:
- Keep a look out for the little triangle arrow icons in the sidebar. Those are clickable and expand more menu options which I didn't realize existed at first. For example if you want to visit the Archive, that's nested under the triangle icon next to Search.
- The "main view" that you would be familiar with from Google/Apple Photos is called Search. Before you search for anything, it just shows all your photos chronologically.
- The Library page isn't really for viewing your library like you might expect. It's more like an operational dashboard which is where you go if you want to import new photos or tell PhotoPrism to re-scan your library.
There are a couple of ways to get photos into PhotoPrism. It might be a good idea to import a couple photos manually just to see what they look like in the interface. The way you do this is in Library > Import and selecting files to upload.
PhotoPrism uses two main folders, "imports" and "originals". The simple workflow is you put new photos into "imports" and they automatically get sorted and categorized, and then placed in a nice subdirectory in "originals" where they live in your library. But if you already know how you want to organize your library, you can manually put photos in "originals" and PhotoPrism will use them as is.
I personally have been sticking to the flow where you just drop stuff in "imports" which is also what happens when you upload photos through the web UI. I selected the "Move files" option on the import page.
After you imported photos, they should show up in the Search page. You can click on them for details, and if you pick "edit" you can see the imported metadata, such as the date and time for the photo.
You may want to get rid of the test photos you uploaded. This is a little less intuitive than I expected. You have to select them and "Archive" using the button at the bottom right, first, then go into the Archive menu (which is nested underneath Search), select them there, and select to delete them. (This option is only available if you've turned on the Delete feature in settings.)
PhotoPrism doesn't have an official mobile app. Instead they have designed the main web interface to be usable on mobile (you can use the "put this website as an icon on the home screen" functionality that is in both iOS and Android these days).
What this means is that, unlike Google/Apple Photos, you have to take care of uploading photos from your phone on your own. It would be a pain to have to do this manually, so there is an app called PhotoSync which does this for you. It's a couple of bucks and is what is officially recommended by PhotoPrism. They support both iOS and Android although I am using the app on Android.
(Note that PhotoPrism is free and open-source, PhotoSync is paid. And what you are paying for with PhotoPrism is just renting a server to run it, you could run it for free on a desktop sitting in your house if you wanted.)
If you are a normal person you can just buy PhotoSync through the iOS Store or Google Play Store. I personally go to great lengths to avoid supporting either Apple or Google, so I shot their support address a mail asking if I could purchase directly. Turns out yes, the CEO very kindly wrote back saying I could download a pre-release version from their Dropbox and send them some money to the company PayPal, and they would assign a license to the unique ID of my installation. So if you want to go to that effort you can. (They also said that in the future they would be building another way to do this direct purchase without having to manually exchange a bunch of emails.)
There is also a 1-week free trial so you can get things started to see if they work before buying.
The first thing you want to do is grant permissions on your files and verify you can see your camera roll photos in the PhotoSync app.
Next you want to go to the settings page and "Transfer Targets >
Configure". This is where you plug in your PhotoPrism server (your
domain name, admin, and password). They have an explicit option for
PhotoPrism, or you can just use the generic WebDAV option, they both
work the same. This documentation
page has
instructions on it.
The main thing that I found different from what the docs said was that
it seems like PhotoSync already knows it is supposed to upload photos
into the import folder (see above). So you don't actually need to
type in /import/ like the guide says, and in fact when I tried, it
ended up failing to upload photos, and the PhotoPrism server logs said
it was erroring out because it was trying to upload to
/import/import/. It seems like /import always gets stuck on at the
beginning, so the destination folder that worked for me was just /
or the default option.
You can also set the filenames that PhotoSync will use when uploading.
I'm not sure if this makes a difference but the PhotoPrism
documentation
says
it's possible for timestamps to be read from filenames, so I figured
it couldn't hurt to set the Upload Settings > File Names format to
Recording Time + Name, just in case the metadata on a photo was ever
broken for some reason, at least there would be a better chance of
things working out.
Other relevant settings I set:
- Delete After Transfer - No, because I want to keep recent photos on my camera roll so they can be viewed without internet, as well as be able to have them also upload to Google Photos in parallel, to evaluate the two systems together.
- Cellular - No Photo, no video, because it should be good enough to wait for wifi for any uploads (Google Photos does this too, by default). But this setting turns out to not really matter too much, see the discussion on Autosync later.
PhotoSync has a couple different options for how and when and what you upload. One thing you have to get comfortable with is that unlike Google/Apple Photos, PhotoSync is a generic system for copying photos from one place to another; it doesn't make the assumption that it has access to your whole library at once. So the place you go for your whole library is really PhotoPrism; PhotoSync is just a tool for copying new photos into there from your camera roll. Because of this there is a bit more complexity about when it makes sense to copy photos.
One thing you notice is blue borders around photos. These indicate the
photos that haven't been uploaded - or at least that PhotoSync doesn't
think have been uploaded. It can't really tell, because as soon as
it uploads a photo, PhotoPrism moves it out of the imports folder
(if you have the "Move files" option enabled like I do). So it keeps
track of that on its own.
You have two options for getting started, either you can have PhotoSync upload everything on your camera roll to begin, or you can select everything and mark it as already uploaded, so only newly taken photos will go into PhotoPrism.
(I took the second option, but then I also exported my Google Photos library using Google Takeout and imported it directly, because uploading 30 GB of photos would have taken forever. See the section later on library import.)
Once you know what's up, you can trigger a sync manually on one or two photos directly from the image browser in PhotoSync to make sure the actual upload process is working, which is probably a good idea. I wouldn't recommend trying to manually sync all photos, because it seems like you can't have it do that in the background, it blocks other usage of the app during the upload process. I guess that's because why not use Autosync instead (see below).
Assuming PhotoSync says the upload process worked for your test photos, you should also check PhotoPrism and see if it has imported them (you can see the progress on the import page) and then indexed them (on a different tab next to the import page). They should end up in the Search view.
It's a good idea to double check that metadata got included properly, so for example the photos sort in the right order chronologically and when you go to edit, all the normal metadata is there. I wasn't having that happen, and it turned out to be because my camera app had an option to strip EXIF data from photos, which was enabled by default. So the metadata was just missing from the photos in my camera roll. I don't know how Google Photos was getting the metadata before, maybe it was just guessing, or spying on me some other way.
Once you've figured out what initial photos you want to sync, you can get autosync set up. This is in the settings menu. You have to pick the conditions when you want photos to be uploaded. These were a little fiddly for me to test if they were working properly. It seems like if you enable an autosync option, it doesn't necessarily start happening right away. But I turned on the option to do uploads in the middle of the night while my phone is charging, and the next morning, it indeed had done that, and it has basically been working as advertised since then. I would configure what makes sense to you and then check back in a few days to see if it's working.
I guess the main alternative would be to configure upload to happen on wifi after each time you take a photo, which is basically what Google Photos does. I guess it would take more battery to do uploads all the time though, and I figured I didn't really need that, so I went with the nightly upload because that seemed more recommended.
I'm still getting started, relatively speaking, with PhotoPrism. It seems like it is missing a feature or two here and there, but the development community seems pretty active and there are good workarounds for a lot of the issues if you are okay with a little inconvenience as the cost of seceding from Google's surveillance-capitalism hegemony.
One disadvantage is there isn't a native mobile app for PhotoPrism, like with Google/Apple photos. This feels pretty reasonable to me actually, because developing mobile apps takes a ton of effort and it's nice they are prioritizing more important things. What you do instead is just go to your PhotoPrism domain in your mobile web browser and click the button to install it as an icon on your home screen. It loads pretty fast and works well on mobile. Obviously it only works while you're online though, so I think it's a good idea to set PhotoSync to leave your photos in your camera roll after upload, so you can still see recently taken photos offline. You just can't search them.
An alternative to using the progressive web app (PWA), meaning "install website on home screen", is that some browsers seem to limit the functionality you have access to when viewing a website in this manner. For example with Firefox on Android I haven't been able to figure out how to copy image URLs in this mode (see question here). So instead I stopped using it that way, and instead when I want to use PhotoPrism on Android, I simply go to it in my normal browser. You could create a bookmark for it.
Another option is to try the unofficial Android app. It doesn't have all the features of the official web version of PhotoPrism but it is more convenient sometimes, so I also have that installed personally. I am not sure what the options are on iOS.
If you want to share an individual photo you can just view it in your library, right-click, and copy the image URL. The image URL has a secret token in it that will let people view it even without authentication, so you can use that to get a "shareable link". You can't "un-share" a photo that was shared in this way, though.
If you want to share a whole album (maybe you could even create an album with just one photo in it), this functionality is built in to PhotoPrism natively. You can use the share button and they have an interface that lets you generate a shareable link, and revoke access later, or set a time limit on how long the link will work.
If you want someone to access your whole library, because it is a joint photo album, you can create them an account for PhotoPrism in the settings page.
You can't edit photos in PhotoPrism directly. Use a separate
application. On Android I use Photo Editor by dev.macgyver and on
desktop I use https://www.photopea.com/, or Krita. You have to
download the photo, edit it in the external application, and then
upload it again as a new copy. Or, if you took the photo on your
phone, and it is still in your camera roll, you could edit it directly
there and upload the new version to PhotoPrism using PhotoSync.
One thing that's odd to me is there isn't a way to reorder the photos in an album manually. You can set a sort order based on e.g. when the photos were taken, but not tweak it manually. I have a thread on the bug tracker about this. The workaround at present is that if you want to change the order of photos in an album, you can edit the photos and change their "date taken" field, and then sort the album by that field. That's what I have done for now but in the future I might try to contribute a pull request to add a drag-and-drop feature.
Another minor issue: photos are sorted based on their naive date-time,
ignoring time zone. Yes, really. I guess this is a bug which will have
to be fixed eventually but the database query literally does an ORDER BY on a column that has the non-time-zone aware version of the
date-time. References:
- photoprism/photoprism#3780 (reply in thread) (point 3 and response from @lastzero)
- <https://matrix.to/#/!DqTvfyRmmWSkpOnbce:gitter.im/$EjU2dpiqZV5zuIS-CHule2boyfIOWxD7Vr7_UWPgHUk?via=gitter
Also, if EXIF data is insufficient to determine a timestamp, then
photos may get imported with timestamps based on their filename and in
this case the time zone may get set to Local Time. That is probably
incorrect because the local time on the server is UTC while the time
zone used in filenames is generally local to the phone (say, PT). The
best fix is probably to get PhotoSync to use UTC when automatically
naming photos, and then backfill appropriate timezones for "Local
Time" photos that were uploaded before fixing that (but after the
initial Google Photos import). I haven't bothered to do this because
it is at most a minor out-of-order issue.
Presumably you also have an existing photo library. There is support for importing it, but because of the large amount of data, it's not totally seamless to do quickly. There is official documentation from PhotoPrism for importing from Google Photos and importing from Apple Photos. In this section I'll write about the former because that is what I had personal experience with.
So, Google has an official data export tool, because it's required by GDPR and CCPA. You go to Google Takeout and ask for a download of your photos data. They email you a link.
If you don't have a large library you could maybe just download the Takeout archive, unzip it, and upload the files to PhotoPrism from home. I had a 30 GB photo library and I don't have gigabit ethernet at home, so instead of doing it from home, where the download and upload would take forever, I used the virtual server that I keep on hand to run my backups and some other personal stuff. If you don't have one, you could get something easily on a service like DigitalOcean or BuyVM (the latter being what I use for this). But you probably don't want to go that route unless you feel comfortable with Linux and the command line.
For my usage, I found that the default settings for Takeout weren't
great for my library. 30 GB of photos with a max file size of 1 GB
meant 30+ zip files to download. So I re-did it with the maximum
possible file size so that everything would download in a single file,
and I changed to .tar.gz format instead of .zip because I felt
more comfortable with that on Linux. The way I got it to download to
my virtual server was by initiating the download from my laptop, then
cancelling it, copying the download URL from my browser, and
downloading that to my server using wget at the command line.
Assuming you're using PikaPods, to actually get the files into
PhotoPrism you have to use
SFTP. You
can enable it in the PikaPods settings for your server and they give
you connection information. There are lots of graphical and
command-line SFTP clients but personally what I like the most is
rclone because it does not just do SFTP but
also can interact with every other kind of cloud storage (e.g. Google
Drive, Nextcloud, Amazon S3, Backblaze) using the same interface. I
used rclone config to create a webdav remote with these settings,
taking the connection information from the PikaPods settings page:
[photoprism]
type = sftp
host = photos.intuitiveexplanations.com
user = p12345
pass = redacted
shell_type = unix
Then I could upload my photos library just by running:
rclone copy ./Takeout photoprism:import/ --progress --transfers=8
and waiting a few hours for everything to upload. I personally turned off the Import feature in PhotoPrism settings during the upload, just out of fear that having two things going at once would cause issues, but I don't think that was necessary. The "import + index" process took many more hours after the upload, once I turned it back on.
PhotoPrism has
support
for reading the JSON files that Google Photos generates which have
photo metadata. This should work transparently for the most part. The
main thing to check is whether all the photos have valid timestamps.
In my case almost everything imported correctly, but there were a
small number of photos (~60) that had empty metadata (they showed up
when I searched for Year = Unknown). I investigated this and found
that this was definitely Google's fault - some of the photos just
didn't have JSON files next to them like they were supposed to. For
those ones I just fixed the metadata manually. (Sort of - I wrote a
little script to edit all the broken photos automatically, using the
PhotoPrism API.)
As documented in the page on importing from Google Photos, albums aren't imported automatically. I used the community script they linked with some success. One issue it had was that it didn't import all the photos in the right order (see the comment above about album ordering), and sometimes it imported duplicates in cases where I had used the "edit" functionality in Google Photos. I think this bug is Google's fault more than PhotoPrism. Anyway, I manually removed the extra copies from my albums.
Some albums imported in the wrong order (see the section above on album ordering), I just "fixed" these manually by tweaking the timestamp metadata on the affected photos.