PhotoPrism
A private photo library with automatic tagging, faces and maps
Alternative toGoogle Photos
PhotoPrism indexes the photos and videos you already have, tags them automatically, recognises faces and places them on a map, all on your own server. It is AGPL-3.0 licensed, written in Go, with some extra features sold as a membership.
Best for when
- you have years of photos in folders and want to search them
- you want face and object recognition without a cloud service
- you want the originals left untouched in their current folders
Watch out for
- the first index of a large library is slow and needs plenty of RAM
- there is no official phone app that backs up your camera roll, uploads need a separate tool
- some features are reserved for paid membership tiers
A browsable archive of your photos
Point PhotoPrism at a folder of photos and it builds a searchable library: it reads the metadata, classifies images with a local model, groups faces and plots geotagged shots on a world map. You can search for things like a place, a year or an object without having tagged anything yourself.
It suits people with a large existing archive who want to browse and search it, more than people looking for automatic phone backup. It can leave your original folders untouched and work in read-only mode, which is reassuring when the photos are irreplaceable.
What running it costs
Indexing is the heavy part. The documentation asks for several gigabytes of RAM plus swap, and the first scan of a big library can take hours or days on modest hardware. MariaDB is the recommended database for anything beyond a small collection, and thumbnails can add a noticeable share of the original library size.
Back up the database and the storage folder that holds thumbnails, settings and sidecar files, as well as the originals themselves. Keep it on a private network or VPN: a photo library is about as personal as data gets.
