Edit: I’ve tried out a few, here’s what I found:
- PiGallery: Super fast, really easy to get going. Not a huge amount of features but really functional. If you just want a gallery, its a great choice.
- Home-Gallery: Nice looking with a basic detection features. No slideshow, but good filtering options. Definitely tried to make my CPU into a hot plate when processing.
- Immich: WAAAAYYYY more resource friendly than their docs suggest. Trimmed up further using an existing postgres and redis, and offloaded the ml onto my photo editing workstation. Would be even better if I could use the mac I had to buy for some client work since its just sitting there, but maybe one day.
The Result: Yeah I’m using Immich. Thanks everyone!
Hey everyone, would really appreciate some ideas on image + video gallery options.
We have a bunch of personal photos and videos taken over the years, and since we don’t want them on cloud providers, right now they are just a bunch of folders on a local share. We do actually enjoy going through them, but browsing a directory isn’t the most fun experience.
Something that had a nice photo/video browser, maybe albums, a slideshow option (maybe with shuffling?), and tags would be great. I’d like to not have to duplicate the images into yet-another-storage-location, so something that can just pull from that share would be great. Backups are also already handled, so not a factor here.
I’ve tried Stash, but thats more oriented toward the adult industry, so it requires a lot of manual intervention.
Ive never tried Immich, but it seems like a lot for this scenario. Maybe I’m wrong though, let me know.
This will never be available anywhere outside of our home (well aside from a WG connection back to our home), so I don’t care about sharing links or any of that kind of stuff. Media is mostly jpg with some Canon and Fuji raws, h264 and h265 videos.
Let me hear your recommendations for open source, locally hosted, no cloud personal media enjoyment!
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Just for sake of completion
Pros
Mature project (around since the early 2000s)
Lightweight compared to Immich
Designed as a photo library first, not an AI platform
Albums, tags, metadata, permissions
Huge plugin ecosystem
Runs happily on modest hardware
Can manage very large collections
Doesn’t demand phone-app-centric workflows (though of course it has a phone to computer app / sync)
Cons
Feels more like a traditional photo archive than Google Photos
Mobile experience is functional rather than slick
No fancy AI search or face recognition by default (though can add easy enough)
UI is a bit “classic web”
What’s your hesitation with Immich? Try it out and with a small subset of your collection and see how you enjoy it before moving everything.
Honestly just seems way more hefty in reqs, I don’t usually give 6GB or more to an lxc or VM (just to hit the bare minimum). The host i would put it on has 24GB in total and does other stuff as well, and it only has 8 cores on it.
Immich recommends 8GB+ and 4 cores, the db to be on a local ssd, etc, which seems like I’d need to pick up another whole machine to run it.
I run immich on a pi 5 8gb ram with a bunch of other services, highly suggest.
I run the immich container stack on a vm with 4GiB memory and 2 cores, with db on local disk and external libraries over smb, and it runs perfectly fine. I offload the machine learning jobs to another sometimes-on machine, sometimes, but don’t really need to unless I’m dumping thousands of new images into the external library at a time and want it all to process quickly.
Thanks! Another person just posted similar, so I’m going to give Immich a shot and see how it goes. If I can pass off CV/ML elsewhere that’s even better, I have a workstation for media tasks/editing I can use which would work out great
I just checked my immich lxc, ram usage fluctuate with plateaus of about 1 GiB, and some spikes up to 1.5 GiB.
Two users, 100+ GiB of images and videos
Awesome, way better than what’s noted in the docs, thanks!
I think those reqs are assuming full computer vision features. I must’ve disabled them because my entire docker LXC is using less than 4GB, of which Immich is only one of the containers its running.
Well thats good to know, thanks!
I’ve tried nearly all, stuck to home gallery.
https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 is something I have moved to from Immich, but actually only because Immich didn’t let my HDD go to sleep anymore. I do like it though, it is a bit simpler.
Just wanted to add, pigallery2 is quick and looks pretty good
I’m standing up immich alongside for comparison (have to do a bit of extra before I can deploy), but pigallery is fast, easy and works - which are all easier said than done!
Awesome, thanks for the rec I’ll check it out!
If you are already hosting Nextcloud, the Memories app might fit your needs well.
Immich definitely isn’t a bad option either. It doesn’t take ton of resources, has a clean user interface and is multiplatform. Just like Coolie4 said, you can just try it out with a small collection first before committing to anything.
If you don’t want them on cloud providers because you’re not comfortable them being able to see those pictures, you can also pay for Ente.
Self hosting Ente is also an option, which is what I use for my family
You might also be able to get away with hosting something like Seafile and use directories as albums. But you won’t get random shuffling in that case(My bad I can’t read. This isn’t much better than what you’re doing currently)Maybe you can use some client to navigate your share in a more pleasant way instead of hosting something new? I never tried that so I can’t recommend anything for that unfortunately
