I've long kept my photo backups off of Google Cloud. I've never trusted them to keep them safe, and I've never trusted them to not do something with them I didn't want. Like, say, ingest them into AI training without telling me. (Which, now, everyone is doing.) Instead, I've backed up my photos to my own Nextcloud server, manually organized them, and let them get backed up from there.
More recently, I've decided I really need a proper photo album tool to carry around "wallet photos" of family and such to show people. A few years back I started building my own application for that in Symfony 4, but I ran into some walls and eventually abandoned the effort. This time, I figured I'd see what was available on the market for self-hosted photo albums for me and my family to use.
Strap yourself in, because this is a really depressing story (with a happy ending, at least).
I reviewed 7 self-hosted photo album tools, after checking various review sites for their top-ten lists. Of those 7:
- 3 were in PHP, 2 were in JavaScript or TypeScript, and 2 were in Go.
- 2 used the MIT license, 2 used the GPL, 1 used AGPL, and two had broken non-free licenses.
- I managed to get one working. 1. Uno.
- Most really pushed you to use their Docker Compose setup to install, none of which actually worked.
Let's have a look at the mess directly.
PiGallery 2 (https://bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2/)
Language: TypeScript License: MIT
PiGallery 2 is intended as a light-weight, directory-based photo album. The recommended way to install it is to use their Docker compose file and nginx conf file... which you have to just manually copy out of Git. (Seriously?) And when I tried to get that to run locally, I could never connect to it successfully. There was something weird with the port configuration, and I wasn't able to quickly figure it out. If I can't get the "easy" install to work, I'm not interested.
Piwigo (https://piwigo.org/)
Language: PHP/MySQL License: GPLv2
Unlike many on here it doesn't provide a Docker image, which is fine so I set one up using phpdocker.io. Unfortunately, it's net installer crashed when I tried to use it, without useful errors. Trying to install manually resulted in PHP null-value errors from the install script. When I looked at the install script, I found dozens upon dozens of file system operations with the @ operator on them to hide errors.
At that point I gave up on Piwigo.
Coppermine (https://coppermine-gallery.net/)
Language: PHP/MySQL License: GPL, version unspecified
When I first visted the Coppermine website, I got an error that their TLS certificate had expired a week and a half before. How reassuring.
Skipping past that, I was greeted with a website with minuscule text, with a design dating from the Clinton presidency. How reassuring.
Right on the home page, it says Coppermine is compatible all the way down to PHP 4.2, and supposedly up to 8.2. For those not familiar with PHP, 4.2 was released in 2002, only slightly after the Clinton presidency. PHP has evolved, um, a lot in 22 years, and most developers today view PHP 4 as an embarrassment to be forgotten. If their code is still designed to run on 4.2, it means they're ignoring literally 20 years of language improvements, including security improvements. How reassuring.
Oh, and the installation instructions, linked in the menu, are a direct link to some random forum post from 2017. How reassuring.
At this point I was so reassured that I Noped right out and didn't even bother trying to install it.
Lemorage (https://lomorage.com/)
Language: JavaScript. (Not TypeScript, raw JS as far as I can tell.) License: None specified.
Although this app showed up on a few top-ten lists, its license is not specified, and installation only offers Windows and Mac. (Really?) The "others" section eventually lets you get to an Ubuntu section, where their recommendation is to install it via... an Apt remote. Which is an interesting choice.
It has a GitHub repo, but that has no license listed at all. Which technically means it's not licensed at all, and so downloading it is a felony. (Yes, copyright law is like that.)
Being a good Netizen, I reached out to the company through their Contact form to ask them to clarify. They eventually responded that, despite some parts of the code being in public GitHub repos, none of it is Open Source.
Noping right out of that one.
PhotoPrism (https://www.photoprism.app/)
Language: Go License: It's complicated
I actually managed to get this one to run! This one also "installs" via Docker Compose, but it actually worked. This is the only one of the apps I reviewed that I could get to work. Mind you, as a Go app I cannot fathom why it needs a container to run, since Go compiles to a single binary.
Their system requirements are absurdly high. Quoting from their site, "you should host PhotoPrism on a server with at least 2 cores, 3 GB of physical memory,1 and a 64-bit operating system." What the heck are they doing? It's Go, not the JVM.
In quick experimentation, it seemed decent enough. The interface is snappy and supports uploading directly from the browser.
However, I then ran into a pickle. The GitHub repository says the license is AGPL, which I am fine with. However, in the app itself is a License page that is not even remotely close to Free Software anything, listing mainly all the ways you cannot modify or redistribute the code.
I filed an issue on their repository about it, and got back a rather blunt comment that only the "Community Edition" is AGPL, which is a different download. The supported version is not.
Noping right out of this one, too.
Photoview (https://photoview.github.io/)
Language: Go, with TypeScript for front-end License: AGPLv3
Another app wants you install via Docker Compose. And when I tried to do so, I got a bunch of errors about undefined environment variables. The install documentation says nothing about setting them, and it's not clear how to do so, so at this point I gave up.
Lychee (https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee)
Language: PHP License: MIT
Lychee is built with Laravel, which I don't care for but I have used very good Laravel-based apps in the past so I had high hopes. It talks about using Docker, but unlike the others here doesn't provide a docker-compose file, just some very long Docker run commands.
Their primary instructions are to git-clone the project, then run composer install and npm. Unfortunately, phpdocker.io is still built using Ubuntu 22.04, which has an ancient version of npm in it, and I didn't want to bother trying to figure out how to upgrade it.
Lychee did offer a demo container, which uses SQLite. That I was able to get to run successfully. However, for unclear reasons it wouldn't actually show any images.
At this point, I gave up.
So what now?
Rather disappointed in the state of the art, I decided to take a different approach. As I mentioned, I use Nextcloud to store all my images. Nextcloud has a photo app, but the last time I used it, it was very basic, and pretty bad. That was a few years ago, though, so I went searching.
Turns out, not only has Nextcloud Photos improved considerably, there's also another extension app on it called Memories. On paper, it looks like it does everything I'm after. A timeline feed, custom albums that don't require duplicating files, you can edit the Exif data of the image to show a title and description, plus some fancy extras like mapping geo information to OpenStreetMap and AI-based tagging, if you have the right additional apps installed. So would it work?
Turns out... yes. The setup was slightly fiddly, but mostly because it took a while to download all the map data and index a half-million photos. Once it did that, though... it just worked. It does almost everything I was looking for. I haven't figured out how to reorder albums or pictures within an album, and it looks like it doesn't support sub-albums. But otherwise, it does what I need. It even has a mobile app (free) that let's me show off selected pictures on my phone, which is what I was ultimately after.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with Nextcloud. In concept, I love it. Self-hosted file server and application hub? Sign me up! Despite being a PHP dev of 25 years, I've never quite understood why PHP made sense for it, though. And upgrades have always been a pain, and frequently break. But its functionality is just so useful. Apps are hit or miss, ranging from first-rate (like Memories) to meh.
But in this case, it ended up being both the cleanest and most capable option, as well as the easiest to get going, provided I already had a Nextcloud server. So, solution found. I am now a Memories user, and will be setting up accounts for the rest of the family, too.