Looking for an alternative to synology photos. I moved over to synology about 3 years ago and am now considering moving out of the synology ecosystem. I’m looking for something that has a decent android app, wifi syncing, shareable albums, all the standard stuff.
Edit: thanks for the many replies, I’ll likely move to nextcloud as I was planning on deploying that anyway as a synology drive replacement. I’ll look into immich as well.
immich, alternative for google photos. there’s a demo portal for it.
Looks like a polished app but sadly it has issues on my Fennec/Firefox for Android
You could try connecting the Android app with the demo portal.
I’m running Immich on an Odroid N2 and it’s great! https://immich.app/
Wow, what a terrible font choice!
Don’t judge the project based on that. It’s genuinely a quality application once you get it up and running.
Would you care to elaborate?
The immich logo is undoubtedly ugly
Why is the “H” bigger than the res?? Truly top tier hideous, it’s like they’re trying to make it terrible.
The logo plus every screenshot on iOS uses that same font. There’s not much else to it. It’s simply an ugly font.
Immich
Immich is still in relatively active development, but has a great feature set and is the only app that could reasonably replace Google Photos for me. Can recommend!
Nextcloud. It’s definitely overkill for photos alone, but since you are likely to want it for other stuff anyway, why not use its gallery (which is decent) as well?
I personally use it for backup and sharing, and do the bulk of my photos/collections management in digikam (reading from a fast network storage).
Use my nextcloud for calendar, contacts, RSS reader, photo sync from my phone, office suite and others.
Jist moved from Photoprism to Immich. Glad i did. Mich better feature set, active development, and multi-user capability isn’t locked behind a paid subscription.
For iOS PhotoSync is great for backing up.
I use PhotoSync to backup my iPhone to an SMB share on my NAS
Photoprism librephotos
Both have excelent android clients
The built-in gallery app on my samsung galaxy phone, in combination with syncthing.
As long as the phone has enough storage for all your images, this has been my favourite selfhosted solution so far.
I used Photoprism before, but I could never find an old picture quickly during a conversation. Now I can, 50% of the time 🫣
Photoprism, running on a Raspberry Pi 4. I’m just running it as a single user, and it’s been working well for that. A couple of notes:
- Video transcoding is a bit iffy on the rpi, but I’m running it under docker and might just move it all to a mini pc at some point
- I don’t have it accessible publicly, but get to it online via Tailscale
- No app, but the Web interface is good.
- I’m currently running it in “read only” mode (mainly out of initial paranoia when trying it out, but it seems fine) so I have syncthing backing up the photos from my phone wirelessly and occasionally do an import of new images in.
There is an app activelly maintained unofficial android client and its great https://github.com/Radiokot/photoprism-android-client
I’m super not knowledgeable about codecs and shit, but IIRC there’s one that the rpi 4 is just garbage at dealing with. x265 I think it’s called?
I actually got so fed up with image galleries that I made my own tiny PHP gallery https://p.drkt.eu/
Did the same, but in perl and used a small javascript in the resulting page. (Made it ages ago)
Did the same in python. Ages ago. And again in python half a decade ago. And again in python a few months ago.
samba/ftp?
Been backing up to NextCloud using PhotoSync on iOS and Android the last few years. I also recently implemented Immich, and although that means doubled up photo backup, it’s nice to test out and witness firsthand just how much Immich is improving with every release.
Do you feel immich is mature enough to be a primary photos app? I may go the route of nextcloud as I’m planning to migrate to nextcloud from synology drive. Didn’t realize they had a photos backup app ad well.
From immich.app:
The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!
Yeah that was my point. That’s why NC is my main and Immich is my secondary.
Oh, I misunderstood. I just set up immich and have my backups, so I won’t have to worry how mature immich is. The design is really great!
I’m using NC too with the Memory app and not Immich. You that are using both what do you think? Do you think that one is better than the other?
I don’t use the Memory app specifically, just a photos. As far as browsing my backed up gallery, Immich winds hands down between that and NextCloud. The gallery and tagging id the closest to Google photos I’ve come in a long time.
Can you point both to the same directory or is that what you mean by doubling backup that you need everything twice now?
You can, but only have one app (Immich or whatever you use to back up to NC) handle uploads. Right now I am doubling up but I have enough spare space that it isn’t affecting me, so I don’t mind.
Interesting, thanks. I just started using Nextcloud at home but once I am happy with the setup I will give this a try.
Immich is pretty great
