Hey all, I have a question for software/website recommendations!
I have a couple thousand family photos, plus a whole bunch of videos, that I’ve been spending my winter break digitizing, uploading to my computer, and tagging with the people/holidays/year/etc relevant to each one. Right now, we have most of these things on DVD and also my computer.
I’d like to upload them to some sort of cloud service with a way to easily share links with family members who cannot/will not come to my parent’s house to look at old DVDs, but I’d like to avoid Google Photos/OneDrive/iCloud/etc. I’ve been looking at Ente but want to know if anyone has any suggestions otherwise before I start a new subscription service lmao.
The requirements for my purposes are as follows:
Easy way to create + share links to specific photos/videos even if the person I’m sharing with does not have an account
Cross-platform functionality. The simpler the better. Most of my family is elderly at this point.
Support for metadata tags so I can like, search “Jay” and have all the photos with me in them pop up.
Cannot be self-hosted - I don’t have the infrastructure, money, or time atm to do that - but I’d like to switch to self-hosted in the future, so a service that supports both would be great.
Bonus but not required: it’d be nice if it was possible for people other than me to upload photos/videos without making an account or anything.
Does a service like this exist?? Ente feels like my best bet but I’m wondering if there’s a service I’m missing in my search. Does anyone have experience with Ente?
The last time I needed to share media with my in-laws, I just put it on a high-capacity USB flash drive and mailed it to Australia since they had relatively modern smart TVs with USB input and knew how to view photos and videos on a USB stick using their TVs.
Unfortunately, such a thing would get lost way way way too quickly in my family </3 I’m already missing VHS tapes I looked at just last year, but in the span of a year they’ve gone missing. I have just about everything backed up on DVDs, I’d like to use a cloud service for sharing.
I’d like to go the self-hosted route as a compliment to the family history website I’ve been building, though I appreciate I might be naive about just how costly and complex such an endeavour would be. I’m already exploring Digital Ocean Spaces for the media for that site so will see if it works out.
I’m still open to trying other services if they fit my needs (very similar to yours, though I would like the ability to have accounts or customise links to provide certain views of the service)
I’ve been messing with immich and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s self-hosted, so closer to what @straydogstrut is looking for, but it’s distributed as a docker app so it’s pretty straightforward to put it on a publicly-accessible server. You can have multiple accounts, create shared albums, share links (with or without password protection). There are iPhone and Android apps. It’s pretty light on resources. I’m running it on an N150-based single-board computer.
I’m using it as a self-hosted curated library of the pictures I actually want to keep. I’m still in the “curating” stage, but I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and so far so good.
good to hear more good things about immich.. i was looking into it but im not sure yet. could do it on some sort of vps i guess, since im unable to actually get a little computer purely for that purpose yet (one semester left at college, lots of moving around, very little money).
since you have some immich experience, could you perhaps answer this question:
is is possible to have an immich instance not show things by date/not show the date prominently with each photo/video??? all of the services im finding now do that, and i cant turn it off.. which, because so many photos/videos are scans, facebook downloads, etc, the dates are absolutely useless and i have no way of knowing the original.
i have my files all organized into folders based on year but thats sort of all i got. i just want something that lets me view photos/videos in a ‘file explorer’ type of thing where it doesnt try to get quirky and sort into dates lol.
I have another suggestion! I use immich, but to me that is more of a photo backup/library alternative. Its very similar to Google Photos or Apple Photos. For sharing photos publicly and privately I have been using Lychee. You can make user accounts and lock certain albums to certain users, or share the album publicly
I love how lychee looks and all the album features it has!! my only problem is it looks like there’s no app, and a lot of my extended family (who will be using it to just look at photos, not upload) only do things on their phones I’ve been testing out Piwigo the past couple of days and while it’s a bit clunky (and expensive, when my free trial runs out) it seems to have everything I need and an extremely simple-to-use app.
Just chiming back in here with an update on my own explorations:
So I realise I used the wrong terminology here, apologies. I have a VPS which is a step further away from shared hosting, but I’m not actually currently self-hosting. I don’t have the spare cash or reliable internet connection for a box of my own at the moment. I’m still effectively renting someone else’s space. It’s maybe just less crowded
That said, in the spirit of learning in public, here’s how i’ve got on hosting an open source photo album sharing service on my VPS. Go easy on me. I’m a beginner. There’s a reason I offload server management to Laravel Forge.
Immich
I really like Immich. It’s basically like Google Photos and the interface is nice and modern. As my first time using Docker, I had a relatively easy time installing it. I also really like the storage template and how you can customise the filenames on disk.
But I also learned very quickly that my dreams of hosting my family’s photos easily and affordably was incredibly naive. My VPS has only a terabyte 100Gb of space which I discovered is nowhere near enough. Immich is storage hungry and saves multiple copies of files in an effort to protect the original. I think that’s admirable but it did mean I started running out of space very quickly.
For example, as a test, I uploaded 409 photos of our wedding - about 700Mb on my local disk - and it took up 9Gb in Immich. It also seemed to use the odd Gb here and there when I deleted photos (even if I emptied the trash).
It was around this time that I realised using a VPS with Immich is probably not such a good idea. I actually went and bought a whole other VPS before I figured that out I woke up this morning thinking what I really need is a NAS that I could easily scale up.. but that’s just not in my budget any time soon.
Lychee
I hoped I would have an easier time with Lychee. Having a clearer idea of what setup I wanted, I was trying to run lychee on a subdomain of what will be my family history website, and ultimately serve the photos from a Digital Ocean Spaces bucket I have. I managed to get Lychee running on port 8000 and setup a proxy for the subdomain in Nginx. However, I couldn’t get it working on the subdomain.
Again, I went the Docker install route and it went okay to start with. However, I kept having problems connecting to the database - it failed the health check so much I just had to take it out to get something working - and I kept getting permissions errors. Working with Docker felt like a bit of a black box: I couldn’t easily see if my changes were having an effect. Slapped in the face with a server 500 error for the umpteenth time, I realised that I really need to learn more about Docker before I can work with it effectively. That’s no slight on Docker or Lychee. I just don’t know enough to use them properly. What I did see of Lychee was very nice though.
Piwigo
I was pretty exasperated by this point and just wanted something to show for my wasted weekend. I’d spent about 4 hours with Immich and 8 hours with Lychee by this point
I initially found the Piwigo documentation very confusing as it felt like every link would take me round in circles, and the paid service is really pushed in front of the actual information I needed. I initially installed Piwigo from the terminal with a command that I suspect didn’t install half the required files and I had trouble running it from a subfolder.
However, once I figured out that I just needed to download the entire zip folder, put the files on my server using scp, and then ensure the root in Nginx pointed at the correct subfolder for both my website and my gallery respecitvely, it all worked smoothly.
I don’t love the interface, but i’m liking all the bits I can customise. I’ve already set albums to private by default and turned off a lot of the image sizes I won’t need. I like that it has custom CSS and Js options as I plan to customise it heavily. I did the same test of uploading 409 photos (bizarrely only 406 made it through and I can’t yet figure out why) and they basically only take up the ~700Mb size of the original files. I still want to look at the potential of using Digital Ocean Spaces as the storage location though.
I’m sure you had a much easier time than I did (pretty sure I made life difficult for myself), but if you’d be willing to share your setup, i’d love to hear it
LOL oh my god no this whole thing has been a nightmare!!! If it werent for yequari’s patience I’d have given up by now, I think.
I’m using a DigitalOcean Droplet and the Piwigo Docker instance. I have 100 GB of space on the DO Droplet that’s just for saving Piwigo pictures and images. Other than that i have 1 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU and 1 TB of transfer room. I’m hitting a bit of a wall with the RAM, since it seems to fill up very quickly. Not sure if that’s an issue with my setup, the amount of stuff I’m trying to put on here (approximately 4500 photos and like 100 videos so far), or a fault on Piwigo.
Ironically despite how much I enjoy custom website stuff I’ve stuck to one of the default Bootstrap themes for now. It works well enough on mobile which is where most of my family members are.
I’m curious how much space is taken up once you actually load all of your photos. Piwigo does this baffling thing where it doesn’t generate thumbnail sizes (of which there are SO MANY) until page load. I have crashed my server by opening an album with 300 photos and trying to scroll to the bottom of them too quickly (I have ‘infinite scroll’ on, at the behest of my relatives).
Random Piwigo things that have helped me that you might find useful:
Download the LocalFiles Editor plugin and add this string to the config.inc.php file $conf['file_ext'] = array_merge( $conf['picture_ext'], array('tiff', 'tif', 'mpg','zip','avi','mp3','ogg','pdf','mp4','MP4','AVI') );, with whatever extensions are relevant to you. That might be accounting for some of the randomly missing photos. Also add a line about $conf['upload_form_max_file_size'] = 10000;, with the size set to whatever. My photos aren’t particularly high-quality or huge or anything, so I just set it arbitrarily.
Sometimes if I try to upload things in bulk, the last few get dropped unexpectedly. I’m curious if re-uploading the 3 missing photos makes them show up properly for you.
My mom has been working as a collaborator with me on this and uploading via the mobile app is actually really intuitive BUT it is absolutely awful to try and add tags on mobile. You cannot type tags in. You have to scroll down a long list and select one by one.
I’m very new to self hosting and php altogether so I’m still learning as I go lol. Let me know if you encounter anything strange/find a fix to problems/etc though!! The Piwigo forums are hit-or-miss at best, lol.
Yeah, I read that it did that. I hadn’t quite appreciated that it could try to generate too many at once though.
I’m curious how much space is taken up once you actually load all of your photos.
Yeah, I actually have no idea how many photos I have because Google Photos won’t seem to give me that info, but I have around 6,000 just hanging out on Flickr until I finally download them all.
I have 2 CPU cores, 8Gb RAM, 100GB space (I got that waay wrong!) and 4TB data transfer a month. It’s storage space that’s at a premium, and that’s without even browsing the photos. Using my current VPS isn’t a long term plan though. I’ll work towards something safer and more scalable.
Apologies for the necropost, but just to report that i’m trying Immich again and having a much better time this time.
My long term goal is to have a home server (considering a Beelink Me Mini) but while browsing the self-hosting category here I came across mention of PikaPods: a service that let’s you spin up a pod for certain open source apps.
I got a 4 core, 8Gb RAM, 500Gb pod running Immich very easily. I added the PikaPods libraries folder as an external library and so far have 1145 photos scanned.
I did notice that the PikaPods RAM usage filled up very quickly - 7.1Gb - and stayed there for several hours, even after the Jobs Queue was empty. It’s dropped down to 3.1Gb now. Given that 8Gb is the Immich recommendation, it’s a little disappointing to think i’ll regularly run into memory issues when bulk importing photos, but I can always upgrade the resources of my pod. This was 2Gb photos from Google Takeout. I still have another 65Gb from Google to go.
I believe this is a bug since I encountered a similar issue after i’d setup Immich on PikaPods: the storage space card showed 14.6Tebibytes of space (i.e. bigger than a Terabyte), even though my PikaPod had only 500Gb space. I can’t recall the exact figure of used space but it was not zero and this was a fresh install with zero photos.
Multiple people [1]have reported [2]a similar issue [3] and it’s apparently due to how Immich gets the space from the filesystem. A ‘fix’ is to set a Usage Quota for the user. I set mine to 500GB and it now shows storage correctly. I uploaded a single photo as a test and the space used is only 444 Kilobytes.
I’m undecided if I want to stick with the external libraries approach:
Pros
I can use my existing folder structure
I’ve read numerous reports of breaking changes within Immich, so having separation of concerns is more reassuring
This is possibly more portable if I do get a home server in future and run Immich on that
Cons
Immich doesn’t show the storage usage (but I can see that in PikaPods)
The docs imply that metadata doesn’t persist well, even when moving things around within Immich (I need to investigate this further)
I have to manually manage my folder structure, which would seem to defeat the point of using Immich (which has storage templates)
External libraries would make using the mobile apps or inviting family more inconvenient, I think
I’m going to think it over a bit more. I worked out that I have at least 30,000 photos to store so I want to decide before I commit too far. I think with a proper 3-2-1 backup strategy, breaking changes are less of a concern, and it seems like i’d be missing out on features otherwise.
Not worse, I just think it would need a bit more management.
To be clear, I’ve yet to try them, so could be wrong, but my understanding is the apps would save uploads within Immich.
That makes sense but I’m mindful that could lead to a hybrid setup where some of my photos are in Immich (the new ones taken on my phone) and some are in the external library (the original batch I scanned).
From what I’ve read some people actually do that: they preserve their existing setup by using an external library, then commit to using Immich for anything new. Personally I’d prefer a single approach for all photos as otherwise I’d have to back up two locations.
I’ve been testing out Piwigo the past couple of days and while it’s a bit clunky (and expensive, when my free trial runs out) it seems to have everything I need and an extremely simple-to-use app.
I woke up this morning thinking what I really need is a NAS that I could easily scale up.. but that’s just not in my budget any time soon.