Hey everyone, I’m hoping to find a self hosted and hopefully FOSS alternative to flickr for photo organization and viewing
The sharing with friends part isn’t important
What we’re looking for is a way to store collections of photos, organized and viewable the same way as Flickr
This person takes a ton of photos all the time but they want a place to store the best/only the highlights/their favourites, organized into albums by destination/location/vacation and most importantly easily viewable to reminisce about the good times
They used to use Flickr for this until it wasn’t free anymore
Immich might work.
Immich is more of a personal camera roll app, modeled after Google Photos. You can make albums and share them publicly but it wasn’t meant as a public photo gallery.
It can work if the emphasis is on self-organization but it’s quite limited due to the fact it insists on merging everything into a single photo stream and forces you to use its albums to split it back up again.
There’s no way unfortunately to have multiple photo streams per user (unless you’re willing to juggle multiple user accounts).
I switched to self hosted Piwigo after Flickr started threatening to delete my photos a while back.
It had an extension that let me import all my photos from Flickr. Not sure if that still works after they changed hands.
It’s very easy to maintain; just click the update button in the Web UI. And it comes with a bunch of extensions.
Piwigo loocks great. How does it compare to Immich?
Piwigo supports multiple users with different access rights, while Immich does not. Immich supports videos and Live Photos while Piwigo does not. Piwigo is a php application and can be installed by ftp on a basic web server and database (same requirements as Wordpress), while Immich requires a docker container. Both Piwigo and Immich have phone apps, but they differ in functionality. Piwigo is set up to upload individual photos while Immich is set up to backup ALL of your photos.
Immich does have a pretty robust user management… https://immich.app/docs/administration/user-management/
Yes but in Immich each user has their own independent album/gallery, whereas Piwigo is a single gallery with different access rights to users.
Immich can’t do what OP wants. It works great for individual personal libraries, but not images that are pre-sorted into specific folder structures and need to be displayed based on that structure.
Piwigo does have a plugin for video upload and playback, and it looks like Live Photos are WIP or at least available through the website, not the app. There are some other neat plugins too like map/geotag support.
The app’s upload functionality can work well for backups too; it isn’t automatic, but it does support batch/folder uploads and remembering which photos you’ve already uploaded.
I’ve been using Piwigo for the past 4 years. The video plugin kinda half works (breaks during upgrades, doesn’t work on Android). It would be cool if Live Photos end up supported, as that’s my main reason for trying out alternatives. But since Live Photos are part video, which itself doesn’t work, I’m not holding my breath.
Does photoprism count?
i use https://lycheeorg.github.io/ for sharing my photos with clients these days.
Check out Lychee. It’s designed for (semi) public photo galleries more like Flickr
This sounds ideal for either Photoprism or Photoview.
Does Plex do photos or just videos?
Yes but in my experience, the performance is horrible (at least a couple of years ago). Imo, Immich is the way to go now.
Have you considered using a photo organizer like Digikam and exporting HTML photo albums from it? You can host plain HTML and images extremely cheaply on a CDN, tie a domain name to it and that’s it, you just update the files over (S)FTP whenever you have something new.
Many people suggest immich or photoptism, but those are not the correct tools for this use case. Piwigo us great, but in my esperience slow and clunky. Lychee is great tough and probably the correct answer to op.
Also, any tools to import high resolution photos and metadata from Flickr into any of the servers listed? Namely title, description, tags, geotags? Even better if comments too, but I know I’m pushing my luck here.