Experimenting with Photoprism

While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.

Photoprism is a photo management app like Lightroom, Google Photos, iPhoto and plenty of other app. It is open source and can be installed quite easily using this Raspberry Pi Solution. With less trial and error than with Nextcloud I was able to get it up and running within an hour or so.

My first try was wwith a slow 16gb card but that took ages so I thought that I would set another card, this time with 512 gigabytes of storage going overnight. In the time it took me to heat dinner the card was ready for me to experiment with and my first impressions were good.

I tried to upload a few images from a PC, and then from the mobile phone via a web browser before playing with Photosync.The beauty of Photosync is that it will upload even when the phone is sleeping, or another app is open. I let it synchronise photos while I slept, and as I went shopping for bread for a Fondue later today. The moment it seemed to lose momentum is when I got back to the parking after shopping. That’s where I lose the mobile phone signal. As I wrote this, after fourteen or so hours of working almost non stop the files were synced between the phone and Raspberry Pi 4 2gb. They recommend using a Raspberry Pi 4gb or higher but for the sake of tests it seems okay with a lower spec machine.

Indexing

With this app you need to tell it to index photographs. This doesn’t happen automatically.

It can recognise people, create labels/keywords for images, moments, places and more. It also gives you a log of everything it’s doing, from indexing photos to adding locations, to adding keywords, to asking you to name faces that it recognises. Remember that this sits on your personal device, and does not need to ever touch the cloud, if you do not want it to.

Another feature that this app has is to detect and flag low quality and low resolution images and this can be a very good feature to have. Sometimes you get junk images from old websites or other directories. This makes it quick to get rid of them.

When Photoprism indexes photos it creates a seperate file with the new file names, creates thumbnails of various sizes and then when it completes its task, or when you stop indexing, it then merges the old index with the new index.

You have the option of a “complete rescan” which reindexes everything or you can choose to “cleanup” which deletes orphaned index entries, sidecar files and thumbnails. It’s because Nextcloud doesn’t have an intuitive way of re-indexing files that no longer exist that I was tempted to try this piece of software.

If I was to change two things with indexing then I would add a status indicator to tell me how many images remain without an index. It runs fine in the background but it would be nice to know how many images remain. I saw that someone else said that they wish indexing would run automaticall, until all images are indexed, and then again when new images are added.

EXIF Data

The app allows you to see image exif data, for example latitude and Longitude but also a title based on the location, iso, exposure, camera used, lens, f-stop, focal length, copyright, subject, description and keywords.

For key wording it uses colours, location, keywords in the local language, such as “Lac”, “rue”, state, country and more. You can add notes and click done if you change anything.

Humour

It has labelled a cat as a dog, human climbers as lizards, a sign for road works as a monument the LHC tunnels as wood.

Filtering

You can filter photos by countries, cameras, newest, month, category, colour, year and more. This makes searching for images quick and intuitive. I also like that it automatically keywords images with the most obvious tags. This allows the human being who is sorting these images to add specific tags, such as people involved, event keywords and more.

Video and Photos

With Nextcloud when you upload videos it doesn’t recognise them immediately so you get a grey box. With Photoprism you see a keyframe and you can then watch the videos within seconds so this tool can be used for photographs and video.

Downsides

Unless you pay 2 USD per month you only have one user, so you can’t have admin as just the admin, and use your own name as a user. This is sub-optimal for security but also for family sharing.

Photosync is also not free. It wants you to pay 6 CHF for the app, and encourages you to pay for Photosync Premium.

If you pay for the bonus features you will pay 6 CHF for the app, 25 CHF for lifetime Premium, and another 2 CHF per month for the right to create more users on your own system.

Google Photo is 100 CHF per year. iCloud is 120 CHF per year. Lightroom is 10 CHF per year to 55 CHF per year.

A few years ago I used Kyno by LessPain Sotware and that is 159 USD per year.

It’s cheap compared to the competition and by using it you’re supporting a European product, rather than American.

And Finally

Whilst Nextcloud is great for file sharing, time tracking, tasks, news reading and more Photoprism is great for managing photographs. It is quick and easy to install on a Pi. You find the URL, you tell Etcher to burn it to an SD card, you put the SD card into a Raspberry Pi and within minutes with a fast card, you can connect either by SSH or by web interface. Within minutes you can be using the Raspberry Pi as a photo management tool locally.

If you install tailscale and Photosync you can be backing up your mobile device images within a matter of minutes and it remembers what has been synchronised, whether you use the local IP address or the tailscail VPN one. When you’re synchronising thousands of files you want a solution that remembers what you have synched.

I was so convinced by Photoprism that I considered replacing Nextcloud with it in the 8gb Raspberry Pi, but chose not to, for now, because Nextcloud has time tracking options that I want to experiment with, for now.