PhotoPrism On a Pi Continued
After more than a week of working twenty four hours a day my Raspberry Pi 4 finally indexed over 120,000 videos and photos. The first thing that I notice is that Photoprism feels slower now. It takes several seconds and it feels as if it is suffering.
Overloaded with 120,000 Files
The Raspberry Pi 4 and PhotoPrism were not designed to have so many photos at once. It tells me that 63,000 files are videos, which I will remove from this archive eventually. They take an enormous amount of space without having much personal value.
Imagine that you use PhotoPrism to index your video directories, where render files are generated by Final Cut Pro X or other softwares. If those files are indexed then they take up a lot of resources to index but have no value except to the video editing system.
Purging Render Video Files
As an archivist I would often purge the render directories because they can take gigabytes of space when the only file you need is the final edit, as an international version, with no titles, and natural sound.
The Long Tail of Thumbnails
Although I speak of 120,000 images indexed there might be 12 times that number of assets being tracked by PhotoPrism. It generates up to 11 thumbnail images per asset for quick display on different resolution screens, from laptops to desktops, mobile phones and tablets.
12,000 of those video files are live photos, so I need to sort through the other files now that the indexing is finished.
Extra stats
It has found 1365 folders, 725 places, 222 calendar “events”, 57 moments and 59 people so far. It takes a long time to load unrecognised people with PhotoPrism because it is not designed to deal with hundreds of unrecognised faces at once.
Changing Faces
As you go through decades of photos at once you notice the faces that have changed over time. You see how you looked when you were two or three decades longer, and you see how your face has changed over time. You also see how much younger people looked just eight years ago in some cases.
The other challenge is to remember the name of people that you have photographed, and with a decade or two since you saw certain people it’s hard to remember.
If you have no idea of a person’s name you can just mouse over a face and click the x button and that face will cease to be in the database.
No Mass Delete
There is no mass delete option. If you want to delete photos via the web interface you will need patience. It might be better to use wildcards and delete them from the directories, and then refresh the indexes to remove ghost files and index references that no longer have media attached.
And Finally
The next step is to see how to backup the database files so that if photoprism crashes I can restore it, and how to backup the images, so that if the drives fail I do not lose the data. The step after that is to see how differently it behaves on a Raspberry Pi 5. I suspect it will make a huge difference.