Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance

https://memories.gallery/

by radialapps • 2 years ago

797 230 2 years ago

memories.gallery

Memories is a FOSS Google Photos alternative that you can self-host (it runs as a Nextcloud plugin).

Website: https://memories.gallery/

GitHub: https://github.com/pulsejet/memories

Demo Server: https://demo.memories.gallery/apps/memories/ (demo runs in San Francisco on a free-tier cloud vm)

Memories has been built ground-up for high performance and is extremely fast when configured correctly. In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time!

Some features to highlight:

* A timeline similar to Google Photos where you can skip to any time in history instantly.

* AI-based tagging that runs locally on your server, identifying and tagging people and objects.

* Albums and external sharing.

* Metadata editing support

* A world map of your photos, supported both on mobile and the web

* Did I mention it's extremely fast?

Would love to hear feedback from the HN community! :)

aendruk• 2 years ago

What are your thoughts on PhotoPrism?

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

It's nice, but $24/year/forever to have multiple users is a bit much...

rockooooo• 2 years ago

$24 a year is too much?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

My thoughts? Too slow. No timeline view. Looks terrible.

lxe• 2 years ago

Looks polished!

timmg• 2 years ago

Just curious: what's the business model for something like this.

burnte3• 2 years ago

Doesn't look like it's a business, so probably no business plan.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

It's free

warkdarrior• 2 years ago

Ugh, it's tied to Nextcloud. Is there a standalone option?

parl_match2• 2 years ago

Yes! It's open source, so simply download the project, make the requisite changes, and then run it wherever you like.

https://github.com/pulsejet/memories

burnte3• 2 years ago

I think you meant to say "No, but it's open source, so simply download the project, make the requisite changes, and then run it wherever you like."

When you say "Yes, it's OSS so you can just do it yourself" it's generally viewed as snarky and misleading, as the question wasn't "can I modify it" but "is it available already in another form?" It's just not helpful to anyone to word it like that backwards manner.

burnte3• 2 years ago

Doesn't seem to be.

mcint• 2 years ago

I found NextCloud pretty easy to set up...from yunohost.org.

By contrast, when I tried to install it manually, the distribution install scripts broke on the second run, on changes that the very same script made on the first run. Anti-idempotent, I dropped it with the impression of drumming up hosting or consulting business.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

hanniabu2• 2 years ago

I don't know anything about Nextcloud, what's wrong with it?

leononame• 2 years ago

Hi, this looks super polished, congratulations. I've got a couple of questions:

- Does the metadata editing allow it to write back to the file, storing the edited metadata in a sidecar or in the EXIF data? - Does it support some kind of auto-stacking? E.g. having raw files alongside exported tiff/jpg and recognizing that they are the same file? Especially for a nextcloud based solution, that'd be awesome

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Yes. Yes.

gwbrooks• 2 years ago

Does it preserve and/or allow editing of the text metadata (typically, the generative prompt) appended to PNG files created with Stable Diffusion?

belinder• 2 years ago

How does this compare to immich? I spent a few weekends ago setting that up and it's working great, though it doesn't always detect faces correctly and swiping through images is a bit slower than Google photos

talhah5• 2 years ago

The main thing to me was that since this runs on Nextcloud its more extensible as the photos are just stored under the files and you can use various other apps to do what your heart desires. The other aspect is you get your own Gdrive alternative. You may or may not want this.

For mobile compatibility Nextcloud is better since you can choose which folder photos go to and you can essentially automatically backup albums whereas with Immich you can't automatically specify which album photos from a directory should go [1].

In addition to this, Immich isn't too stable yet and each time you update the server all clients have to be on the latest version, at least since the last time I used Immich.

1. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1678

menthe5• 2 years ago

This is moot.

- Immich supports external libraries

- Use docker compose and never worry about versions breaking

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Face recognition is a hard task but you can manually correct the AI and it learns from that. Performance is the #1 goal here. I actually profiled this side-by-side and it's actually faster than Google Photos for my personal deployment.

Jnr5• 2 years ago

Having tens of thousands of photos in Immich, I am surprised how accurate the model is. It rarely gets it wrong and when it gets it wrong, it usually happens with similar baby faces of close relatives.

pathsjs2• 2 years ago

How complex is it to configure memories? I own a hosted instance of NextCloud from Hetzner, but I would rather not misconfigure it. Also, is there a mobile app? I think not having one is limiting, since most of the time I want to look at the pictures on the phone

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Everything can be mostly configured through the admin panel, maybe 15-20 minutes?

There's a mobile app for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memori...

On iOS, you can use the PWA ("add to homescreen") and it behaves almost exactly as a native app

raybb6• 2 years ago

You might wanna consider adding a page to your docs about setup on hetzner since it's so popular for NC hosting.

Seems that it is possible to get it mostly working based on this issue: https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/issues/110

pathsjs2• 2 years ago

How complex is it to configure? I have an instance of NextCloud from Hetzner, but I would rather not misconfigure it.

Also, is there a mobile app? Most of the time when I look at pictures I am on the phone

talhah5• 2 years ago

As easy as downloading an app from the store and telling it which directory to work with.

If you need the AI features those require separate apps and depending on your deployment it might need some effort. I'm running a docker image and had to ensure I have some of the required libraries for the AI things to work. It isn't too hard to misconfigure though and I believe there's a decent amount of resources for this.

As for mobile app, there isn't an explicit one but the webapp interface is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I also use NC photos and it still works with the tags and face recognition things. That app doesn't require "Memories" as far as I know.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

There is an Android app, not for iOS yet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memori...

bl4kers• 2 years ago

Basically the last thing keeping me locked into Google Photos is it's social features.

I see "external sharing" is mentioned but haven't found more information on that. Ideally I'd want the option to share an album with password protection, doesn't require an account to view, and allows comments on photos. Bonus would be to have a running album feed with view receipts per account.

I know that's a lot but wanted to be specific. I'm ready to migrate but haven't found a platform that has feature parity on this front.

magic_hamster• 2 years ago

It sounds like you can implement this by hosting your photos on a server with password access. You don't even need google for this.

lytedev• 2 years ago

#ThatDropboxComment ;)

radialapps39• 2 years ago

You can share folders and albums that don't need an account to view. Folders do support password protection as well.

singhrac• 2 years ago

Does it support allowing others to upload photos as well (eg from a group trip)? If it does I’ll install it today on my homelab.

collin128• 2 years ago

This for me too.

The reason I pay for tons of extra Google photos storage is it tags and uploads and pics of my kiddos to an album shared with all the grandparents. It's their favourite app in the world and I'm never allowed to cancel.

Could I replicate that here?

hoherd• 2 years ago

Photoprism has gallery sharing and the share links can have expirations.

conqrr• 2 years ago

I will take whatever is the most stable. I don't need a lot of feature, just a timeline and gallery with albums. Immich fits it for now, but it is way too focused on piling features and is bleeding edge. I hope memories has stability as its goal.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Indeed. Backward compatibility is also a major goal and there have been almost no major breaking changes since v2 (at v7 currently)

dugite-code7• 2 years ago

I've been using it for quite a while and had no issues with the app at all. Only one hick-up with Nextcloud itself but that was really my fault if I'm honest

Fnoord3• 2 years ago

(Still installing/configuring.)

Awesome, this is the main piece of puzzle I (or rather: my wife) miss from Nextcloud (the default Photos has terrible performance and lacks some features). Gonna set it up. Also nice to see Face Recognition app is used. Now I'm gonna have to edit my docker-compose.yml for the dependencies but that is fine.

Also, I've been trying Photoprism and also I tried Immich in past. They have disadvantages: they don't sync with whatever got uploaded to Nextcloud and they either do not have a mobile front-end or it is some web app. They also have stability issues, though I had most success with Photoprism.

I suppose it won't be as useful to me as it could be as I'm stripping all EXIF data from any photo uploaded by Nextcloud because I fear my wife stupidly just shares whatever when she should not. Yes, I know you can do OSINT analysis anyway, but that is a skill as of yet.

jvanderbot2• 2 years ago

Try https://ente.io/

I like it very much.

avhception• 2 years ago

Thanks, that looks really interesting!

Fnoord3• 2 years ago

Not for me. I self-host Nextcloud in my home network. I have a Wireguard VPN set up to it, too. I'll have fiber (1000/1000 mbit) soon, so not worried about network speed. I prefer something native in Nextcloud. And I do not need E2E encryption; I already use FDE in this VM.

That said, to each their own, thanks for sharing.

screamingninja• 2 years ago

Thoughts about Les Pas?

https://github.com/scubajeff/lespas - comes with built-in two-way sync with Nextcloud server

(no affiliation, just a curious Nextcloud user)

wkipling• 2 years ago

None of those negatives you mentioned apply to Immich.

iforgotpassword• 2 years ago

Man, I've yet to find the perfect solution for this. Photoprism was really promising at first but the Dev can't seem to handle the stress of trying to make this pay his rent. Sometimes he reacts really pissed if people complain about something missing/broken, and not just if they're unreasonable or something. Just not very clever if that's the same people who are paying you. Pull requests get denied or rejected for the smallest of reasons. yes, it's his project and you should not just merge any crappy code, but it's things like rejecting an API extension by developers of the mobile app so they eventually give up on the app.

The facial recognition is subpar and performs worse the more faces you tagged, but it's always the users fault somehow, instead of accepting that yes even though you put a lot of work and effort into it, the result might be bad.

Then somehow immich comes along and manages to basically become a better photoprism over night because it's somehow just a well managed project accepting a lot of contributions without the code turning into complete shit.

I don't know what to say. I'm still a sponsor of photoprism bot it seems the guy running it is his own worst enemy in some ways.

brucethemoose2• 2 years ago

Being a "hero" open source dev for a project like that can require a lot of neuroticism.

Sometimes it works, but sometimes the project is just too big, I think.

janwillemb2• 2 years ago

Somehow I'm relieved by this comment, that it's not just me. I've tried communicating with the author about face recognition and always got answers that I considered slightly rude and off-putting. I shook it off, contributed some money, and I'm still a user. I'll take a look at immich now though.

COGlory3• 2 years ago

Also check out the nc-photos Android app, it's a nice companion app for Memories:

https://gitlab.com/nkming2/nc-photos

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Wanted to drop a note here: nc-photos is really nice but Memories does also have an Android app of its own

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gallery.memori...

menthe5• 2 years ago

For having used Memories on Nextcloud, and having spent hours trying to micro optimize the Nginx & PHP configuration, I can safely say that, while it is better than the Nextcloud’s native Photos app, this is absolutely nowhere near to Immich, Filerun, or surprisingly even a dumb SMB share (which doesn’t have thumbnail caching…!). I’ve really tried hard, as Immich’s support for external libraries was still in a PR at that time, and didn’t want to have two separate tools to grab files and grab photos.

A big part of the problem, it seems, is that, when you have a large library, and you jump/scroll to a specific year or so, it won’t cancel the previous page(s) worth of thumbnails loading. So as soon as you’re scrolling to search for something, it quickly accumulates hundreds of useless requests that quickly overload the PHP workers, and make everything crawl to a standstill.

I personally had to give up. When trying to grab photos from abroad for my shortly upcoming proposal, I’ve literally deleted Nextcloud/Memories, plopped Immich in docker compose, let it index/transcode/generate thumbnails from scratch against my “external library” (so Immich doesn’t duplicate the medias), and that ended up savings me days of buffering, and was able to find the nice pictures for the occasion!

(R740xd with 48 cores and 96TB SSD-backed ZFS pool)

radialapps39• 2 years ago

It's silly to micro optimize nginx / php when you have docker. Just use the Nextcloud Docker image or AIO and be done with it, everything is pre-optimized.

Thumbnail caching exists (it's even highly configurable), there's absolutely zero buffering even with 100k photos+ on a raspberry pi. You obviously did not read the documentation or install the preview generator (which the docs clearly tell you to)

Your deployment skills are hot garbage

EDIT 3: ^the last line was in response to something that has been edited out of the original comment

EDIT: the comment this is in reply to was edited multiple times. This is pointless and a lot of it is just false.

EDIT 2: (at least currently the previous comment claims unnecessary PHP requests) this only happens if your configuration is incomplete; you didn't install preview generator as the docs say. Secondly it happens exactly once, the first time you see the image. All other requests are gracefully cancelled.

menthe5• 2 years ago

Absolutely was using the AIO image, with thumbnail generation enabled for every formats of my library (another thing you need to manually edit in Nextcloud’s configuration as by default the format list is limited).

And it’s only “pre-optimized” if you are cool with PHP memory limit crashes, PHP operation timeouts, PHP request size limits, and the works.

Another joy associated with using Nextcloud sync is that uploads don’t even seem to support multi-part resumable uploads. So not only is it crazy slow, if there’s any error during the auto-upload of a 2G video clip, or the app is temporally backgrounded by iOS, it’ll go into an exponential back off (which you can force start), and eventually just start the upload for that/those file(s) over from scratch - good ways to waste days burning in your screen while in a trip and trying to ensure your medias are backed up in case you lose your phone on a trip. Try uploading raw images & 4k clips shot on iPhone to Nextcloud using the Nextcloud app + the AIO image from abroad.

I’m telling you, I’ve tried to use them for quite some time, and I’m far from DevOps-illiterate - I’ve been using k8s since it’s infancy, we wrote the original Operators at CoreOS way back.

ggm• 2 years ago

Does it have perceptual hash duplicate detection?

ementally• 2 years ago

How is it compared to https://ente.io/ ?

hanniabu2• 2 years ago

looks like memories has auto-categorization

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Different goals.

Ente is commercial, Memories is free

Ente is focused on E2EE, Memories is focused on self-hosting.

saddist0• 2 years ago

It has a commercial offering, but it isn't "commercial" and provide self hosting fyi. https://github.com/ente-io

xiconfjs• 2 years ago

ente.io is fully open source since 2024:

https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/

adam_gyroscope• 2 years ago

Is there auto syncing from Apple Photos? That’s the missing feature in Google Photos for me.

dugite-code7• 2 years ago

There is an Auto upload function in the Nextcloud APP, I believe it works on IOS

greatNespresso• 2 years ago

Impressed by the loading speed of pictures, how does that work?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

It uses very complex hand optimized SQL queries to do everything in a single database query. The database is also structured in a way to support this.

The result: each request overall only takes a few milliseconds for the hardest part, the rest of the optimization is a game of caching.

spencerflem• 2 years ago

I was just setting this up last weekend! Its lovely, really well put together. If this is your project, thank you so much

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Great to hear that!

It's FOSS and I only work on this in my free time, so please keep the bug reports coming as you run into them! :)

greensoap2• 2 years ago

I think this is relevant; but does anyone know of any software that is able to tag photos based on quality- like blur, framing, composition. We have too many photos. So many duplicates from the same day. I’ve dreamed of something that would tag or prune based on the best of from any given set of photos. It would turn our library of 80000 random photos into a set of photos I can put on a frame and see the “good ones”.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

This one has been on my mind for a long time. A good start would be blurred photos, duplicate identification and finding a generically "good" photo given a set (e.g. photos from a single location)

zilti• 2 years ago

digiKam might have this or similar, or there might be a plugin for it. It's gotten so many features that I hardly know what's going on anymore.

globular-toast3• 2 years ago

Delete the bad ones.

greensoap2• 2 years ago

Why didn't I think of that?

sampli• 2 years ago

I’m a big fan of https://immich.app/ and I use it every day for thousands of assets

hereme888• 2 years ago

I tried it a year ago through Nextcloud AIO and it barely worked... Has it had major improvements since? Or is it because I was using the AIO version of Nextcloud?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

The project is a little over a year old, so yeah lol

XiS• 2 years ago

Tried this a year ago, it was a real mess, barely worked and broke often.

Hopefully it changed a lot in the meantime because I would really like this to be integrated into NextCloud.

I the meantime, I'm really happy using Immich

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Umm the project barely existed a year ago, it was in very early stages.

doublesocket• 2 years ago

I currently use Mylio. The feature I like most is that I can store a compressed version of my entire catalog on my phone so it's very quick to find something and it works offline. I can then download the full res image if I want it.

My biggest complaint about Mylio is there is still no automatic synchronisation from Android. You have to leave the app open for it to sync.

Wondering if the Memories Android app can handle both of these points?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

First one is interesting, not possible at the moment.

The Nextcloud app is used for auto-upload, that does support background upload at least on Android.

raybb6• 2 years ago

Nextcloud itself is a PWA. Did you have to do anything special to make what seems like essentially your own PWA inside another? I ask because I'd love to turn the nextcloud/tasks app into a PWA but was concerned about how it could work.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Not much, it works pretty much out of the box.

blacklion• 2 years ago

Is here any FOSS, self-hosting (single-user is Ok), alternative to flickr? With all its albums, collections, photostream, map, keywords, etc?

I'm looking at this Memories now, but I don't like first page, sorry, with all photos is small and divided with white spaces and dates...

But I don't need any metadata editing, AI and mobile apps, I need gallery for high-quality photos to view on big screens.

COGlory3• 2 years ago

Where can I give you money? I see nothing on the support page.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

The GitHub has sponsors, thanks! :)

https://github.com/sponsors/pulsejet

2Gkashmiri• 2 years ago

What's the vps specs required to get started? I do not need ai features for example. Just a place for family to store photos on.

Preferably on the cheapest vps with s3 backend

radialapps39• 2 years ago

See the demo above. It runs on a free-tier VM from Oracle.

Minimum requirements are quite low. Mainly you need memory to get good performance (at least 4GB, say). CPU-wise it runs fine with massive libraries even on RPi.

I don't recommend S3 as external storage though; the Nextcloud implementation is quite finicky. Unless you can mount that and use it inside docker, that would work fine.

EDIT: features like AI are all optional.

laksmanv• 2 years ago

Hi! I love it - how can I reach out to you?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

https://memories.gallery/faq/#getting-help :)

porphyra• 2 years ago

Does it have search by keywords/semantics? That would be my main need. For example if I need to find photos of red algae I could just search for that.

OpenAI open sourced CLIP a couple of years ago: https://github.com/openai/CLIP and I was planning to write something myself to index my vast photo library but got too lazy and gave up.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Not yet, search is a major planned feature

dmitrygr• 2 years ago

How hard would this be to deploy the old-fashioned way (as an executable on my own linux box, no docker/nexcloud/prevcloud/bulbasaur/cerebii/cubone)?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Easy to deploy, hard to configure right. All you need is PHP + an HTTP server (then tune it https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/instal...)

senectus1• 2 years ago

right, i think i have a new project this weekend.

I've been trying to find a way out of google photos... but that auto OBJECT and face tagging is a so useful. I can search for car and get cars, or dog and get dogs etc I look forward to testing this out!

nikolayasdf1233• 2 years ago

does it support HDR? live photos? 4K HDR videos? dare I say, new apple "spatial" video format?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

HDR kinda works, depends on the photo. Live photos are fully supported (Apple/Google/Samsung/Xiaomi at least). HDR videos are a pain to transcode, it mostly doesn't work well (but this is not very well tested / worked on). No idea about the spatial stuff.

nikolayasdf1233• 2 years ago

got it. guess my point is that excellent support for latest formats are super important for this to be viable for mass user

(AFAIK latest browsers still do not support HDR photos.. so guess would be hard to implement in open source those).

nikolayasdf1233• 2 years ago

transcode...

I guess other important point is to store originals as well (or maybe even rendering originals directly). and also RAW format for audio video.

then comes question on handling 250GB+ videos and libraries for TBs sizes

Apple Photos rocks in all of the above. and it also works excellently offline.

to beat it you have to really solve those problems..

nntwozz• 2 years ago

I've been using Lychee for many years - https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee

Memories looks like a nice alternative, anyone using Lychee here with a comparison?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Can't compare myself, but here's a general comparison table between various alternatives in this space that someone has been maintaining.

https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

eblanshey• 2 years ago

Wow, the state of self-hosted photo libraries has gotten way better since I last settled on Photoprism a few years ago. Both Memories and Immich seem very polished. The timeline features look great. I may need to play around with these.

tuananh• 2 years ago

I've been using Synology Photos. Not OSS but they have Android/iOS app so that I can just log in once and enable auto-backup.

codethief4• 2 years ago

Fantastic project!

No Lock-In
Memories stores most of the metadata in the EXIF headers of your photos, which means that you can easily migrate to other solutions without losing your data. It also utilizes your existing filesystem structure for organization without converting it to any specialized format

Given that, would a standalone version be feasible, i.e. one that doesn't rely on Nextcloud and only operates on a folder on disk? I mean, while Memories might not lock you in, Nextcloud can still do so. (No two-way sync etc. etc.)

Currently, I just use Syncthing to synchronize all my files across devices (laptop, phone, home server, …) and it works splendidly! Ideally I'd just want to run Memories either locally (on the local copy of my photos folder) or on my home server (on the home server's copy of my photos folder).

raybb6• 2 years ago

Probably not what you want but I use rclone to mount my hetzner NC instance and have syncthing that points to that mounted folder. It's been pretty hands free solution for me since I don't have a computer at home that's always on. It all started because I didn't want to keep getting sync conflicts with my obsidian notes between laptop and phone.

BodyCulture2• 2 years ago

Is that data in the data centre encrypted?

codethief4• 2 years ago

I'm not sure I'm following: What do you use Syncthing for if on your laptop you mount your remote Nextcloud storage anyway (and presumably use the Nextcloud client on your phone)?

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Thank you!

I wrote a bit on why Nextcloud a while back, I'll link it here (see point 5 in FAQ): https://memories.gallery/faq/#faq

As such, Nextcloud doesn't really lock you in; it just provides a framework for the app. You can, theoretically, continue to use Syncthing to sync files while running Nextcloud on top of it (probably not ideal though)

I want to note though, the "no lock-in" philosophy refers more to being able to move out of Nextcloud/Memories at any point if you want. Nextcloud still just stores everything on your disk as folders and files, so you can just decide to nuke it one day and still have everything (not fully true yet, you'll still lose some things like tags and albums; exporting these out too is WIP)

skybrian• 2 years ago

Another question for your FAQ might be "what is NextCloud?"

BodyCulture2• 2 years ago

Please add to FAQ:

Is my data encrypted?

Thank you!

headmelted• 2 years ago

I like the approach taken here. Nextcloud is becoming the defacto open-personal-cloud standard so it makes sense to integrate photos into that. If Nextcloud were getting up to shenanigans in the future I'm confident the project would be forked, and in the meantime I don't expect it would be hard to plug in an alternative backend.

I think for an open-source and/or self-hosted solution to come close to an approximation of google cloud/iCloud/whatever we need projects like this to be able to pick their niche and hyper-focus on it, which leaning on Nextcloud does in this case I feel.

codethief4• 2 years ago

Thanks so much for elaborating!

For what it's worth, I think for people like me (who already use Syncthing and Tailscale), all the reasons the FAQ mention for why Nextcloud is really necessary (auth, file upload, etc.) are already covered, which is why I'd be so interested in something a little bit more lightweight.

(As an aside, I am not sure I agree on the "Nextcloud upgrades are seamless" part – every time I've had to upgrade a Nextcloud instance so far I was in for a world of pain.)

Anyway, I wish you tons of success with your project! :) It might be what will push some of my family members to leave Google Photos and/or Dropbox, and that would be a huge win already!

evrial• 2 years ago

So you saved yourself overhead in lines of code by pushing that overhead to people who don't want Nextcloud platform as slow piece of irreparable bloatware.

auscad2• 2 years ago

I would really like to see an integrated camera app that allows me to hide my photos from the OS so that big brother doesn't automatically ingest them

lxgr• 2 years ago

If you don’t trust your OS, how can you trust it to run an app? Apps can’t hide data from the OS that’s running them.

auscad2• 2 years ago

I’m concerned about what the OS is doing in accordance with its privacy policy or terms of service. Without having read them (I am only human) I assume the photos in the default location are sent off for analysis to “improve your experience by showing you relevant advertising”. I would be surprised if this above-board surveillance went as far as crawling the filesystem

dugite-code7• 2 years ago

The Nextcloud App (Not the Memories Nextcloud app) allows taking a photo that goes directly to the server. It's also got a Scan document feature that I use to scan to a Paperless folder for processing.

adrr2• 2 years ago

Biggest missing feature for all these self hosted photo hosting is the lack of a real search. Being able to search for things like "beach at night" is a time saver instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of photos. There are trained neural networks out there like https://github.com/openai/CLIP which are quite good.

kn100• 2 years ago

Immich does exactly this with CLIP models, you can even customise which CLIP model it uses and it does a phenomenally good job, I'd personally say surpassing even Google Photos.

ic3man5• 2 years ago

I can 2nd Immich, nextcloud sync was just terrible for me also.

Jnr5• 2 years ago

Immich is awesome for this and many other things. Automatic facial recognition feature in immich is also great.

vincnetas2• 2 years ago

Immich warning from the home page :

"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!"

schainks• 2 years ago

Google Photos can already do this pretty well. I use the feature daily without friction. Sometimes, but not always, it can even pull text from receipts I photograph, which is handy for expense reporting.

beezle• 2 years ago

Makes me wonder whether Google is scanning all photos for text and making use of the data found.

dugite-code7• 2 years ago

Nextcloud has some neural network integrations so implementing something like that might be possible. The Memories app can already use the Recognize app for the smart tags for Photos.

Combining it with "The Search Page" app makes it a quite comfortable experience as is.

kzisme• 2 years ago

How easy are these integrations to setup? I use straight up Nextcloud sync and while it works most of the time sometimes it's a little finnicky (when I don't have cell service or something like that)

vishnumohandas2• 2 years ago

Hey, we run CLIP on the device at Ente[1]. Like you noted, the search experience is quite interesting.

[1] https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/

jojohack• 2 years ago

This great, Thanks for sharing!

rc_kas• 2 years ago

Oh god. I <3 for making this.

anigbrowl• 2 years ago

This looks promising, plus it won't try to push its idea of my favorite photos at me when my phone detects I'm awake each day - a gPhotos behavior I find increasingly creepy and never asked for.

mcfedr2• 2 years ago

Disable notifications and it's gone

spurgu2• 2 years ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted (upvoted to counter). I assume you mean the notifications of Google Photos (and not disabling notifications altogether). I don't see any legitimate use for them so might as well just turn them off.

Edit: It doesn't change the fact that the behavior is creepy though. Maybe that's the criticism.

WhitneyLand• 2 years ago

Great work Varun.

Doing photos is one thing, but doing it to scale and also with high performance at the client is a very nice accomplishment.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Thank you!

stavros2• 2 years ago

This is fantastic, better photo viewing is the only thing I was missing from Nextcloud, since without this I basically can't see any photos (they're too slow and the UX is bad).

I installed this, indexed the photos, etc, but I still get lots of grey boxes (photos not loading) when I browse. Am I missing something, or is my server just too slow for this?

EDIT: I think my server is just too slow. The entire machine freezes when loading one of the photos.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

You're missing the preview generator, so it's trying to generate them on demand. See https://memories.gallery/config/#recommended-apps

Also note there are some extra config steps for the preview app (initial run, cron job). See https://github.com/nextcloud/previewgenerator

stavros2• 2 years ago

Ahh, thank you, I did install the preview generator but missed the initial run, thanks!

forgingahead• 2 years ago

Nice work! Been looking for a good standalone photo manager for a while.

Three questions:

1. Can we do multiple person search? Eg: photos with Person A and Person B?

2. Any plans for descriptive search using CLIP or any of the existing neural networks out there?

3. I see we can edit the exif description, but maybe can we have a custom caption box? eg: "Mum and Dad in 1993". Ideally that would also be available for search, and it would appear more explicitly when browsing photos (kind of like a real album with the notes written next to each photo).

Jnr5• 2 years ago

You should try Immich. It already does 1. and 2. very well.

mikrotikker• 2 years ago

PHP? Really? Why?

dugite-code7• 2 years ago

Because Nextcloud is made in PHP and it's not a bad language? It's been a long time since PHP5

nwbort2• 2 years ago

Any suggestions on the best workflow to export out of Google Photos? I have ~200GB in Google Photos and would need to eg put together the weird Google Photos metadata into usable format for Memories

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Google Takeout. Importing from takeout metadata is supported (at least edits to the images; not albums right now)

ajtaylor• 2 years ago

I tried using Takeout but the exported file structure and various metadata files were almost incomprehensible. This is likely partly my fault because I didn't download the full 100+ zip files, but I suspect there would be so many files scattered in too many directories to be much use.

muppetman• 2 years ago

These are all similar things that Gallery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_Project) promised (not the same features because location for example wasn't a thing). And delivered on for a great number of years, really well. It seemed like the future of image hosting. And then it slowly trailed off, v3 of Gallery did get released but to a lukewarm reception (the old plugins/addons didn't work and the cloud was just starting to take over) and then yea, it just died.

I have my gallery still online these days, with a fork so that PHP8 still works with it, but I've had to hide it behind an IP Access list now because I don't trust it being public facing anymore.

I don't mean to shit on this project, I hope it's massively successful. We need more awesome open source apps like this. But I've been burnt once already pouring my heart and soul into an open source image gallery so I'm not going to do it again.

In hindsight I wish I'd put all my photos in Flickr (I thought I was being so clever using Gallery) because it's stood the test of time that Gallery didn't. These days I use Google Photos, I can't see it going away anytime soon (though of course it's Google so who knows)

Sorry this rant is probably very offtopic. The product itself looks amazing and I DO hope it achieves the success that Gallery couldn't.

hwbunny• 2 years ago

In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time! --- Wow, and why is that necessary?

bogdan• 2 years ago

Because we have limited time in this world and waiting for photos to load isn't the best way to spend that time

dohello• 2 years ago

this is awesome!

ksvarma• 2 years ago

Great work and finally I could take that step of bringing all the pictures together locally.

hunter2_• 2 years ago

I need to dig deeper, but for now I just want to say how delightful it is to be able to go to the next/previous photo by swiping even if I've zoomed in. Google Photos makes me zoom all the way back out first with a huge pinch, which leads to a lot of frustration when swipes fail to change the photo. Nice work.

beAbU• 2 years ago

"It's not a bug, it's a feature".

Many rely on this "issue" to prevent people from swiping to photos they're not supposed to see - a common enough occurence when showing someone a photo on your phone.

globular-toast3• 2 years ago

Reminds me of this: https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-wi...

Users will always find a way...

spurgu2• 2 years ago

Indeed. Maybe there should be a setting for this functionality so you can turn it on/off according to your preferences.

stevenicr2• 2 years ago

"prevent people from swiping to photos they're not supposed to see"

I feel this is a common problem and there could be a solution like long-press pop a menu that allows you to lock 'just this pic' until photos is closed and reopened.. or select 'pics from just today' or 'pics just from the past XX minutes'

Or something, this issue is huge in a lot of circumstances.

283042834092342• 2 years ago

Have been using it for a couple of months now! Wife and I love the album feature which helps us to maintain photo albums async.

It is a huge step up from the default photo's app in Nextcloud. Absolutely wonderful stuff.

mcfedr2• 2 years ago

Shout out for photo prism, similar concept, with nice ai search, and doesn't need next cloud, just a folder. https://www.photoprism.app/

No affiliation, just a happy consumer.

intuxikated• 2 years ago

does it do automatic tagging / recognizing faces / scenes / objects?

noisem4ker2• 2 years ago

Sort of. It uses TensorFlow for object recognition and categorization. I personally wouldn't say it's very reliable. I'm not going to compare it to Google Photos, though, as I never fed my photo library to the latter.

nolok• 2 years ago

They have a features page : https://www.photoprism.app/features

janwillemb2• 2 years ago

Yes but it is very unreliable. Especially for recognizing kids.

gaazoh• 2 years ago

Still requires hosting AFAICT. Would you know of a native Windows software alternative, perhaps? I could probably manage to host Photo Prism or Memories, but there's no way my parents would take the time to learn and set up a server, yet they have decades of pictures to sort through.

noisem4ker2• 2 years ago

They offer a hosted service, on PikaPods:

https://www.photoprism.app/cloud

lordfrikk• 2 years ago

I'm a happy consumer, too, but I would say speed is not Photoprism's strength.

tamimio• 2 years ago

Can I search for a text in a photo?

Off topic: what’s the best desktop application that allows that? A lot of my pics in my iPhone are still there because of this feature, but if there’s a program that does the same on windows/linux, I will be happy to use instead.

stevenicr2• 2 years ago

I started playing with 'image scan ocr' (from the windows store I think) - to bulk pull the text from a bunch of screenshots / pics - hoping to export it all and make it searchable..

It did some things well, but I did not complete the mission for reasons I can't recall.

I think powertoys->Text Extractor

and other windows apps have this built in now, including the built-in win 11 'snipping tool' - ( https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/what...

I was reading that MSsoft preinstalled Edge browser has " Enable Edge Screenshot Tool with Copilot, OCR and Search" - but I am unsure if this is on device or shared to cloud.

thih9• 2 years ago

Congrats on building this, looks great!

Minor feedback: could you update the text or image to link to nextcloud? I know nothing about nextcloud, the project mentions it and I wanted to read more.

usrusr• 2 years ago

Would it be good for federation? As in ability to dump a large amount of mixed quality images on a local instance and then sync only a subset ("tagged favorite", "rated 4+ stars" or something like that) to an off-site instance. Because that's my number one requirement for image management: convenient management of the image selection subset pyramid.

I know nextcloud has some federation features, but I have no idea if that could be put to work based on some exif criteria or other file metadata.

For all I know this could be a killer feature that would be enough on its own to motivate the nextcloud plugin vs standalone decision, or it might be completely useless as in federation only based on entire folders.

XCSme2• 2 years ago

I have been using https://www.photoprism.app for a couple of years, and it works better than expected, with the latest updates it's actually quite fast and the face tagging works reasonably well.

abhaynayar• 2 years ago

Missed opportunity to call it FOTOSS.

archon810• 2 years ago

I gave the demo album a whirl on my Pixel 8 Pro in Chrome.

Two bugs stood out to me immediately:

1. Tapping on the i button does nothing.

2. After clicking around on some images, the back button was mostly useless until I pressed it like 10 times. I think it works for album navigation but stops working when you start photo navigation.

radialapps39• 2 years ago

Thanks for the useful report! Fixes are in the pipeline and should land in the next version

garfieldnate• 2 years ago

I don't see this in the demo so I'll ask here: what does the UI look like for identifying unknown faces? In Picasa there was a tab somewhere with unknown faces grouped together by what it thought were the same person. It had a really good flow for this that was perfect for doing genealogy work with loads of old photos.

rrix2• 2 years ago

I set this up today, it's very nice, thank you! It indexed more than a decade of photos in a couple of hours and gave me geocoding and "on this date" back more than a decade. I didn't realize I could per-generate thumbnails on my server, too, your docs helped me out a bit there. Have you looked at how much in common the EXIF data elements can be shared with a desktop DAM like Digikam?

I'm looking forward to the Android app being available in an F-Droid repository!

kirso• 2 years ago

Are there any migration ways (to for instance offload everything from iCloud to Memories)?

vishnumohandas2• 2 years ago

The demo is really cool! Congrats on the launch!

nloa• 2 years ago

Would be nice if someone could create an Unraid community application for this.

Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance

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