[mceachen]

Personal plug: I'm working on PhotoStructure, after trying many, many open source photo projects (and being a committer for years of one of the most popular, "gallery.")

PhotoStructure is browser-based (using Vue), and scales to hundreds of thousands of assets over millions of files. Your library can be created on a Mac, saved on your NAS, then later opened and managed by a Linux box, seamlessly. Raw images have highlight restoration before rendering previews. Videos are auto transcoded for mobile and desktop web use. Corrupt images are detected automatically and culled. Image source sets are used to minimize network data and maximize viewing quality. XMP sidecars are imported for metadata. Importing aggressively coalesces duplicate images and videos using direct and inferred metadata, so even your downsized Google photos takeout will be deduped with your originals.

Once you've got a huge library, though, it needs a novel UX. Scroll-reverse-chron and a search bar shouldn't cut it. PhotoStructure has a couple novel and unique approaches to navigation, which you can read about here: https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/

It scales down to odroids, and up to as many CPUs as you can throw at it, and self-throttles CPU during library sync so the machine is still useable. Installation takes under a minute, and updates are automatic.

It's closed-source because it's how I want to pay for my food and clothing, but it's a corporate mandate to open source in case of business closure, which is also explained in that blog post.

I'm sending out another wave of beta testers later today, and during the beta it's free. I'm giving heavy discounts to my beta testers that share feedback.

I'd love to hear what you think.

[xtracto]

Personally I don't like this response. The post specifically asks for Open Source software, and the top response is a closed-source service?

I am not making any judgement on the service, just that it is not an appropriate reply for what is being asked here.

[mceachen]

Yeah, I hear you.

Having written many open source libraries (my rubygems have been downloaded several million times, my node packages are close to that, and I've contributed to other libraries for over a decade), I personally will choose open source projects over closed-source because I don't want to be victimized by abandonware or corporate whims.

It seems like photo software (both closed and open source) is especially prone to dying on the vine. It's a common need, and it's easy (and fun) to write a simple script that makes thumbnails from a folder of images. I seen countless photo projects on github, but as complexity ramps up quickly, the installer script (if there is one) breaks, updates fail, there aren't any tests, and the author gets bored and moves on.

I guess I felt justified here because a) it is self-hosted, and b) I'd added my corporate mandate to open-source the codebase in case of business closure. (I don't remember a corporation doing this open-source-on-close before, do you?)

I've actually already open-sourced some of the trickier bits: https://exiftool-vendored.js.org/ and https://batch-cluster.js.org/. I expect that to continue.

[icebraining]

While not open source, it doesn't seem to be a service, but a self-hosted application.

[pheeney]

I have been looking for a photo meta data app for a long time, not sure if this is something you have/will offer.

I am essentially looking to leave the original photos on external drives and have an app that indexes them and stores a customizable thumbnail with the app to view them on my local machine. This way I can browse through all my photos and figure out the original file path if I want to retrieve them. The most important aspect is that I can take the drives offline while the thumbnails and index remains within the app and re-indexing when connected again.

My existing workflow is to import all photos on my mac to the Photos app. I pull them from different devices (phones, camera, etc). The photos app does an OK job at de-duping any matches. I also run PhotoSweeper to further de-dupe which analyzes the photos itself and I can leave the best ones remaining. After that I run some custom scripts to export the data as [year]-[month]/[year]-[month]-[day] [hour].[min].[sec].jpg. I then merge those onto my external drive and kick off my backup process to clone them to other drives and sync to cloud.

The closest I have come is Lightroom which indexed the drive a little bit but the "thumbnails" and catalog is huge. It allows some tagging and other features to discover old photos but some processes are a bit manual. This workflow seems to be common among digital asset management software which is expensive and way more then I am looking for.

[mceachen]

Yes, you can absolutely use PhotoStructure for your use case.

After you install, the second question you should pick "No thanks, I like my photos and videos where they already are." See https://support.photostructure.com/automatic-library-organiz...

Email me at hello at photostructure.com or sign up for the beta. I'd love to hear what you think!

[pheeney]

Already signed up, looking forward to trying it. I found this line on your blog:

https://support.photostructure.com/how-much-disk-space-do-i-... > As an example, if you have 250,000 images and videos, your library metadata and previews will consume about a half a terabyte.

I assume this is mostly from the preview image size and not meta data? This is where I was hoping for a configurable image size because I would be willing to have smaller previews to be able to store more metadata.

If the goal is to archive my entire life's photos or even use it for business use then at some point it looks like I would need a dedicated drive / computer just to view the photos on the other drives. If it is configurable then I could push this limitation further.

[mceachen]

There are some knobs you can dial in PhotoStructure to reduce disk space consumption, at the cost of browsing speed.

I just added instructions for you to that post: https://support.photostructure.com/how-much-disk-space-do-i-...

[MrGilbert]

Also just signed up for the beta. :) If I can choose, I'll pay for a project that allows self-hosting rather than pumping my pictures into the cloud. I'm doing the same for Bitwarden, my go-to password manager.

[jayniz]

Signed up for the beta! I've been looking for something like this for my ~1TB photo database ranging back to 1999.

[meepl]

awesome, just signed up for the beta