PhotoPrism: Browse your life in pictures

PhotoPrism is a server-based application for browsing, organizing and sharing your personal photo collection. It makes use of the latest technologies to automatically tag and find pictures without getting in your way. Say goodbye to solutions that force you to upload your visual memories to the cloud.

More screenshots: https://photoprism.org/#screenshots

What to expect

• Clearly structured Web interface for browsing, organizing and sharing your personal photo collection
• Import everything without worrying about duplicates or RAW to JPEG conversion
• Reverse geocoding, XMP support and automated tagging based on Google TensorFlow

For the early birds

You're welcome to play with our demo at demo.photoprism.org. Leave your email to get a release notification.

Step-by-step installation instructions can be found in our User Guide. Developers can skip this and move on to the Developer Guide.

All you need is a Web browser and Docker to run the server. It is available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

Note that this is work in progress. We do our best to provide a complete, stable version. If you have a question, don't hesitate to ask in our help forum or contact us via email.

Why this has to be free software

The development of every commercial product is focused on monetization. We've built similar apps more than once and every single time the constraints of working in a profit-oriented corporate environment were an impediment.

We are sure we can do better with only a fraction of the budget. Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - can be very powerful. Go itself is a great example.

Our long-term goal is to become an open platform for machine learning research based on real-world photo collections.

How to contribute

We welcome contributions of any kind. If you have a bug or an idea, read our guide before opening an issue. Issues labeled help wanted / easy can be good (first) contributions.

You'll get a small reward for working on funded issues, see issuehunt.io for details. Note that issue descriptions may be outdated on their site. Rewards are paid out when all acceptance criteria prioritized as MUST are met and your pull request was successfully merged.

Please follow us on Twitter and join our developers mailing list to receive regular project updates and discuss development related topics. Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions.

No free beer

This project is about freedom but not necessarily about free beer. We feel like it was a mistake on our side to state there will be no costs, because clearly we have huge expenses, your server hardware is not for free and then maybe you'd like to have some extra features that need to be developed.

We do this because we think it's important. It's somewhat disappointing how little support we get by companies and especially public organizations who should share similar goals. Not a single dollar.

The consequence is that we are forced to think about monetization. We honestly didn't expect this will be an issue and didn't ask for anything the first year.

Specific solutions could be to...

• sell a tested & supported version in the app store while our contributors and other developers can continue to use Docker or build from source
• offer a geodata, public events and maps subscription since OpenStreetMap doesn't want us to use their development API for production

Donations

You're most welcome to support us via GitHub Sponsors, especially if you need help with using our software. They will match every donation in the first year. In addition, you can find us on Patreon and PayPal. Our sponsors and contributors will get for free whatever we might have to charge for a geodata subscription later.

Also please leave a star on GitHub if you like this project, it provides additional motivation to keep going.

Financial support makes a huge difference and enables us to spend more time with the features you care about. Ideas backed by a sponsor are marked with a golden sponsor label. Let us know if we mistakenly label an idea as unfunded.

Thank you very much! <3

Lessons learned

Having done mostly commercial projects in the last 10+ years, it is important for us to explore various forms of funding and communication for independent Open Source projects. Note that many of today's popular projects are backed by corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Intel.

That's a good thing and we profit from it, but doesn't mean independent developers should not do this full-time or pay everything themselves without asking the community for support. In fact, crowdfunding is a common way to cover development expenses and it's strange to criticize us for not delivering a complete product before we ask.

In no way do we spurn other OSS projects like OpenStreetMap, as a Twitter user suggested. We just state the fact that even a non-commercial app can't use their API for production, which is perfectly fine. On the other hand, that doesn't mean we have to provide this service for free to our users.

We understand money is a very sensitive topic most of our users don't engage with. For this reason, we'll exclude this topic from our social media communication from now on.

Public and corporate sponsorship

We spent weeks asking organizations like The Prototype Fund for help and also tried to cooperate with companies like Mapbox and Cewe.

Some conversations were good without leading to a sponsorship yet. Others have given us the advice that what we do "already exists in America". You would think it's easier to get a few dollars with our background and a working demo.

If any of those organizations changes their mind, they are welcome to reach out to us.

Disclaimer

We'd like to remind everyone that we are no full-time marketing specialists but developers that work a lot and enjoy a bit of sarcasm from time to time. Please let us know when there is an issue with our "nuance and tone" and we'll find a solution.