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 Note that issue descriptions may be outdated on their site.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.

Funding

It's clear many users are waiting for a stable release while only very few donate or help with development. This project is about freedom but not necessarily about free beer.

We are not Google and don't have billions of dollars on our bank accounts to give away to our fans in exchange for their data. It's also somewhat disappointing how little support we get by companies and especially public organizations. Not a single dollar.

Every politician wants to support Open Source and warns social media is bad for your privacy, but only very few are willing to help those that actually do something.

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. Thank you very much to our few sponsors! We still love each and everyone of you, even those that send multiple pages of written requirements and then ask every week when it is done.

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 here 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 funded 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 pretty common way to cover development expenses if you look at Indiegogo or Kickstarter.

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 OK.

On the other hand, it also doesn't mean we have to provide this service for free to our users. We've learned that money is a very sensitive topic most of our users don't engage with and even try to avoid. No wonder many founders go the easy way, take venture capital and sell licenses for their software.

Public and corporate sponsorship

Our software is now almost done after two years of hard work, some days 16 to 20 hours on top of other projects we did to finance this. We spent weeks asking organizations like The Prototype Fund for help and also tried to cooperate with companies like Mapbox and Cewe. We have been ignored and even given the advice that what we do "already exists in America".

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