PhotoPrism

We love taking photos and they belong to our most valuable (and storage consuming) assets. Privacy concerns and the wish to properly archive them for the next generation brought us to the conclusion that existing cloud solutions are not the right tool to keep them organized. At the same time, traditional desktop software like Adobe Lightroom lacks many features and can only be used on a single computer. That's why we started working on an easy-to-use application that can be hosted at home or on a private server.

History

Our endeavour probably had its origins around January 2018 while traveling through South Africa. The original plan was just to find all of Theresa's cat pictures, but it soon expanded into a more complex technology experiment and a broader vision.

The first major milestone was a proof-of-concept which got completed in September 2018:

• It can import all your photos from a local directory and re-index them later
• Photos are getting automatically labeled, tagged and sorted
• It is possible to instantly search for objects and locations or filter by camera model
• You can view individual photos
• Thumbnails are created using a high-quality resampling filter (Lanczos)
• The application layout is fully responsive
• Contains all important technologies such as TensorFlow

We think this is pretty impressive and we got lots of positive feedback. Thank you for that.

Roadmap

Our next goal is to implement the following features in good quality for the first release:

• Easy-to-use Web interface based on Material Design (20% implemented)
• High-performance command line tool (80% implemented)
• No difficult installation, all you need is Docker (done)
• No proprietary or binary data formats (done)
• Automatic RAW to JPEG conversion (implemented using Darktable)
• Duplicate detection (RAW plus multiple JPEG files can be used simultaneously) (done)
• Automated tagging using Google TensorFlow (90% implemented)
• Reverse geocoding based on latitude and longitude (implemented using OpenStreetMap; support for Google Maps on the todo list)
• Image search with powerful filters (40% implemented)
• Albums to organize your photos (0% implemented)
• Easy backup and export (10% implemented)
• Project Web site including a demo and end-user documentation (0% implemented)

More advanced features will follow later:

• Sharing with friends
• Improved search based on Solr
• Facial recognition

Please ask if you have any questions. We value feedback. A more detailed documentation - also for non-developers - will follow.

Donations

To continue working full-time and build a community, we are looking for public funding or a private sponsor who shares our vision. Any help and advice is much appreciated.

Since the software is not released yet, we don't want to ask for small donations from individuals. Please leave a star if you like this project, it provides enough motivation to keep going.

Setup

Before you start, make sure you got Git and Docker installed on your system. Instead of using Docker, you can also setup your own runtime environment based on the existing Docker configuration (not recommended).

Step 1: Run Git to clone this project:

git clone git@github.com:photoprism/photoprism.git

Step 2: Start Docker containers:

cd photoprism
docker-compose up

Note: This docker-compose configuration is for testing and development purposes only.

Step 3: Open a terminal to run tests and commands:

docker-compose exec photoprism bash
make
make test
make install
go run cmd/photoprism/photoprism.go start

See Quick and easy guide for migrating to Go 1.11 modules for an introduction to Go Modules and Makefiles.

Directory Layout

The directory layout is loosely based on https://github.com/golang-standards/project-layout.

Assets like photos, built JavaScript/CSS files and HTML templates are located in assets/ by default. You can configure individual paths in the config file, using environment variables or command flags.

Example configuration files can be found in configs/.

The frontend code is located in frontend/. Developers run npm run dev to watch files and automatically re-build them when changed.

All other paths contain Go source code and scripts used for building the application.

Web Frontend

Open a terminal an type photoprism start to start the built-in server. It will listen on port 80 by default. The UI is based on Vuetify, a Material Design component framework for Vue.js 2.

Command-line Interface

Running photoprism without arguments displays usage hints:

NAME:
   PhotoPrism - Digital Photo Archive

USAGE:
   photoprism [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

COMMANDS:
     config      Displays global configuration values
     start       Starts web server
     migrate     Automatically migrates / initializes database
     import      Imports photos
     index       Re-indexes all originals
     convert     Converts RAW originals to JPEG
     thumbnails  Creates thumbnails
     export      Exports photos as JPEG
     help, h     Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --debug                              run in debug mode [$PHOTOPRISM_DEBUG]
   --config-file FILENAME, -c FILENAME  load configuration from FILENAME (default: "/etc/photoprism/photoprism.yml") [$PHOTOPRISM_CONFIG_FILE]
   --darktable-cli FILENAME             darktable command-line executable FILENAME (default: "/usr/bin/darktable-cli") [$PHOTOPRISM_DARKTABLE_CLI]
   --originals-path PATH                originals PATH (default: "/var/photoprism/photos/originals") [$PHOTOPRISM_ORIGINALS_PATH]
   --thumbnails-path PATH               thumbnails PATH (default: "/var/photoprism/photos/thumbnails") [$PHOTOPRISM_THUMBNAILS_PATH]
   --import-path PATH                   import PATH (default: "/var/photoprism/photos/import") [$PHOTOPRISM_IMPORT_PATH]
   --export-path PATH                   export PATH (default: "/var/photoprism/photos/export") [$PHOTOPRISM_EXPORT_PATH]
   --assets-path PATH                   assets PATH (default: "/var/photoprism") [$PHOTOPRISM_ASSETS_PATH]
   --database-driver DRIVER             database DRIVER (mysql, mssql, postgres or sqlite) (default: "mysql") [$PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_DRIVER]
   --database-dsn DSN                   database data source name (DSN) (default: "photoprism:photoprism@tcp(localhost:3306)/photoprism") [$PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_DSN]
   --help, -h                           show help
   --version, -v                        print the version

Example

# ./photoprism import
Importing photos from /photos/import...
Moving main raw file "Canon 6D South Africa 2018/IMG_2171.CR2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093058_8BA53355C9BF.cr2"
Converting "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093058_8BA53355C9BF.cr2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093058_8BA53355C9BF.jpg"
Added main raw file "2017/12/20171226_093058_8BA53355C9BF.cr2"
Added related jpg file "2017/12/20171226_093058_8BA53355C9BF.jpg"
Moving main raw file "Canon 6D South Africa 2018/IMG_2172.CR2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093107_B522D1D35DD7.cr2"
Converting "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093107_B522D1D35DD7.cr2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093107_B522D1D35DD7.jpg"
Added main raw file "2017/12/20171226_093107_B522D1D35DD7.cr2"
Added related jpg file "2017/12/20171226_093107_B522D1D35DD7.jpg"
Moving main raw file "Canon 6D South Africa 2018/IMG_2173.CR2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093117_E1EEE95F488F.cr2"
Converting "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093117_E1EEE95F488F.cr2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093117_E1EEE95F488F.jpg"
Added main raw file "2017/12/20171226_093117_E1EEE95F488F.cr2"
Added related jpg file "2017/12/20171226_093117_E1EEE95F488F.jpg"
Moving main raw file "Canon 6D South Africa 2018/IMG_2174.CR2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093120_9D205FF627B3.cr2"
Converting "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093120_9D205FF627B3.cr2" to "/photos/originals/2017/12/20171226_093120_9D205FF627B3.jpg"
Added main raw file "2017/12/20171226_093120_9D205FF627B3.cr2"
Added related jpg file "2017/12/20171226_093120_9D205FF627B3.jpg"
Deleted empty directory "/photos/import/Canon 6D South Africa 2018"
Done.