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://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/wiki/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
• 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.

There is also a pre-installed Raspberry Pi image here.

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. We're already in contact with data scientists who like our idea.

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.

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.

Free beer

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

It's fair to say that users with basic needs will have no monthly costs. We were also way more effective per dollar than commercial projects and learned a lot on top of it. An earlier version of this document contained a rough number, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter.

Basically all established OSS companies make 90% of their revenue with enterprise customers, that's why private users and single developers typically get everything for free. Obviously that doesn't work if you have only private users that refuse to share their data on top of it. In our opinion it would have made sense to finance this like all public infrastructure, our expenses are peanuts compared to building a road.

Looking forward, specific solutions for funding development and maintenance 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, which is perfectly fine

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.

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

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. You would think it's easier to get a few dollars with our background and working code.

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 not full-time marketing specialists but developers who 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.

PhotoPrism™ is a trademark of Michael Mayer. You may use it as required to describe our software, run your own server, for educational purposes, but not for offering goods, products, or services to others without prior written permission. In other words, please ask.

In exchange, PhotoPrism is GPL licensed instead of AGPL. This means, you're not legally obliged to publish the source code when modifying a private copy. Hopefully we can keep it like that :)