I want to start by saying I recognize that everyone’s needs & priorities are different.
My wife and I both have iPhones, and i have a Pixel 7 Pro I use for work (and sometimes to compare the camera to the iPhones). All of our photos are currently backed up to iCloud (Apple One Premier - 2TB storage) and via Synology Photos. The Pixel has “unlimited” storage for photo backup w/ Google, and also backs up to the Synology. In general, I would like to get off of Google, but it’s 99% work stuff that I wouldn’t miss if it was lost.
There’s a lot that I really like about Immich, but there are also some real pain points for me. I’m not going to comment on the discrepancies between the mobile vs. web interfaces as I expect them to be addressed as the product matures.
- The rapid development is both a blessing and a curse. I love that the team are really working through the roadmap. But sometimes it feels like new features arrive somewhat half-baked. The most common example being something is released working on just the web or mobile app. But the pace also creates extra work for me in that every release requires me to look for breaking changes and make appropriate fixes. I get it, it’s beta software, and heavy development often requires this.
- If it mis-identifies a face, the mechanism for correcting that is pretty clunky. I have to first, say it’s a different person, and then, if I don’t care about tagging that face, I have to go to People to hide it. I don’t really care about faces that it completely misses because I don’t consider facial recognition as a “archive-grade” feature. We have tags/keywords for that.
- The tagging is both cool and clunky. I love the nested tags and the drill-down tags interface. I hate that I can only add a new tag from the tags admin page. Would also like to see auto-tagging, or suggested tags implemented.
- Image rotation is half-addressed at best. For one, I’m not sure why it only works on the mobile interface since the web interface has direct access to ImageMagick. I mainly see image orientation issues w/ raw files. To fix this, I have to edit it on mobile, save it to my phone’s library and upload the newly created JPG, which shows up as a separate file w/ metadata that doesn’t align w/ the original (like creation date). It’s just a mess.
I started playing with PhotoPrism a little bit, and while it addresses many of my complaints w/ Immich, it also raises some of its own pain points.
- Probably the biggest issue I have with PhotoPrism is the lack of mobile apps. There are some out there, but the recommended app is a third-party WebDav app called PhotoSync. I tried it and wasn’t overly impressed. At least, not enough to pay for it. This would be a dealbreaker except that I can simply use the Synology Photo backup, and have PhotoPrism mount those directories as its library ( can also do this with Immich’s “External Library” feature).
- The metadata editing is comprehensive. In this one regard it is streets ahead of Immich. Seriously, you have so much more access to the photo metadata. Unfortunately, it’s hampered by the limited batch capabilities.
- Batch editing isn’t really batch editing. It’s just editing a smaller subset of individual files one at a time. So when go to to the next or previous file, it the next or previous one in the selected subset.
- Keywords are supports, and new ones can be created on the fly. That said, nested keywords don’t appear to work.
- There’s also labels. Both are auto-suggested, and both can be manually edited. Labels are also accessible from the sidebar. No nested labels, either, but it does auto sort labels into broad categories. For example, “dog” and “cat” are placed into an “animals” category. You can switch between showing/hiding the broad categories. You can also have favorite labels.
- Image orientation/rotation is done right in the photo editing dialog. One more area where PP beats Immich.
I currently haven’t decided which one I will keep. I could use either with the Synology Photo app to back up my phones. PhotoPrism’s lack of mobile app is really bad, but the mobile web interface is fine for navigating the library. Immich is a more wholistic solution, but it’s handling of some key organizational and editing functions is pretty glaring as well. I know Immich is the overwhelming favorite of most self-hosting communities, but I found PhotoPrism to be pretty compelling in its own right - especially the metadata editing capabilities.
ETA: I see lots of people talking about Immich’s facial detection. Out of curiosity, what are your detection settings? I’ve found it to be pretty good compared to Photo Prism’s, but not exactly game changing. My settings are:
- Model: antelopeV2
- Min Score: 0.2
- Max distance: 0.5 Min recognized faces: 1
I switched to Immich recently and am very happy.
- Immich’s face detection is much better, very rarely fails. Especially for non-white faces. But even for white faces PhotoPrisim regularly needed me reviewing the unmatched faces. I also needed to really turn up the “what is a face” threshold because otherwise it would miss a ton of clear faces. (Then it only missed some, but also has tons of false positives). On the other hand Immich just works.
- Immich’s UI is much nicer overall. Lots of small affordances. For example the menu item to “view in timeline” is worth switching alone. Also good riddance to PhotoPrism’s persistent and buggy selection. Someone must have worked really hard on implementing this but it was really just a bad idea.
- Immich has an app with uploading, and it allows you to view local and uploaded photos in one interface which is a huge UX win. I couldn’t find a good Android app for uploading to photoprism. You could set up import delays and stuff but you would still regularly get partially uploaded files imported and have to clean it up manually.
- Immich’s search by content is much better. For example searching for “cat with red and yellow ball” was useless on PhotoPrism, but I found tons of the results I was looking for on Immich.
The bad:
- There is currently a terrible jank in the Immich app which makes videos unusable and everything painful. Apparently this is due to some Album sync process running in the main thread. They are working on it. I can’t fathom how a few hundred albums causes this much lag but 🤷 There is also even worse lag on the location view page, but at least that is just one page.
- The Immich app has a lot less features than the website. But the website works very well on mobile so even just using the website (and the app for uploading) is better than PhotoPrism here. The fundamentals are good but it just needs more work.
- I liked PhotoPrism’s advanced filters. They were very limited but at least they were there.
- Not being able to sort search results by date is a huge usability issue. I often know roughly when the photo I want to find was taken and being able to order by date would be hugely helpful.
- You have to eagerly transcode all videos. There is no way to clean up old transcodes and re-transcode on the fly. To be fair the PhotoPrism story also wasn’t great because you had to wait for the full video to be transcoded before starting, leading to a huge delay for videos more than a few seconds, but at least I could save a few hundred gigs of disk space.
Honestly a lot of stuff in PhotoPrism feels like one developer has a weird workflow and they optimized it for that. Most of them are counter to what I actually want to do (like automatic title and description generation, or the review stuff, or auto quality rating). Immich is very clearly inspired by Google Photos and takes a lot of things directly from it, but that matches my use case way better. (I was pretty happy with Google Photos until they started refusing to give access to the originals.)
Thanks for the write-up! I’ve settled on Immich but it’s always interesting to hear about other peoples perspectives.
Have you considered ente?
I’ve looked at ente, but honestly don’t see the point unless I want to stop paying for iCloud storage (which for the time being I don’t).
Ah. Are you using iCloud storage with Immich?
I was under the impression it functions similar to Immich. Figured, since you’re testing out Immich and PhotoPrism, maybe you’d test out Ente’s self hosted version too and compare 🫡
Ah, i didn’t see ente’s self hosted version. The instructions look kind of strange. Will need to look into it more.
Some food for thought:
When I was looking to get my photos under control, in the end I decided to go all-in with Apple Photos. As I’m also using a Mac, the convenience can’t be beaten. Also, I can easily pull up any photo using Apple’s smart filters and can easily select photos from within apps without having to “share” them to the photos library first.
But this was only decided after I found out that Apple Photos keeps all photos in separate files in original quality and all metadata in a local SQLite database. Using the osxphotos tool, you can query this database and easily pull out any photo incl. metadata - even when running on other OSes, no need for Apple Photos. This also makes it easy to move everything to another system, if needed.
I’ve set my Mac to always keep original copies on disk and run a backup to my NAS every night. (Using CCC at the moment, but looking to switch to restic.) This way, all my photos are always off-site in iCloud, on my Mac and on my NAS.
You’d just need a tool to upload your Android photos to iCloud. From a quick search it seems Sync for iCloud might do the trick - albeit manually … if I read the reviews correctly.
Agreed, iCloud Photos is pretty nice. I almost gave in when they added the AI features and text recognition. Unfortunately, my library started having some stability issues. Was finally, hopefully, able to resolve those yesterday.
Still, one of the nice things about most of the photo hosting apps is they store photo metadata properly - in sidecar files. If they go tits up, and you maintained your metadata you really haven’t lost much. If the Photos DB gets corrupted, you’re going to lose data that would otherwise have been stored in those sidecar files. IMO this is a glaring omission on Apple’s part. I get that having all that info in a database makes larger libraries perform better, but por que no los dos?
It’s an SQLite database. Corruption is very unlikely. So, that’s not something I am worried about.
I’m curious if anyone’s paying to support development (of either application)?
I’m just about getting all my photos into my NAS, so will be looking at these myself soon
Im paying for photoprism and donated twice to the unofficial Android client
Once I pick one, I’ll probably set up a regular donation. I should also probably drop some $$ towards the other projects since I’ll probably keep an eye on them.
Check out this app https://github.com/Radiokot/photoprism-android-client
Maybe also check out Ente. They went open source relatively recently, but have been developing it for a while with their SaaS platform.
They have a free tier (5GB) if you wanted to test it very quickly.I’ve been testing Ente out the last few weeks and so far it’s pretty good. Easy enough to setup and point the app to my instance. A little annoying to keep seeing a free tier limit being listed on a self hosted instance. Hopefully it doesn’t actually do anything, we’ll see when I hit it though
Been on PhotoPrism+ for a few years (90000 photos, 9000 videos). I use PhotoSync and it’s rock solid (although I go through an FTPS server for sync) - I’ve never ever had an issue with it. Yes, it’s third party, but for me it has just WORKED. Can also highly recommend PhotoPrism although I don’t edit many tags.
I am not using either. Sync via syncthing and web interface via Photo view. More basic, but fits my bill.
I manually sort synched photos into folders for photoview to pick them up.
Just food for thoughts.
I hadn’t looked at FOSS image album software in awhile, but I recently installed Immich on my home Yunohost server. I am very happy with it so far. It is miles better than Nextcloud photos, and I’m honestly blown away by how well the facial recognition works. I’m also enjoying the “x years ago today” highlighting feature, after seeing proprietary platforms have that for so long.
I trialled both a while ago, chose ummich asits face recognition was superior.
There were other reasons, but I’ve forgotten them.
