4 Aug, 2021
Top 5 self-hosted photo storage options
Cloud

Tom Merritt talks about self-hosting your own photo storage so you don’t have to keep paying for storage space.

Are you tired of storing your photos in the cloud only to have the cloud provider change the deal and ask you to pray they don’t alter it further? Have you looked at all the photos on your hard drive and thought, well I have them, I just want easier ways to share them? My friend, self hosting is for you. 

SEE: The future of work: Tools and strategies for the digital workplace (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Here are five self-hosted photo storage options for you to consider.

1. NextCloud. This open-source project offers a mobile app and has a pretty good auto-upload feature. You can use it as the host for other photo management apps, too. And it can host non-photos like documents, calendars, contacts and the like.

2. Photoprism. This open-source app uses Google TensorFlow to automatically classify images. It extracts location data, does duplicate detection and can sync with Nextcloud.

3. Piwigo. This open-source photo gallery software offers geolookup and multi-user support. Its album features are great, including batch management, album hierarchies and more. It also has a mobile app.

4. Lychee. This open-source photo gallery app has excellent album and metadata-editing features. But of course its gallery features are where it does the best. Just keep in mind it doesn’t have any machine learning in it. So, no auto-detection of stuff.

5. LibrePhotos. Like most things named Libre, this one is a fork. In this case, a fork of OwnPhotos. Object detection, face training and event-based album generation. It also integrates with NextCloud.

Albums, sharing, automatic facial recognition, all the things you’d get from that cloud provider that suddenly wants to charge you while still gathering your data for its ad targeting. If you’ve got the space on your own computer or server, you can be self-hosting your own photos in no time.

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