PhotoPrism

What PhotoPrism does

PhotoPrism is a web app for browsing, organizing and sharing a large photo and video collection. You point it at a folder of originals and it indexes them in place, keeping your folder structure, or you let it import files into its own structure. During indexing it reads Exif and XMP metadata, labels pictures by content and location, detects faces and groups them into people, and places geotagged photos on a world map.

Search is its strongest point. Filters can be combined across labels, location, color, chroma, resolution, quality and many other properties, which makes it practical to find one picture in a library of hundreds of thousands. It handles RAW files, HEIC, JPEG XL, videos, Live Photos, Motion Photos and 360° panoramas. Captions and labels can optionally be generated with Ollama or OpenAI.

Phones and syncing

There is no official native app. The interface is a progressive web app that can be installed on a phone’s home screen, and PhotoPrism has a built-in WebDAV server. For automatic phone backup the documentation recommends PhotoSync, a third-party app for iOS and Android in which some transfer options need a paid upgrade, or any WebDAV client. Windows Explorer and macOS Finder can also connect over WebDAV.

To move from Google Photos you extract a Takeout export into the originals or import folder; PhotoPrism reads titles, captions, locations and dates from the JSON files. Albums are not imported automatically.

Editions and license

The Community Edition is AGPL-3.0, free, and has no storage or instance limits. PhotoPrism is funded by paid memberships for personal use and team plans for organizations. Members get extras such as more account roles (the Community Edition has Super Admin, Admin and Guest), 3D vector and satellite maps, and reverse geocoding without a request limit. The project says it may develop some features internally and release them to members first.

Note the Docker tags: the standard latest image uses the proprietary PhotoPrism Plus License so it can bundle member extensions, while the ce tag is the pure AGPL build.

Self-hosting PhotoPrism

Docker Compose is the recommended install, with multi-arch images for AMD64 and ARM64, so a Raspberry Pi works too. Podman, Linux packages, FreeBSD ports and NAS devices are also covered. The documented minimum is 2 CPU cores, 3 GB of RAM and a 64-bit system, with at least 4 GB of swap and no hard memory limit. A local SSD for the database and cache speeds up indexing. It uses MariaDB 10.5.12 or later; SQLite works for small libraries, and MySQL 8 is no longer supported. Maps and place names come from PhotoPrism’s own geocoding service and MapTiler, so the server needs outgoing Internet access for those.

By default PhotoPrism writes a daily database dump and keeps three. A full backup also needs the originals and the storage folder.

Hosted version

The developers do not run a hosting service. Their docs point to PikaPods, a separate provider, for managed hosting, and to DigitalOcean.

Limitations

Phone backup depends on third-party apps. Some features are reserved for paying members, and the license of the default Docker image is not open source. There is no end-to-end encryption.

Who it suits

PhotoPrism suits photographers and families with a large existing archive on a NAS or server who want strong search and maps on top of their folders without heavy hardware. If native backup apps matter more, compare it with Immich; for a fully MIT-licensed project with similar AI features, see LibrePhotos.