Edit: I've tried out a few, here's what I found:

  • PiGallery: Super fast, really easy to get going. Not a huge amount of features but really functional. If you just want a gallery, its a great choice.
  • Home-Gallery: Nice looking with a basic detection features. No slideshow, but good filtering options. Definitely tried to make my CPU into a hot plate when processing.
  • Immich: WAAAAYYYY more resource friendly than their docs suggest. Trimmed up further using an existing postgres and redis, and offloaded the ml onto my photo editing workstation. Would be even better if I could use the mac I had to buy for some client work since its just sitting there, but maybe one day.

The Result: Yeah I'm using Immich. Thanks everyone!


Hey everyone, would really appreciate some ideas on image + video gallery options.

We have a bunch of personal photos and videos taken over the years, and since we don't want them on cloud providers, right now they are just a bunch of folders on a local share. We do actually enjoy going through them, but browsing a directory isn't the most fun experience.

Something that had a nice photo/video browser, maybe albums, a slideshow option (maybe with shuffling?), and tags would be great. I'd like to not have to duplicate the images into yet-another-storage-location, so something that can just pull from that share would be great. Backups are also already handled, so not a factor here.

I've tried Stash, but thats more oriented toward the adult industry, so it requires a lot of manual intervention.

Ive never tried Immich, but it seems like a lot for this scenario. Maybe I'm wrong though, let me know.

This will never be available anywhere outside of our home (well aside from a WG connection back to our home), so I don't care about sharing links or any of that kind of stuff. Media is mostly jpg with some Canon and Fuji raws, h264 and h265 videos.

Let me hear your recommendations for open source, locally hosted, no cloud personal media enjoyment!

all 15 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 11 points 5 months ago (8 children)

What's your hesitation with Immich? Try it out and with a small subset of your collection and see how you enjoy it before moving everything.

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] [S] 4 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    Honestly just seems way more hefty in reqs, I don't usually give 6GB or more to an lxc or VM (just to hit the bare minimum). The host i would put it on has 24GB in total and does other stuff as well, and it only has 8 cores on it.

    Immich recommends 8GB+ and 4 cores, the db to be on a local ssd, etc, which seems like I'd need to pick up another whole machine to run it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I run the immich container stack on a vm with 4GiB memory and 2 cores, with db on local disk and external libraries over smb, and it runs perfectly fine. I offload the machine learning jobs to another sometimes-on machine, sometimes, but don't really need to unless I'm dumping thousands of new images into the external library at a time and want it all to process quickly.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] [S] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Thanks! Another person just posted similar, so I'm going to give Immich a shot and see how it goes. If I can pass off CV/ML elsewhere that's even better, I have a workstation for media tasks/editing I can use which would work out great

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2 is something I have moved to from Immich, but actually only because Immich didn't let my HDD go to sleep anymore. I do like it though, it is a bit simpler.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] [S] 3 points 5 months ago

    Just wanted to add, pigallery2 is quick and looks pretty good

    I'm standing up immich alongside for comparison (have to do a bit of extra before I can deploy), but pigallery is fast, easy and works - which are all easier said than done!

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    If you are already hosting Nextcloud, the Memories app might fit your needs well.

    Immich definitely isn't a bad option either. It doesn't take ton of resources, has a clean user interface and is multiplatform. Just like Coolie4 said, you can just try it out with a small collection first before committing to anything.

    If you don't want them on cloud providers because you're not comfortable them being able to see those pictures, you can also pay for Ente.

    Self hosting Ente is also an option, which is what I use for my family

    You might also be able to get away with hosting something like Seafile and use directories as albums. But you won't get random shuffling in that case (My bad I can't read. This isn't much better than what you're doing currently)

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago*

    I've tried nearly all, stuck to home gallery.

  • source