[Knowledge] PhotoPrism: Browse Your Life in Pictures

Posted on 2021-10-09 Edited on 2024-09-12 In Awesome Software , Multimedia Views: Word count in article: 3.4k Reading time ≈ 3 mins.

PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism® is a privately hosted app for browsing, organizing, and sharing your photo collection. It makes use of the latest technologies to tag and find pictures automatically without getting in your way. Say goodbye to uploading your visual memories to the cloud!

PhotoPrism®

Key Features

Our intuitive Web UI makes browsing and organizing your photo collection as easy as it should be — whether it’s on a phone, tablet, or desktop computer
Index all your photos and videos without worrying about duplicates, RAW to JPEG conversion, or video transcoding
Includes four high-resolution world maps to see where you’ve been, and for rediscovering long-forgotten shots
Enjoy privacy-preserving face detection and recognition 💎
Automatic image classification based on Google TensorFlow – in addition, PhotoPrism detects many other properties such as colors, chroma, luminance, quality, panoramic projection, and location type
Use PhotoSync to securely backup iOS and Android mobile devices in the background
WebDAV clients, like Microsoft’s Windows Explorer or Apple’s Finder, may connect directly to PhotoPrism so that you to can open, edit, and delete files from your computer or phone as if they were local
Because PhotoPrism is built as a Progressive Web App, it provides a native app-like experience, and you can install it on your home screen without struggling with compatibility issues

Configuration

Download our docker-compose.yml file (right click and Save Link As... or use wget) to a folder of your choice, and change the configuration as needed:

1	$ wget https://dl.photoprism.org/docker/docker-compose.yml

Please change PHOTOPRISM_ADMIN_PASSWORD so that PhotoPrism starts with a secure initial password. Never use photoprism, or other easy-to-guess passwords, on a public server. A minimum length of 4 characters is required.

Your personal photo and video collection will be mounted from ~/Pictures by default, where ~ is a placeholder for your home directory. We’ll refer to this as the originals folder.

You may mount any folder accessible from your computer, including network drives. Note that PhotoPrism won’t be able to see folders that have not been mounted. Multiple folders can be indexed by mounting them as sub-folders of /photoprism/originals:

    volumes:
      - "~/friends:/photoprism/originals/friends"
      - "/media/photos:/photoprism/originals/media"
```  

Make sure there is enough disk space available and verify file system permissions before starting to index: The originals folder must be readable, while storage must be readable and writeable.

The import folder points to `~/Import` by default, so that you can easily access it. If you don't need this feature, e.g. because you manage all files manually or use a different tool for importing, you can safely remove the volume. Using import is strictly optional.

Settings, index, sidecar files, and thumbnails will be put in storage by default. You may use an anonymous volume or absolute path instead, just don't remove it completely so that you don't lose your index and albums after restarting or upgrading the container.

## Start the server¶

Open a terminal, go to the folder in which you saved the config file and run this command to start the server:

```shell
$ docker-compose up -d

Now open http://localhost:2342/ in a Web browser to see the user interface. Sign in with the user admin and the initial password configured via PHOTOPRISM_ADMIN_PASSWORD. You may change it on the account settings page, or using the photoprism passwd command in a terminal. A minimum length of 4 characters is required.