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Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

224 points jamesxv7 | 4 comments | 30 Jun 25 18:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

First of all, this is purely a personal learning project for me, aiming to combine three of my passions: photography, software engineering, and my family memories. I have a large collection of family photos and want to build an interactive experience to explore them, ala Google or Apple Photo features.

My goal is to create a system with smart search capabilities, and one of the most important requirements is that it must run entirely on my local hardware. Privacy is key, but the main driver is the challenge and joy of building it myself (an obviously learn).

The key features I'm aiming for are:

Automatic identification and tagging of family members (local face recognition).

Generation of descriptive captions for each photo.

Natural language search (e.g., "Show me photos of us at the beach in Luquillo from last summer").

I've already prompted AI tools for a high-level project plan, and they provided a solid blueprint (eg, Ollama with LLaVA, a vector DB like ChromaDB, you know it). Now, I'm highly interested in the real-world human experience. I'm looking for advice, learning stories, and the little details that only come from building something similar.

What tools, models, and best practices would you recommend for a project like this in 2025? Specifically, I'm curious about combining structured metadata (EXIF), face recognition data, and semantic vector search into a single, cohesive application.

Any and all advice would be deeply appreciated. Thanks!

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crobibero ◴[30 Jun 25 18:23 UTC] No.44426343[source]▶
I think Immich checks a lot of these

https://immich.app/

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1. lucideer ◴[30 Jun 25 19:58 UTC] No.44427196[source]▶
Been running immich on my home server for about a year now.

Near zero maintenance stack, incredibly easy to update, the client mobile apps even notify you (unobtrusively) when your server has an update available. The UI is just so polished & features so stable it's hard to believe it's open source.

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2. hammyhavoc ◴[01 Jul 25 07:56 UTC] No.44431641[source]▶
This seems in stark contrast to others complaining enough about breaking updates that I haven't bothered to try it until it is deemed "stable".

Is it really that stable and flawless in terms of updates?

Because I'm sat here with ZFS, snapshotting and replication configured and wondering why people scare others off of it when the tools to mitigate issues are all free and should be used anyway as part of a bog-standard self-hosted stack.

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3. i-am-gizm0 ◴[01 Jul 25 11:31 UTC] No.44432816[source]▶
I've also been running it for a year or two now. There used to be a lot more "breaking" releases but that's slowed way down recently as they approach a "stable" release. As long as you don't use Watchtower or other tools that blindly update containers immediately, you're all set. When there are breaking changes, they are extremely clearly marked in the release notes with migration steps included. So as long as you read those you're all set
4. lucideer ◴[01 Jul 25 11:50 UTC] No.44432953[source]▶
I've only been running it for about a year (August last year) & from skimming those comments I get the impression I got in at the right time - there's a sense that they've improved stability a lot lately compared to what it was like & it may still be burdened with the fallout of reputational damage from that period.

I also perform all my updates manually - it's fully automated: a simple script that runs in seconds across my entire home server - but I don't have it on any schedule so I'm not doing anything blind. That at least affords me the luxury of being present if/when anything breaks (though for Immich that has not occurred yet).