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

224 points jamesxv7 | 1 comments | 30 Jun 25 18:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.316s | 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!

1. gerdesj ◴[30 Jun 25 23:34 UTC] No.44429055[source]▶
Nextcloud with a few addons. Now this might look like overkill for your use case but I get the impression that you might want to go further in future.

Stock NC gets you a very solid general purpose document management system and with a few addons, you basically get self hosted SharePoint and OneDrive without the baggage. The images/pictures side of things has seen quite a lot of development and with some addons you get image classification with fairly minimal effort.

The system as a whole will quite happily handle many 100,000 files with pretty rubbish hardware, if you are happy to wait for batch jobs to run or you throw more hardware at it and speed up the job schedules.

NC has a stock phone app which works very well these days, including camera folder uploads. There are several more apps that integrate with the main one to add optional functionality. For example notes and voip.

It is a very large and mature setup with loads of documentation and hence extensible by a determined hacker if something is missing.