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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: 0.197s | 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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sircastor ◴[30 Jun 25 19:18 UTC] No.44426857[source]▶
Immich is what I'm using right now. I'm running it in a Docker container on my Synology. It was very advantageous to spin up another docker container on my laptop to do the face recognition work because the Synology was going to take forever on it.

We no longer are auto uploading to Google or Apple.

So far, I really like it. I haven't quite gone 100%, as we're still uploading with Synology's photo app, but Immich provides a much more refined, featured interface.

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darknavi ◴[30 Jun 25 20:46 UTC] No.44427672[source]▶
If you want a solid "just upload the photos" experience, PhotoSync on iOS is really great.

I think you can use Immich to just look at a folder and not use the backup from phone bits.

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1. SirMaster ◴[01 Jul 25 21:02 UTC] No.44437965[source]▶
I tried PhotoSync, but it feels like a really misleading name. When I delete photos from my phone, they don't delete on the sync destination, so it's not actually a "sync".

So my photo storage on my home server is getting filled with a bunch of useless images that I only have on my phone temporarily and that I end up deleting shortly after.