Photo services give you good search in exchange for the most personal dataset you own: the faces of everyone you know and a map of everywhere you have been. PhotoPrism gives you the same classification, face recognition and timeline, with the indexing happening on your own offshore server.
What you get
- Automatic classification so the library is searchable without manual tagging
- Face recognition, geo-search and a timeline, computed on your machine
- Your own hardware, with no images uploaded for anyone else to analyse
- Offshore, no KYC, crypto billing
Get it running
Give it room to work
This is one of the heavier catalog apps: around 2 GB of memory and generous disk, since indexing and thumbnails add to the size of the originals. Pick an offshore VPS with headroom.
Install it in one click
Install PhotoPrism from the catalog with a hostname such as photos.example.com. It requires an admin password of at least eight characters and will not start without one, so there is no window where the instance sits unclaimed.
Import your photos
Place your originals on the server and let it index. The first pass takes a while, since it is doing the classification work locally that a cloud service would do on its own fleet.
Browse and search
Search by face, place, date or content, and share albums selectively rather than by default.
Most phone photos embed GPS coordinates and timestamps in their metadata. That is useful inside your private library and dangerous outside it: publishing a single image can reveal where you live. Strip metadata from anything you share publicly, and never assume a shared album has been scrubbed for you.
A face-recognition index of your family and friends is sensitive personal data, and they did not choose to be in it. Keep the instance private, restrict who can log in, and think twice before enabling public sharing on a library full of identifiable people.
Photos are the one dataset with no second copy in the world. Back up the originals off the server and test a restore, rather than trusting a single VPS disk. See manage your VPS from chat.
The classification runs on your CPU, so the initial import is slow on a small server. It is a one-off cost for the bulk of the library, with incremental work after that.
Start now
Spin up an offshore VPS and install PhotoPrism from the catalog, or read the documentation.