About me: My name is Solène Rapenne, pronouns she/her. I like learning and sharing knowledge. Hobbies: '(Qubes OS BSD OpenBSD Lisp cmdline gaming security QubesOS internet-stuff). I love percent and lambda characters. Qubes OS core team member, former OpenBSD developer solene@. No AI is involved in this blog.

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Software to keep photos organized

Written by Solène, on 09 April 2026.
Tags: #privacy #photography #selfhosting

Comments on Fediverse/Mastodon

Table of contents

1. Introduction §

I have a lot of photos that I have been carrying since a long time, this is certainly my oldest files that I was able to not lost over 20 years. It has been stored as a hierarchy since then, and it had very poor metadata information, and poor ability to be browsed. It was time to improve on this.

My goal was to fix metadata on my pictures, but also put geolocation metadata on them because I really enjoy see a map with thumbnails of memories (just make sure to trim this metadata before sharing). Then I found about "modern" features like face recognitions, which allowed me to easily sort pictures by people, which I found handy when I want to view photos of relatives who are no longer with us.

I tried multiple solutions, each with pros and cons, here is an overview of my findings.

First, they almost all support the following features, let's say it is the core set of features we want:

  • support metadata in sidecar files
  • allows pinning pictures on a map
  • has face recognition
  • can do mass edits
  • duplicate detection
  • can browse pictures from a map
  • can sort by year/month

2. Digikam §

Project official website

As of my experience, it was practical to edit a lot of pictures and reset incorrect metadata, or add geolocation on directories of pictures. But the overall experience was pretty bad, I gave up a few times, I had to dig a lot to figure how to achieve what I wanted correctly.

I did not really enjoy using Digikam at all, but to my surprise, it is the most viable and advanced photo library around. There are other software of course, but they all lacked a few features Digikam had.

Digikam can generate metadata from filename (date, time), this can be useful when you have a lot of old pictures that have timestamp in the filename, but not in the metadata.

3. Photoprism §

Project official website

Photoprism is an open source web app that you can self host. It is rather easy to host and use, although the user interface is not really great, it works well.

In addition to face recognition, it has scene / objects recognition. In practice, it gave funky results like a volcano scene for a dish photo.

One issue with photoprism is that an instance of it can only have a single set of pictures, you can make multiple users for access control, but they are all admin.

Some features have a weird user experience, most notably the face recognition interface.

4. Immich §

Project official website

This is the best software around for the task, by far, in my opinion. It works great, looks great, it has a great user interface and provides Android and iOS apps for uploading new pictures.

Face recognition works well, and I did not have to fight with it to associate names to faces, like it was on Photoprism.

One surprising feature I really enjoy is that it daily shows pictures taken the same day of previous years, this is an engaging way to revisit old pictures for me and I check it daily now.

Compared to Photoprism, you can have multiple users with their own libraries, and users can give access of some folders or their libraries to other users of the same instance.

It comes with a share feature that creates a link that can show a set of pictures and strip all metadata, with optional password and expiration time.

Scenes and objects recognition works well, I can search "flower" and get all pictures featuring flowers. This kind of feature adds some CPU use when new pictures are imported, but it is really light in terms of CPU/memory requirements.

It even supports animated pictures and videos!

5. Conclusion §

For my use case, Immich is exactly what I wanted: an efficient and easy picture management software, that allows me to share some pictures with a URL, and even share my library with my husband. Face recognition is not something I expected on average software, but it works great.

Digikam had a steep learning curve, but allowed me to edit a few thousand pictures in a few hours, although Immich supports editing pictures it might not be as convenient.

I used Photoprism a bit after looking for an alternative to Digikam, but then I found about Immich and immediately gave up on Photoprism.