PhotoPrism Challenges Google Photos with Enhanced Local AI

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Key Takeaways

1PhotoPrism, an alternative to Google Photos, enhances its facial recognition capabilities with ONNX, replacing the old Pigo engine.

2PhotoPrism's video transcoding is optimized by Vulkan, reducing CPU load and speeding up processing on NAS devices.

3The update features a modernized interface, allowing users to edit metadata and faces directly in full screen.

💡Why it matters — PhotoPrism strengthens its position as a self-hosted solution, providing users with more control and privacy.

PhotoPrism: An Update That Disrupts Photo Management

PhotoPrism, a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos, unveils a major update that promises to significantly enhance the user experience. This version focuses on three main areas: facial recognition, video processing, and user interface.

Redesigned User Interface

The new update of PhotoPrism introduces a complete overhaul of the information sidebar in the viewer. Users can now directly edit the metadata of photos, such as title, date, and location, as well as manage albums and tags, all without leaving full-screen view. Additionally, manual tagging of faces that were not automatically detected is now possible from this same panel.

Improvements in Facial Recognition

PhotoPrism has replaced the old Pigo engine with a pipeline based on ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange). This change allows the application to utilize artificial intelligence models from platforms such as Hugging Face, Ollama, and services compatible with the OpenAI API.

Optimization of Video Transcoding

Video transcoding now benefits from Vulkan hardware acceleration via FFmpeg 8. This technology offloads the CPU of the NAS by utilizing the power of the GPU, speeding up the processing of video files, especially for large libraries. PhotoPrism also includes a native player for HEIC and AVIF formats, thanks to the update of the libheif library to version 1.21.2. Additionally, multi-layer TIFF files and Adobe Photoshop PSD files are now supported.

Other Notable Improvements

Among other adjustments, PhotoPrism introduces support for boolean queries with NOT and AND operators, as well as simplified importing via a drag-and-drop area. Zstd compression is also used to speed up page loading. In terms of security, search queries now go through parameterized instructions, protecting against SQL injections.

PhotoPrism positions itself as a decentralized photo management solution that respects privacy and is compatible with various platforms such as Docker, Raspberry Pi, FreeBSD, and DigitalOcean.