PhotoPrism
Photos & MediaA self-hosted photo library that uses AI-based tagging and face and place recognition to browse and search your pictures and videos.
Open-source alternative to:
What the free edition leaves out
The free edition is genuinely usable, but some team or enterprise features need a paid plan. “Not confirmed” means the official pages we read did not say, so we do not guess.
| Feature | Free edition | Details | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSO / SAML | Free | The editions page lists OpenID Connect in the Community, Essentials and Plus columns. SAML is not listed. | Source ↗ |
| Role-based access control | Paid | The editions page lists Super Admin, Admin and Guest roles in Community, and adds User and Viewer roles in the paid editions. | Source ↗ |
| Audit logs | Not confirmed | Audit logs are not listed on the editions page. Session monitoring and hardened security link to Plus documentation. | Source ↗ |
| Multi-user / teams | Not confirmed | The editions page shows account roles for each edition and a web interface for account and session management in Plus; it does not state user limits. | Source ↗ |
| Backups and restore | Free | The editions page lists database backups, manual and scheduled, in the Community column. | Source ↗ |
| API access | Not confirmed | A public API is not listed on the editions page. | Source ↗ |
| Support SLA | Paid | Community has public forums and chat. The README says eligible members can email the team for technical support. No SLA is stated. | Source ↗ |
Best for
People who want a private, self-hosted replacement for a cloud photo library and are comfortable running Docker.
Why choose it over Google Photos
The Community Edition is AGPL-3.0 and free to run, and it keeps your photos and their metadata on your own storage. It includes automatic classification, face and place recognition, a world map and OpenID Connect sign-in. Scheduled database backups are part of the Community column.
Where it falls short
Some features are for paying members only: extra account roles (User and Viewer), better map layers and geocoding without rate limits, the Plus account and session management interface, and private chat support. The default Docker image is not pure AGPL: it carries the Plus License for bundled member extensions, and you pick the 'ce' tag for the AGPL build. The PhotoPrism name and logos are proprietary under the repository's additional terms. The docs say SQLite does not scale well, so larger libraries should use MariaDB, and the server wants at least 3 GB of memory.
Open-source alternative to
- Google Photos — PhotoPrism can be used instead of Google Photos to store, browse and search your photo library on your own server, with automatic classification and a map view.
Category
Photos & MediaTopics
Tech stack
Go
JavaScript
Vue
DockerLanguages as reported by GitHub for the repository.
