radialapps (u/radialapps)

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

archon810 · 2 years ago

I gave the demo album a whirl on my Pixel 8 Pro in Chrome.

Two bugs stood out to me immediately:

1. Tapping on the i button does nothing.

2. After clicking around on some images, the back button was mostly useless until I pressed it like 10 times. I think it works for album navigation but stops working when you start photo navigation.

radialapps · 2 years ago

Thanks for the useful report! Fixes are in the pipeline and should land in the next version

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

nikolayasdf123 · 2 years ago

> transcode...

I guess other important point is to store originals as well (or maybe even rendering originals directly). and also RAW format for audio video.

then comes question on handling 250GB+ videos and libraries for TBs sizes

Apple Photos rocks in all of the above. and it also works excellently offline.

to beat it you have to really solve those problems..

radialapps · 2 years ago

Only the originals are stored. Transcoding is needed to play any video in browsers, e.g. HEVC isn't supported by most browsers. For this, Memories transcodes your video on the fly and streams it to the browser with HLS. RAW support for photos is easy and already supported, no idea about videos.

As far as "beating" Apple, I'm ready to bet that'll never happen (not just with this project but any really). A small open source project can't really compete with a $2T company

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

nwbort · 2 years ago

Any suggestions on the best workflow to export out of Google Photos? I have ~200GB in Google Photos and would need to eg put together the weird Google Photos metadata into usable format for Memories

radialapps · 2 years ago

Google Takeout. Importing from takeout metadata is supported (at least edits to the images; not albums right now)

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

stavros · 2 years ago

This is fantastic, better photo viewing is the only thing I was missing from Nextcloud, since without this I basically can't see any photos (they're too slow and the UX is bad).

I installed this, indexed the photos, etc, but I still get lots of grey boxes (photos not loading) when I browse. Am I missing something, or is my server just too slow for this?

EDIT: I think my server is just too slow. The entire machine freezes when loading one of the photos.

radialapps · 2 years ago

You're missing the preview generator, so it's trying to generate them on demand. See https://memories.gallery/config/#recommended-apps

Also note there are some extra config steps for the preview app (initial run, cron job). See https://github.com/nextcloud/previewgenerator

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

WhitneyLand · 2 years ago

Great work Varun.

Doing photos is one thing, but doing it to scale and also with high performance at the client is a very nice accomplishment.

radialapps · 2 years ago

Thank you!

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

dmitrygr · 2 years ago

How hard would this be to deploy the old-fashioned way (as an executable on my own linux box, no docker/nexcloud/prevcloud/bulbasaur/cerebii/cubone)?

radialapps · 2 years ago

Easy to deploy, hard to configure right. All you need is PHP + an HTTP server (then tune it https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/instal...)

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

codethief · 2 years ago

Fantastic project!

> No Lock-In

> Memories stores most of the metadata in the EXIF headers of your photos, which means that you can easily migrate to other solutions without losing your data. It also utilizes your existing filesystem structure for organization without converting it to any specialized format

Given that, would a standalone version be feasible, i.e. one that doesn't rely on Nextcloud and only operates on a folder on disk? I mean, while Memories might not lock you in, Nextcloud can still do so. (No two-way sync etc. etc.)

Currently, I just use Syncthing to synchronize all my files across devices (laptop, phone, home server, …) and it works splendidly! Ideally I'd just want to run Memories either locally (on the local copy of my photos folder) or on my home server (on the home server's copy of my photos folder).

radialapps · 2 years ago

Thank you!

I wrote a bit on why Nextcloud a while back, I'll link it here (see point 5 in FAQ): https://memories.gallery/faq/#faq

As such, Nextcloud doesn't really lock you in; it just provides a framework for the app. You can, theoretically, continue to use Syncthing to sync files while running Nextcloud on top of it (probably not ideal though)

I want to note though, the "no lock-in" philosophy refers more to being able to move out of Nextcloud/Memories at any point if you want. Nextcloud still just stores everything on your disk as folders and files, so you can just decide to nuke it one day and still have everything (not fully true yet, you'll still lose some things like tags and albums; exporting these out too is WIP)

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

nntwozz · 2 years ago

I've been using Lychee for many years - https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee

Memories looks like a nice alternative, anyone using Lychee here with a comparison?

radialapps · 2 years ago

Can't compare myself, but here's a general comparison table between various alternatives in this space that someone has been maintaining.

https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

nikolayasdf123 · 2 years ago

does it support HDR? live photos? 4K HDR videos? dare I say, new apple "spatial" video format?

radialapps · 2 years ago

HDR kinda works, depends on the photo. Live photos are fully supported (Apple/Google/Samsung/Xiaomi at least). HDR videos are a pain to transcode, it mostly doesn't work well (but this is not very well tested / worked on). No idea about the spatial stuff.

radialapps commented on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance memories.gallery/... · Posted by u/radialapps

singhrac · 2 years ago

Does it support allowing others to upload photos as well (eg from a group trip)? If it does I’ll install it today on my homelab.

radialapps · 2 years ago

Folders: this is fully supported. You can share out links of folders that anyone can upload to etc. These get stored in that folder (in your account) then.

Albums: partial support. You can share links to albums that are viewable or share albums with others with an account on your nextcloud instance. People who have an account can upload photos to the shared albums.