Replacing Google Photos

Self-Hosted Photo Storage Solution

After testing a lot (almost all of them) of alternatives and solutions. Finally I came up with the definitive solution, the one that gives me everything I want in an easy (once set up is done), cheap, secure and lightweight way.

At the end of this tutorial we will have a Photo Storage solution that will allow us to:

• Sync our photos from any device.
• Remove exact-photo duplicates efficiently.
• Automatically organize our Gallery by Year and Month.
• Manually run Face Recognition and Face Scanning.
• Manage our gallery from DigiKam.
• Have an online gallery with a map, faces, tags, ratings and other filters.
• Upload an encrypted backup of our gallery to any cloud service.
• Locally generate a backup on a separated drive.
• Securelly access our Gallery from anywhere outside our network.

This can be achieved using a Raspberry Pi 4 and a HDD Storage drive. Pretty cheap!

The stack we will be using is the following:

• PiGallery2 - A simple and lightweight gallery with all that you expect. Read only.
  • You can also use PhotoView instead if you want to be able to do the Face Recognition on the Raspberry itself. I personally prefer not to carry this workload on the RPI.
• Syncthing - A simple, fast, peer-to-peer syncing tool.
• Phockup - Script to organize your Photos.
• Czkawka - Find duplicates for your photos really fast.
• SSHFS - Manage remote Gallery folder locally.
• DigiKam - Face Recognition and Metadata management.
• rsync - Efficient backup tool.
• rclone - Rsync for cloud services.

The Guide

1. Set up the server
2. Setting up the Google Photos replacement
3. Outside access: PiVPN