I’m a photographer, so of course I have terabytes of photographs and never enough disk space. I have a mess of folders created over the last 15 years that have some level of organization but can only be viewed by physically sitting at a computer and plugging in a hard drive.

I was after something better. My plan was to get the photos organized into albums and then have a way to view them from any device on my network and maybe off of my network as well.

When it comes to my home lab, my priority at first was the streaming content stuff since that’s useful to my whole family. I organized our massive movie and show collection, then organized our 100,000 track music library. I also put together an epub and pdf library with about 40,000 books, but with those initial projects done, I knew it was time to organize the photos, videos, and other documents families create and share.

About 2 years ago I started copying all of my files from various places over to an 8tb hard drive, this process took weeks and resulted in many duplicates. Somehow, I’m still missing files on that drive, but maybe I never finished or there were errors? I’m not sure. Fortunately I still have all of the other drives laying around and just need to dig them out and plug them in.

I found that there are basically two primary options people use to self host a photo server, and it’s immich or photo prism. Immich is free but is somewhat unrefined.

Photoprism has a more polished look and has more advanced features but doesn’t allow multiple users and even though I’m hosting it, they have a subscription fee for some features. I decided to go with immich, since it’s free and allows for multiple users. Immich also has a more intuitive UI.

Both were very easy to set up, but immich also has a pretty good app which lets me upload and view photos to the server remotely, just like iCloud or google photos would.

I started pouring over my hard drives, and stuck to uploading only photos that can be assigned to an album. I don’t want random or loose photos floating around on my server, they will need at least 1 event tied to them, but immich also lets me find them by date, by camera model, or by face in the photo, so that’s nice.

The hard part is de-duplicating and culling. Immich does have a pretty good de-duplicator, but it isn’t perfect, so I still have to manually review every image that it thinks has a duplicate. It usually saves the larger files, even if the size difference is a few kbs. I’ve had a couple of really great photos where the person is blinking in one frame or the exposure is different but it obviously can’t tell which is a better photo to me. It’s time consuming and sometimes I just keep both.

I have 20,000 images uploaded but I’d like to go in there and clean up every album, making sure I just have the photos I really care about available on the server. Drawing that line has always been hard for me, since it’s easier to just buy more storage.

Having more photos doesn’t necessarily make the memories sweeter, in fact, too many photos can dilute the good ones with noise, but when it’s all said and done, I don’t usually spend much time actually looking back at my photographs, I just want them, and I want them to be organized in case I do want to look at them.

It’s very handy, especially for writing blog posts, to be able to pull an image up within a few taps. It’s been fun finding photos and videos I made and forgot about, and have had some memories triggered randomly by looking through them.

It’s been a fun project, and I think once I get the final tally I may have closer to 30,000 photos uploaded. I have a lot more loose, random photos, and duplicates or culled images that I probably won’t bother with for the time being.

I also have noticed some bitrot. Bitrot is what happens to digital photos over time. The more they are copied, and the longer they sit, the more noise that’s introduced to the file. The best thing to do of course is to print the ones you care about. Having ready access to my library will help me make sure I do print the ones I care about.

If you’re like me and have tens of thousands of photos, I encourage you to go ahead and put them together. Your photos are an invaluable resource for friends and family over the years. We bought our parents digital picture frames so it’s very easy to scan through and add photos to their frame, it’s a nice little surprise when an old image gets put up that people forgot about or haven’t seen in a while.