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Self-hosted photo library with AI search, face recognition, RAW support, and world maps, keeping every picture on hardware you control.
German AI-powered photo app, self-hosted with face recognition and smart search.
PhotoPrism is a German self-hosted photo app that brings Google Photos intelligence to hardware you own: AI-powered search classifies your pictures automatically, recognizes faces, and finds "beach sunset 2019" without a single manual tag. Nearly 40,000 GitHub stars make it one of the most popular self-hosted projects in the world.
The engine indexes RAW files and all common photo and video formats, plays Live Photos, and plots everything on high-resolution world maps. It runs via Docker on a home server, NAS, or Raspberry Pi, and the AGPL Community Edition is free forever, with paid tiers adding multi-user roles for teams.
Key features:
- AI search and classification finds photos by content, no manual tagging
- Face recognition groups people across your entire library
- RAW support plus every common photo and video format
- World maps showing where every picture was taken
- Runs anywhere via Docker, NAS, Raspberry Pi, or cloud VPS
- Free Community Edition under AGPL with full data ownership
- No cloud dependency, your originals never leave your server
PhotoPrism is developed by PhotoPrism UG in Berlin, Germany, self-funded and independent, with a dedicated GDPR documentation page. Since you host it yourself, sovereignty is structural: no provider ever holds your memories.
Ideal for self-hosters leaving Google Photos who want the smart features without the surveillance.
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Head-to-head comparisons
See how PhotoPrism stacks up side-by-side against the non-EU incumbent on jurisdiction, GDPR, pricing, and features.
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