I need some help with some new suggestions for what I want from my tiny homeserver, made up by a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB (passive cooling case) and an external hard drive. That server will not be reachable from outside my home network, if that makes a difference for suggestions.
I am looking for an easy solution that works well on the limited resources of the Rpi. What I mostly need is an app I can self-host that has a nice and well performing gallery function, I got tons of old photos from when I still used digital cameras a lot. Those are already sorted in folders, and I want that app to not mess with that at all, just read them basically.
What I also need is for that app to be able to auto-upload new photos from my phone regularly, so I can include them more easily in backups of my server. I also do not want them to be weirdly hidden in some strange folder structures, so that they remain accessible if I want to change apps again down the road.
Here is what I tried already: Photoprism - loved it in general, but all the indexing was super slow on the Rpi of course. I didn't really need the AI features of it either. It also made quite big thumbnails for the image analysis so it would really add a huge requirement of a ton more storage space just for features I did not want to use, I understand those could be downscaled but the process seemed tedious and resource-intensive. Overall wasn't practical for the Rpi, if I had a stronger server I'd try again.
Nextcloud - thats the current solution I am looking at, since it got all I want. Auto-upload, easy access, no resource-heavy features I don't need. But overall, it is pretty slow on the Rpi for scrolling through photo libraries. I found today the NC Photos app on Google Play Store, which seems to work better than the Nextcloud App to look at galleries, but still seems slow.
Aside from that I found out about Immich, but cannot test it right now since my Rpi runs on 32bit. But it sounded to me like a lighter type of Photoprism app, maybe not fair to say, I know its supposed to be like Google Photos. But the stuff it does for face recognition and what else makes it sound again like a choice I won't enjoy using on the Rpi. Maybe that is an unfair view? I see recently the feature that allows external libraries in it, was added, so that fits my needs.
Anyway, thanks for reading all this, I will end with the question, are there any other solutions that I haven't considered so far?
Maybe https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2
As far as auto-upload goes, unless using Immich I would just use an app such as Foldersync and connect via whatever protocol you want; webdav, sftp, smb, etc..
Nextcloud is slow even on good hardware, so that's not too much of a surprise.
Immich seems pretty lightweight and is very fast for scrolling galleries, it does run a lot of stuff on import for face recognition and whatnot, but that's only once and then it's done.
Is it just me or there are no login credentials for the demo listed anywhere?
You mean for pigallery2? You don't need any, I just opened it to test.
Yes. For some reason yesterday, while trying to use the demo it just returned a login screen. Strangely, today it just logs in automatically.