OpenMediaVault VS PhotoPrism

You might want to consider the previously mentioned MergerFS and SnapRAID, or MDADM and LVM for your setup. OpenMediaVault [https://www.openmediavault.org/ is a solid choice in this regard. Additionally, if you're planning to run something like Proxmox, you could look into deploying Starwind CVM on top of it. Pretty much like in this guide: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/ .

You would better to install OMV instead. It's a ready to use fileserver solution with web interface.

So I'm working on a similar setup with an ancient desktop my in-laws were getting rid of. I installed OpenMediaVault directly to the hard drive (it's so old that I assume it wouldn't work too well as a hypervisor), with a 4TB external HDD attached. OMV supports Docker by means of a plug-in and I'm running a Jellyfin container with no issues at all. I'm still manually downloading everything to the HDD but *arr containers are my next step, as well as setting up a gluetun container to route all that through a VPN.

That is possible (it's automated to a certain extent). It also depends on the NAS OS. Unraid, for example, can work with drives of different sizes while using the largest one for parity. TrueNAS uses ZFS so you won't be able to just add a drive to your RAIDZ and expand it. There's also openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/ that uses Linux Software RAID and you can add a new drive there but you can't combine drives of different sizes. And there's also Starwinds NAS that supports both Linux Software RAID and ZFS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas. Plus, I would avoid SMR drives in RAID: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

I'd put it like that: if you have a spare PC, then it's definitely worth trying. I would also look into openmediavault (minimal RAM needs): https://www.openmediavault.org/ and Starwinds NAS (supports both ZFS and Linux software RAID): https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas

Your current PC looks very decent for a lab. Proxmox on it, then one Linux VM with Docker, another VM for NAS with something lite and easy like openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/ or Starwinds NAS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas and Plex separately. And other stuff in VMs or containers.

I have been using https://www.photoprism.app for a couple of years, and it works better than expected, with the latest updates it's actually quite fast and the face tagging works reasonably well.

For self-hosting, there's Photoprism[1] as well.

Ente's strength lies in end-to-end encryption[2] and its cloud[3] offering so you don't have to worry about reliability.

So if self-hosting is what you're after, Immich, Photoprism and Damselfly (TIL!) are perhaps better designed to serve your needs.

[1]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

[2]: https://ente.io/architecture

[3]: https://ente.io/reliability

For quite a while I'm also in search for a solution which allows me to share galleries with my family, without having to ask them to jump through hoops in order to access them.

After some searching I'm now testing photoprism [1] which is a fantastic application, especially for self-hosting of photos. There's no mobile app for it (yet) and user-management is just starting to get implemented, but it shows alot of promise. Unfortunately not yet enough for putting it on the tablet of my granny but one can hope (and donate!)

Either way, I'm afraid that building a good mobile gallery app is an equally large task, after all the best solution would be to replace the users' native gallery-app with an equivalent that also supports custom Online-Galleries...

[1]: https://www.photoprism.app/

out of curiosity, why no sort-of-established pkg and internal dirs? What do you think of https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism structure?

Thank you!

Ente was first a piece of hardware, then a self-host-able project, but we had a hard time monetizing both, which lead to the E2EE pivot.

TIL about TagSpaces, thanks!

Our server can be open-sourced, but we're unsure of the value E2EE will provide, with services like Photoprism[1] and Immich[2] already doing a good job of serving customers who prefer to self host. In this context E2EE might become a constraint, rather than a feature.

[1]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

[2]: https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Ive seen github issues like this one https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/907 in which it is implied that this is very very difficult.

Hi. I want to implement an image server similar to Photoprism using ImageAI to tag images based on objects and context. However I don't want to spend to much time working on the frontend, at first I were thinking about using Danbooru and use Flexbooru or the web interface on my phone. But it doesn't have any encryption or password protection (since the purpose of it is to be used as a public image board).

https://www.photoprism.app in Docker.

PhotoPrism[0] and some ugly plumbing[1] to semantically tag all images in the gallery.

0: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism