scanservjs VS PhotoPrism

My solution to use my workforce with paperless is scanservjs and scantopl and I'm pretty happy with it

I use scanservjs and scantopl on docker.

Recently I stumbled upon ScanServerJs, an awesome software that allows you to setup your own scan server.

Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..)

Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that.

However, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software.

The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author.

It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.

We currently have an HP M1136 MFP connected to CUPS on the local network. It always turns itself off and is never available. People have mostly resorted to walking over with their laptop and connecting via USB. Also there are no good network interfaces to the scanner. We use https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs to control the scanner but it's too buggy and slow.

I've had an old all-in-one HP USB printer/scanner hooked up to a Raspberry Pi for a few years running CUPS. Network printing has been great via this method. But the scanner portion has sat unused ever since. Until, now.... WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT SCANSERVER-JS?! My word this is incredible! It does for scanning what CUPS does for printing, and with a beautiful Web UI.

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