Immich is widely recommended as an open-source self-hosted photo library with strong local AI features and a polished UI.
Photoprism offers facial recognition and clustering but struggles with performance on large collections and slow development contributions.
Ente supports self-hosting with end-to-end encryption, local AI processing, and CLI tools for data synchronization.
Nextcloud with Recognize and Memories apps in Docker can handle face tagging and metadata indexing for large photo sets.
Custom stacks use pipelines combining OpenCV or MTCNN for face detection, BLIP for captioning, SentenceTransformer embeddings and ChromaDB for vector search.
Local LLMs via Ollama like Mistral Small, Gemma 3 and Qwen 2.5VL are recommended for generating descriptive captions and semantic search.
Tools like rclone help collate and deduplicate photos from various cloud services, though original-resolution downloads may be limited.
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