Due to the Raspberry Pi 5, and older, having issues with heat throttling and more it makes sense to build a Photoprism on a “normal” laptop before migrating towards the Pi. The process is an interesting one.
Photo Consolidation The First step is to consolidate your photos from Google Photos, Apple Photos, Flick and any other source you might have. The simplest method is to organise them chronologically, and then to spend time removing as many duplicates as possible.
It’s amusing. I look through Immich and Photoprism and I am struck by how many names I have forgotten, but how easily I remember certain faces. I’m also curious to see how I remember certain names after scrolling through faces yet to be identified.
Decades ago when I was playing with iPhoto and Picasa I knew all these people well, and I saw them daily. It was easy to match faces to names.
Photosync is a photo uploading app that allows you to upload to various devices and cloud solutions with ease. Photo Uploader for Photoprism is a specialist app for Photoprism. The reason for which I bring up both of these apps is that they allow you to sync to photoprism.
When I was testing uploads with Photosync I noticed that I can upload to the Photoprism library directly but that it creates a “current_phone” folder, and adds photos within this folder.
I chose to experiment with Le Chat by Mistral, the French AI alternative to Gemini, Claude and CatIFARTED (ChatGPT). For the experiment I copied my Photoprism photos from the drive I use that is connected a Raspberry pi to a laptop before running scripts to sort and remove duplicates. It worked well, with a nice little bonus which I’ll expand on later.
Goal: Clean Up Duplicate Photos My objective was to Remove duplicate photos from a large collection while keeping the best version of each file.
I downloaded my photographs from Google Photos via Google Takeout before using Exiftool to repopulate the exif metadata. Once this was done, I had to move the files from the mac to the Raspberry Pi running photoprism. For this I used rsync because it can run in the background as you sleep.
The Rsync command The command is rsync -avzP /source/ user@remote_host:/destination/
-a is for the archive mode
v is verbose.
Many years ago, if I took photos with a nokia phone I had to sync them via a memory card. With the arrival of the Android Nexus on and the Apple iPhone our digital photography habits changed. With time we would leave our cameras at home, and carry our mobile phones, and photograph paries and hikes with these.
In the process we had two apps to backup. Google Photos and iPhoto.
I grew up in the eighties, and 90s, and so computing, open source software and the world wide web grew up with me. In that time we went from going to magazine shops to buy mags, and cd shops to buy CDs, and book shops to buy books. We also took photos on rolls of films and then took those rolls to La Combe or the Garden Centre to have the films processed, and then we put them in albums.
Yesterday I shifted my data and setup from the Pi5 8gb to the Pi5 4gb with relative ease. I rsynched the data from one Pi to the other, brought up the docker containers, checked that they were working before shutting down the other Pi. I then swapped the 8gb Pi with the four gb pi and turned on the four gb Pi, after plugging the hard drive that I use to store photos and audiobooks and podcasts.
There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.
This morning I made PhotoPrism self-booting. I am not certain that this is the write term so I will specify what I mean. PhotoPrism, when run via docker boots, when we tell it to boot, like any other app on our laptop. This morning, after a little time spent with AI I found the solution.
I used ChatGPT for this help but this is to give you an idea of how to enable docker containers to boot automatically rather than manually.