Edit: I’ve tried out a few, here’s what I found:
- PiGallery: Super fast, really easy to get going. Not a huge amount of features but really functional. If you just want a gallery, its a great choice.
- Home-Gallery: Nice looking with a basic detection features. No slideshow, but good filtering options. Definitely tried to make my CPU into a hot plate when processing.
- Immich: WAAAAYYYY more resource friendly than their docs suggest. Trimmed up further using an existing postgres and redis, and offloaded the ml onto my photo editing workstation. Would be even better if I could use the mac I had to buy for some client work since its just sitting there, but maybe one day.
The Result: Yeah I’m using Immich. Thanks everyone!
Hey everyone, would really appreciate some ideas on image + video gallery options.
We have a bunch of personal photos and videos taken over the years, and since we don’t want them on cloud providers, right now they are just a bunch of folders on a local share. We do actually enjoy going through them, but browsing a directory isn’t the most fun experience.
Something that had a nice photo/video browser, maybe albums, a slideshow option (maybe with shuffling?), and tags would be great. I’d like to not have to duplicate the images into yet-another-storage-location, so something that can just pull from that share would be great. Backups are also already handled, so not a factor here.
I’ve tried Stash, but thats more oriented toward the adult industry, so it requires a lot of manual intervention.
Ive never tried Immich, but it seems like a lot for this scenario. Maybe I’m wrong though, let me know.
This will never be available anywhere outside of our home (well aside from a WG connection back to our home), so I don’t care about sharing links or any of that kind of stuff. Media is mostly jpg with some Canon and Fuji raws, h264 and h265 videos.
Let me hear your recommendations for open source, locally hosted, no cloud personal media enjoyment!


I run the immich container stack on a vm with 4GiB memory and 2 cores, with db on local disk and external libraries over smb, and it runs perfectly fine. I offload the machine learning jobs to another sometimes-on machine, sometimes, but don’t really need to unless I’m dumping thousands of new images into the external library at a time and want it all to process quickly.
Thanks! Another person just posted similar, so I’m going to give Immich a shot and see how it goes. If I can pass off CV/ML elsewhere that’s even better, I have a workstation for media tasks/editing I can use which would work out great
I just checked my immich lxc, ram usage fluctuate with plateaus of about 1 GiB, and some spikes up to 1.5 GiB.
Two users, 100+ GiB of images and videos