chapmanjacobd / comparing_oss_photo_organizers.md
I chose to compare PhotoPrism, LibrePhotos, and Damselfly, because they seemed like the strongest freely available candidates for a large library of photographs.
I am mostly interested in face clustering (DBSCAN) and other "AI" capabilities like auto-categorization. Import speed is not as important to me as "playback" speed. I don't mind if it takes a few days but once everything is indexed and processed then it should be fast to explore everything.
The dataset that I used for this comparison was under 22GiB but over 750,000 images. Mostly AVIF files but some PNG and some JPEG.
All three were pretty easy to get started. I liked that damselfly automatically started scanning. But I don't like that it starts a bunch of folder watchers (inotify, etc) and there doesn't seem to be an option to disable that.
I disliked that PhotoPrism creates a sidecar YAML file for each image--though it does save this in the PhotoPrism Storage folder rather than mucking up your Originals folder--so I know it could be worse! However, this can be disabled with PHOTOPRISM_SIDECAR_YAML="false". But it is enabled by default!
