// the find
hooram/ownphotos
Self hosted alternative to Google Photos
Ownphotos was a self-hosted Google Photos alternative with face recognition, object detection, and map views built on Django/React. It has been abandoned in favor of LibrePhotos — the README explicitly says so and the last commit was late 2022. Don't adopt this; go to LibrePhotos instead.
- The architecture is reasonable: separate Django REST backend and React frontend behind nginx, Docker Compose for local deployment — easy to understand and modify
- Face clustering with scikit-learn plus manual labeling is a practical approach that works offline without cloud dependencies
- Nextcloud integration as a photo source is a nice touch for people already running Nextcloud
- Dead project — development explicitly moved to LibrePhotos in 2022, so any bug you hit here is yours to fix forever
- The object detection stack (densecap in Lua/Torch, places365) is ancient and requires CUDA 8, which won't run on any modern GPU driver without significant pain
- Primary language listed as Jupyter Notebook, which means there's exploratory prototype code committed to the repo — not a good sign for production reliability
- No tests worth mentioning (api/tests.py exists but the repo shows no evidence of a real test suite), and the original README warned it was 'in very early stages'