I would probably do a one-time purchase but I don’t do subscriptions.

Piwigo is more like a shared gallery. Users create album/folders and upload individual photos, which other users can access. Piwigo has poor support for videos and no support for Live Photos.

Photoprism has only a single user for the free tier. It supports Live Photos and videos, and individual photo uploads. It does facial recognition tagging.

Immich supports video/Live Photos, facial recognition, and has multiple users, but it expects a full backup/synchronization (not individual photos). Sharing between users is manual, not automatic or permissions-based like Piwigo. Each user has access only to their own backups or shared albums.

In summary, I think Piwigo is the simplest to set up and use, but it doesn’t do much beyond photos - it’s a simple shared gallery. Photoprism is good and stable, but you have to pay a subscription for multiple user accounts. Immich is rapidly developing, which means things will break, but also it has the most features. My only issue with Immich is that I don’t want to use it as a backup - only as a “best of” shared gallery. While it’s possible with Immich, I would have to maintain an Immich album on my phone, and sync only that, and I would have to set up shares with other users manually.

I’ve been using Piwigo for the past 4 years. The video plugin kinda half works (breaks during upgrades, doesn’t work on Android). It would be cool if Live Photos end up supported, as that’s my main reason for trying out alternatives. But since Live Photos are part video, which itself doesn’t work, I’m not holding my breath.

Yes but in Immich each user has their own independent album/gallery, whereas Piwigo is a single gallery with different access rights to users.

Piwigo supports multiple users with different access rights, while Immich does not. Immich supports videos and Live Photos while Piwigo does not. Piwigo is a php application and can be installed by ftp on a basic web server and database (same requirements as Wordpress), while Immich requires a docker container. Both Piwigo and Immich have phone apps, but they differ in functionality. Piwigo is set up to upload individual photos while Immich is set up to backup ALL of your photos.

I have used Piwigo for this purpose the past 3.5 years. It’s running on a tiny Odroid HC-2 and solid state drive. The same device also runs Emby for video streaming. I started it with a free sub domain from afraid.org. I migrated to a real domain later. To run two services from one domain name you also need a reverse proxy and SSL certificate renewal, like SWAG or NGINX Proxy Manager or Zoraxy.

The main thing I’ve learned is keeping everything isolated repeatable. On my Odroid I learned to use Docker and Portainer for the apps. But there were a couple times I broke everything through updates/upgrades. Now I have a small Intel N305 (Minsforum UN305C), running ProxMox VE, and apps in Linux containers. The first I set up myself to learn but later I discovered some open source helper scripts https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/. ProxMox seems a bit more complex than Docker/Portainer, but more flexible.

I’m using IPv4 only but I’m migrating to IPv6 soon to help with in-network routing to my domain. My advice would be unless you want to host your own DNS and override your domain to resolve to LAN, just use your IP:port on LAN and use the domain only outside your home.

I wish there was good PoE hardware. I wish I had it for powered blinds, doorbell (real chimes), and even can lights which are now so poplar.

Kodi runs a server and a client. Depending on the client it may request a transcode. Looks like it’s just bad software support for h.265 on the client side.

Kodi played through the browser? It’s probably transcoding to H.264, using more bandwidth for lesser quality.

Considering the PoE switch is also powered by an adapter, I’d say no. Your have the same efficiency from the AC-DC conversion plus line losses.

I’m running Emby with 4k content from an Odroid HC-2. If you have a 4k TV it should support the H.265 codec without transcoding so the resources for sending videos is low.

Thanks I will learn LXC once I have a new 8 core Intel machine. I also want to hose this website that needs an outdated php/Apache setup so it would be nice to keep that in an isolated container.

As an owner of the HC-2, I’d say if you don’t need to transcode and you really only need qBitTorrent and Jellyfin, the HC-4 should be an awesome NAS and media host. You really only need more power when you have scope creep, and you realize you want your home server to do more and more. In any case it’s a pretty low cost of entry, should you choose to upgrade in the future.

I’m in the same boat. My poor HC-2 is struggling on memory running Omada (WAP controller) and HomeBridge, among other things. I use Emby so I don’t need transcoding - supports 4k streaming just fine.

Right now I’m looking at one of the fanless Intel four port software routers, like this one.. But for a machine like that I’m going to use ProxMox to spin up a Firewall/Router/VPN/Networking VM - not sure which OS/image. That will remain separate from my media and web serving. I will probably end up just off-loading the network tasks to the new machine, and leave my HC-2 running as a media server. That way I can restart and upgrade the systems independently. Using ProxMox, it may be possible to move the media services onto a second VM on the same machine, but I’m not sure what advantage that might give me, if any.