LibrePhotos
Self-hosted photo management service with automatic face recognition and semantic search
Alternative to: google photos, apple photos, amazon photos
LibrePhotos is a self-hosted, open-source photo management service with automatic face recognition, object detection, and semantic search, powered by modern machine learning. It organizes photos and videos by timeline, people, places, and objects, offering a Google Photos-style experience that keeps a personal photo library fully under the owner's control.
LibrePhotos Docker Compose example
Self-host LibrePhotos on your own server, homelab, or VPS starting from this Docker Compose example.
It runs LibrePhotos in Docker containers using the official reallibrephotos/librephotos-proxy:latest, pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade:latest, reallibrephotos/librephotos-frontend:latest, reallibrephotos/librephotos:latest images, with persistent volumes and automatic restarts preconfigured.
Review the environment variables and adjust them to your setup, save the file as compose.yml (or docker-compose.yml), and start the stack with docker compose up -d.
services:
proxy:
image: reallibrephotos/librephotos-proxy:latest
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- scan_data:/data
- protected_media:/protected_media
depends_on:
- backend
- frontend
db:
image: pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade:latest
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
# Database user created on first start (must match the backend DB_USER).
- POSTGRES_USER=docker
# Password for the database user (internal to the compose network).
- POSTGRES_PASSWORD=librephotos
# Database/schema name (must match the backend DB_NAME).
- POSTGRES_DB=librephotos
volumes:
- db:/var/lib/postgresql
healthcheck:
test: psql -U docker -d librephotos -c "SELECT 1;"
interval: 5s
timeout: 5s
retries: 5
frontend:
image: reallibrephotos/librephotos-frontend:latest
restart: unless-stopped
backend:
image: reallibrephotos/librephotos:latest
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- scan_data:/data
- protected_media:/protected_media
- logs:/logs
- cache:/root/.cache
environment:
# Django secret key used to sign sessions and tokens. Any non-empty string works.
- SECRET_KEY=changeme
# Internal hostname of the backend service; leave as-is.
- BACKEND_HOST=backend
# Email address of the admin account created on first start.
- ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@example.com
# Username of the admin account created on first start.
- ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
# Password of the admin account created on first start.
- ADMIN_PASSWORD=changeme
# Database backend driver; leave as-is.
- DB_BACKEND=postgresql
# Database/schema name (must match the db service).
- DB_NAME=librephotos
# Database user (must match the db service).
- DB_USER=docker
# Database password (must match the db service).
- DB_PASS=librephotos
# Hostname of the database service on the compose network.
- DB_HOST=db
# Database port.
- DB_PORT=5432
# Mapbox API key enabling reverse-geocoding/map features (optional).
- MAPBOX_API_KEY=
# Number of API worker processes; higher values use more RAM.
- WEB_CONCURRENCY=2
# Comma-separated path patterns to skip while scanning (optional).
- SKIP_PATTERNS=
# Allow uploading photos through the web UI.
- ALLOW_UPLOAD=true
# Public origin(s) trusted for CSRF/Django-admin access behind a custom domain (optional).
- CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS=
# Disable Django debug mode in production; leave as-is.
- DEBUG=0
depends_on:
db:
condition: service_healthy
volumes:
scan_data:
protected_media:
logs:
cache:
db:
Values set to changeme are required — replace them with your own
values before starting LibrePhotos.
Prefer a managed setup? WinterFlow installs, configures, and updates LibrePhotos for you using this same Docker Compose configuration.