Installing PhotoPrism on Debian

Background

What is PhotoPrism?

PhotoPrism is a self-hosted web application for managing and organising a photo collection. It aims to provide many of the popular features of cloud services like Google Photos.

Why this guide?

The PhotoPrism documentation recommends Docker as the installation method. However, not everyone can, or wants to, use Docker. The purpose of this guide, therefore, is to provide instructions for setting up a usable PhotoPrism installation on Debian. The guide has been written for, and tested on, Debian 12 "Bookworm", but should also work on older versions like Debian 11 "Bullseye", as well as derivatives like Ubuntu and Raspbian.

DISCLAIMER

This guide is provided in good faith and for informational purposes only. No claims are made or guarantees given that it will work on any particular combination of hardware and software, or that it will be kept up-to-date with new releases of PhotoPrism. You will assume all responsibility for managing your PhotoPrism server, including the prevention of unauthorised access and safeguards against data loss.

Installing PhotoPrism

Prerequisites

If you haven't done so already, ensure your server's packages are up-to-date:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

Next, a few optional packages can be installed to enable extra features like better metadata extraction and RAW image conversion:

$ sudo apt install -y ffmpeg exiftool darktable libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff-dev imagemagick

Download PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism provides pre-built Linux packages on their website. Download the latest build and extract it to /opt/photoprism:

$ wget https://dl.photoprism.app/pkg/linux/amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo mkdir /opt/photoprism
$ sudo tar xzf amd64.tar.gz -C /opt/photoprism/
$ rm amd64.tar.gz

If you're using an ARM-based system like a Raspberry Pi, you'll need to download the ARM64 build instead, so change the URLs and filenames accordingly.

You can run /opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism -v to verify the version.

If the pre-built package does not work on your system for some reason, it's possible to build PhotoPrism manually.

Configure PhotoPrism

Create a separate user account for running PhotoPrism:

$ sudo useradd --system photoprism

Create a directory where PhotoPrism will store files like metadata, thumbnails, database (if using SQLite) and so on:

$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/photoprism

Ensure all relevant directories are owned by the newly created user:

$ sudo chown -R photoprism:photoprism /var/lib/photoprism /opt/photoprism

Go to the newly added directory and create a file for PhotoPrism configuration parameters:

$ cd /var/lib/photoprism
$ sudo nano .env

This opens the file in the Nano text editor. Feel free to use another editor if you have a preference, but this guide will assume Nano.

The full list of configuration options is available here, but you can use the following as a starting point:

# Initial password for the admin user
PHOTOPRISM_AUTH_MODE="password"
PHOTOPRISM_ADMIN_PASSWORD="photoprism"

# PhotoPrism storage directories
PHOTOPRISM_STORAGE_PATH="/var/lib/photoprism"
PHOTOPRISM_ORIGINALS_PATH="/var/lib/photoprism/photos/Originals"
PHOTOPRISM_IMPORT_PATH="/var/lib/photoprism/photos/Import"

# Uncomment below if using MariaDB/MySQL instead of SQLite (the default)
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_DRIVER="mysql"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_SERVER="MYSQL_IP_HERE:PORT"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_NAME="DB_NAME"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_USER="USER_NAME"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_PASSWORD="PASSWORD"

Press Ctrl+O and Enter to save, then Ctrl+X to exit Nano. Now enter the following commands:

$ sudo chown photoprism:photoprism .env
$ sudo chmod 640 .env

This ensures that the file cannot be read by other users on the system, as it contains sensitive details.

System service

The last step is setting up a system service so PhotoPrism can run automatically in the background.

Create a file for the service definition:

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/photoprism.service

Add the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=PhotoPrism service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
User=photoprism
Group=photoprism
WorkingDirectory=/opt/photoprism
EnvironmentFile=/var/lib/photoprism/.env
ExecStart=/opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism up -d
ExecStop=/opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism down

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now run the following commands to start the service and to have it start automatically on every boot:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable --now photoprism

If all went well, you should be able to open http://YOUR-IP-HERE:2342 in a web browser and see the PhotoPrism interface. Log in as "admin" with the password set in the .env file.

Automatic background tasks

It's possible to have PhotoPrism automatically run background tasks, like importing any photos that have been added to the Imports directory, using a cron job.

Create a file for the cron job:

$ sudo nano /etc/cron.d/photoprism

Enter the following contents:

0 * * * * photoprism export $(grep -v ^# /var/lib/photoprism/.env | xargs) && /opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism import >/dev/null 2>&1

This runs the PhotoPrism import command every hour. If you want to run it more (or less) frequently, change the time expression at the beginning accordingly. Use a helper like https://crontab.cronhub.io if needed.

It's also possible to run other commands. For example, if you add photos directly to the Originals directory and just need PhotoPrism to index them, change import to index. Run /opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism to get a full list of commands that can be executed.

For logging, replace /dev/null with the name of a log file (make sure the photoprism user can write to it). This can be helpful for troubleshooting.

Alternative method

It is also possible to use a systemd service and timer to run the background tasks. See this comparison against cron for pros and cons.

Create a file for the service definition:

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/photoprism-bg.service

Add the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=PhotoPrism background tasks
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
User=photoprism
Group=photoprism
WorkingDirectory=/opt/photoprism
EnvironmentFile=/var/lib/photoprism/.env
ExecStart=/opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism import

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Again, change import to whatever command you need to execute.

Since it is a oneshot service, a systemd timer will be used to run it automatically, in this example every hour.

Create a file for the timer definition:

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/photoprism-bg.timer

Add the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=PhotoPrism background tasks

[Timer]
OnCalendar=*:0:0

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

If you want to run the timer more (or less) frequently, change the OnCalendar parameter accordingly. You can use systemd-analyze calendar to verify the syntax.

Run the following commands to enable and start the timer:

$ sudo systemctl enable photoprism-bg.timer
$ sudo systemctl start photoprism-bg.timer

For troubleshooting, run the following command to check the service status:

$ systemctl status photoprism-bg.service

And run the following commands to check the timer status:

$ systemctl status photoprism-bg.timer
$ systemctl list-timers photoprism-bg

Updating PhotoPrism

When a new version of PhotoPrism is published, the following steps need to be done.

First, update your system:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

Then, stop the PhotoPrism service:

$ sudo systemctl stop photoprism

Delete the contents of the directory where you extracted the PhotoPrism build package:

$ sudo rm -rf /opt/photoprism/*

Optionally, make a backup copy of the directory first so you can easily revert if necessary:

$ sudo cp /opt/photoprism/ /opt/photoprism.bak/

Download the latest build and extract it:

$ wget https://dl.photoprism.app/pkg/linux/amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo tar xzf amd64.tar.gz -C /opt/photoprism/
$ sudo chown -R photoprism:photoprism /opt/photoprism
$ rm amd64.tar.gz

As before, change the URLs and filenames if you're running on an ARM-based system.

Finally, restart the PhotoPrism service:

$ sudo systemctl start photoprism

Troubleshooting

Run the following command to check the service status:

$ systemctl status photoprism

The following command can provide more information:

$ sudo journalctl -u photoprism.service

Also check the PhotoPrism troubleshooting checklists. Some of the information there is Docker-specific, but a lot is useful even with non-Docker setups.