Google Photos alternative with OCR reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FangLeone2526 · 2023-12-10 18:57 Literally the only features i care about are OCR and a solid android app with automatic backups. I have tried immich and nextcloud and the lack of OCR means that they really just cant work for me. I use the google photos search to find text that is somewhere in my images VERY often. I cannot find any existing solutions for this explicit purpose, but i have seen multiple android apps for this for indexing local files, and I am already using paperless ngx for my documents ( I dont see a way for it to auto backup and it also just does not seem like the right solution for this from a UI perspective. ) , so i know that OCR on a file SHOULD be doable... Ive seen github issues like this one [https://github.com/photoprism/ph otoprism/issues/907](https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/9 07) in which it is implied that this is very very difficult. Is there any way i can use existing ocr tools to add metadata to all my images of the ocr'd text that will show up in my searches with immich / nextcloud, or is there any tool that does support automatic ocr of images ? Please let me know. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- averybadlime · 2023-12-10 19:21 Look into paperless-ngx - there's native OCR. Easy to host but you gotta backup yourself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FangLeone2526 · 2023-12-10 19:44 Third paragraph ---------------------------------------------------------------------- smbell · 2023-12-10 21:34 I'm not sure exactly what your use case is, but what I would do is use syncthing to automatically back up photos to the consume directory of paperless-ngx. That will get you automatic backup and OCR. I could see possible headache if paperless is set to delete on import and syncthing deletes the copy from your phone. Be careful with that. You're going to have a bunch of duplicates stored, but I can't think of a better setup off the top of my head. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FangLeone2526 · 2023-12-10 21:40 My usecase is i have a large amount of screenshots of conversations and memes and such like that in my camera roll, and i would like to be able to search them at any given time, and i have multiple phones, which all store different things on them, that i would also like to be able to search across. google photos achieves this perfectly ( though i have to pay for storage because i have more than 5gb of stuff ) ( im also giving my photos to google which i dislike ) If immich had ocr immich would be perfect for my purposes paperless ngx seems like its far too document focused for it to be reasonably used as a photo gallery. Any time i wanted to look at photos and was not thinking about OCR it would be a weird choice. I could use immich for normal photo gallery and paperless ngx for photo storage. I also do not think i can use syncthing from my iphone to sync my camera roll and i know i can use syncthing from android via termux but i do not know if it can be given access to files in my normal android filesystem. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- smbell · 2023-12-10 23:11 It looks like there is some interest (and maybe even a bit of code) for ocr in immich. Doesn't look like any active development right now though. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/3168 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FangLeone2526 · 2023-12-10 23:15 Yeah I saw that, there are issues like that for most of the selfhosted photo library solutions, but I do not think any of them have actually implemented OCR. Really weird to me given how common OCR is and how many existing tools there are for it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Darkchamber292 · 2023-12-11 15:05 This isn't what you are looking for but I stumbled across this looking for a solution for you and wanted to share it. This is like CUPS but for scanning. Has a nice WEB UI. It also does OCR but I think only for things you are scanning in. Not sure about existing images. https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs