The situation is kind of disappointing, more like hopeless I’d say for power users. Photoprism is by far the best I’ve found too, but still isn’t replacing Google Photos, where I still dump everything too, and I go there more often than not to find stuff. Of note about Google Photos is not only the uncanny face recognition, I have a person with pictures from literally 0 years old to I don’t even want to calculate what age now, “driving age” anyway - but beside faces and things it also does OCR (text), which can be VERY useful. And it’s also processing videos, too!

I tried immich with the external library and gave it the pictures from 2023 for now, run first into the issue with the models for ViT-B-32__openai not being available for download; there were multiple github issues about this, I got them and put them in (supposedly) the right place, still it didn’t work, tried multiple sources, after a few hours gave up and updated the docker (which downloaded quite a bit of data, even if the version I had was just installed) and with the new version it downloaded by itself and used fine the models and everything. I’m still getting some spurious errors now and then when scanning the files and from github this seems to be seriously “work in progress” but overall seems to be moving BLAZINGLY FAST (which is a first for me with such programs), including but not limited the map module which is one of the most important ones for me (I’ll see what it does with 20 years of data, instead of 1 but that’s another story).

I just now realized: this is a Google Photos clone! It’s kind of fine, as there’s no learning curve, but this is why it doesn’t care about subdirectories and everything.