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PhotoPrism® is an AI-powered, privacy-first app for browsing, organizing, and sharing photos and videos. It helps tag, search, and rediscover media without getting in your way.

Visit photoprism.app to learn more, or try our public demo at demo.photoprism.app.

Software Included

Creating an App using the Control Panel

Click the Deploy to DigitalOcean button to create a Droplet based on this 1-Click App. If you aren’t logged in, this link will prompt you to log in with your DigitalOcean account.

Creating an App using the API

In addition to creating a Droplet from the PhotoPrism 1-Click App using the control panel, you can also use the DigitalOcean API. As an example, to create a 4GB PhotoPrism Droplet in the SFO2 region, you can use the following curl command. You need to either save your API access token to an environment variable or substitute it in the command below.

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
         -H 'Authorization: Bearer '$TOKEN'' -d \
        '{"name":"choose_a_name","region":"sfo2","size":"s-2vcpu-4gb","image":"photoprism-20-04"}' \
        "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets"

Getting Started After Deploying PhotoPrism

It may take a few minutes until your Droplet is provisioned, and all services have been initialized.

The initial admin password is stored on your Droplet, you’ll see it when running these commands:

ssh root@YOUR-SERVER-IP
cat /root/.initial-password.txt

You can then access your instance by opening the following URL in a Web browser (see “Using Let’s Encrypt HTTPS” for how to get a valid certificate):

https://YOUR-SERVER-IP/

All files related to PhotoPrism can be found in /opt/photoprism. It is running as “photoprism” (UID 1000) by default.

To edit the main config file containing services, storage paths, and basic settings (save changes by pressing Ctrl+O, then Ctrl+X to exit):

cd /opt/photoprism
nano compose.yaml

Remember to restart services for changes to take effect:

docker compose stop
docker compose up -d

Using Let’s Encrypt HTTPS

By default, a self-signed certificate will be used for HTTPS connections. Browsers are going to show a security warning because of that. Depending on your settings, they may also refuse connecting at all.

To get an official, free HTTPS certificate from Let’s Encrypt, your server needs a fully qualified public domain name, e.g. “photos.yourdomain.com”.

You may add a static DNS entry (on DigitalOcean go to Networking > Domains) for this, or use a Dynamic DNS service of your choice.

Once your server has a public domain name, please disable the self-signed certificate and enable domain based routing in compose.yaml and traefik.yaml (see inline instructions in !! UPPERCASE !!):

ssh root@YOUR-SERVER-IP
cd /opt/photoprism
nano compose.yaml
nano traefik.yaml

Then restart services for the changes to take effect:

docker compose stop
docker compose up -d

You should now be able to access your instance without security warnings:

https://photos.yourdomain.com/

Note the first request may still fail while Traefik gets and installs the new certificate. Try again after 30 seconds.

System Requirements

We recommend hosting PhotoPrism on a server with at least 2 cores and 4 GB of memory. Indexing and searching may be slow on smaller Droplets, depending on how many and what types of files you upload.