MT Photos is a photo management system developed by Hangzhou Xiangce Home Technology Co., Ltd. It is specially designed for NAS players and supports automatic organization and classification of your photos, such as by time, location, people, and photo type. This article shares the installation and use of MT Photos.

Features

• Supports Docker deployment
• Supports multiple users
• Supports timeline view of your photos
• Supports folder-based display of your photos
• Supports facial classification
• Supports location classification
• Supports lossless backup, download, and display of Live Photos
• Supports scene classification (e.g., screenshots/animals/landscapes, etc.)
• You can easily share photos with your family through albums
• Supports iOS/Android apps

Pricing

MT Photos is a paid software with a 1-month free trial. There is no free version available. The pricing (as of January 2024) is as follows:

• $3/month
• $25/year
• $99/lifetime

In my opinion, the pricing is quite affordable. If you mind paying, you can also consider the open-source alternative immich (which is more complex to deploy and maintain).

Why Choose a Self-Hosted Album?

Initially, I used Google Photos, which is a very powerful and the best photo management software I have experienced so far. However, Google Photos has limited storage and requires additional purchase of storage when exceeded. Moreover, there may be privacy risks.

Later, I purchased a NAS and used the "Q-Photo" album management software provided by the NAS. It allowed me to privatize my albums. However, "Q-Photo" had slow recognition speed, an outdated app interface, and often encountered strange issues after NAS system updates. The app was difficult to use and the software was unstable. After using it for a while, I gave up.

I also tried PhotoPrism, but it does not support multiple users or have an app, so I abandoned it. Until the emergence of MT Photos, I found that it was the private album management software I wanted.

The main reasons I chose to self-host a private album are:

• Privacy and security concerns
• Automatic backup of mobile photos
• Automatic classification, organization, and retrieval of photos
• Sharing with family members

Installing MT Photos

The official documentation of MT Photos provides detailed instructions, including methods for Synology NAS and QNAP NAS. The core is to install it with Docker. I used the Docker Compose method to install MT Photos. The detailed docker-compose.yaml content is as follows:

version: "3"

services:
  mtphotos:
    image: mtphotos/mt-photos:
    container_name: mtphotos
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8063:8063
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./mt_photos_upload:/upload
      - ./photos/zhansan:/photos/zhansan
      - ./photos/lisi:/photos/lisi
    environment:
      - TZ=Asia/Shanghai
  mtphotos_ai:
    image: mtphotos/mt-photos-ai:latest
    container_name: mtphotos_ai
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
    environment:
      - API_AUTH_KEY=xxx

• 1.24.2 indicates the version of MT Photos. You can check the latest version at https://hub.docker.com/r/mtphotos/mt-photos/tags.
• The first 8063 is the external access port, and the second 8063 is the internal port of the container. Keep it fixed and do not modify it.
• ./photos/zhansan:/photos/zhangsan: Here, I separately mount a directory to save the albums of the user "zhangsan".
• ./photos/lisi:/photos/lisi: I separately mount a directory to save the albums of the user "lisi".
• mtphotos_ai is the service used for scene recognition, and it is optional.
• When using mtphotos_ai, you need to define an API authentication key to be configured in MT Photos.

Finally, don't forget to use the command docker-compose up -d to start the services.

For more detailed installation instructions, it is recommended to refer to the official documentation: https://mtmt.tech/docs/example/intro

Using MT Photos

After installation, enter http://IP:8063 to access the web service, and then go through the following steps separately:

• Installation Wizard
• User Management
• Gallery Management (I assigned a separate folder for each user, as mentioned above, "zhangsan/lisi")
• GPS API Configuration (used to recognize the location of photos, you need to apply for an AMap API)
• Add Smart Recognition API (depends on the mtphotos_ai service for scene recognition)

I want to specifically mention the step "Add Smart Recognition API". Since I installed MT Photos using Docker Compose, MT Photos and the mtphotos_ai service are on the same network. The address for scene recognition needs to be filled in as http://mtphotos_ai:8000.

Using the App

MT Photos provides iOS and Android apps, which can be searched and installed in the app store, or you can download them by scanning the QR code on the official website.

The app is simple and easy to use, supporting features such as automatic backup and filtering of photos. It is in line with the usage habits of Chinese users. The only thing to note is the "Backup Destination". By default, it will automatically create a default directory for you. I recommend creating a separate directory for each user to facilitate maintenance and differentiation.

Conclusion

MT Photos is very suitable for hosting your own private albums and is much better than the "Q-Photo" provided by NAS. Although MT Photos is not perfect, it is still one of the best private album management software available. If you don't want to spend too much time tinkering, MT Photos is definitely a good choice.

MT Photos Official Website: https://mtmt.tech/