Leneex - Hosting Provider
PhotoPrism

Deploy PhotoPrism on a VPS in One Click

Media serversFile storage & sync

Self-hosted AI photo and video manager with face recognition and private search — your own alternative to cloud photo services.

Deploy on a VPSAll apps
  • Ready in ~7 min
  • Free installation
  • We handle the setup
At a glance
Version
Latest (build 261007)
Operating system
Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS
Minimum RAM
4 GB
License
AGPL-3.0
Addressing
IPv4, IPv6
GitHub
40,000
Deployment~7 min
Open source & self-hosted
VPS plans

Choose a VPS plan for PhotoPrism

Blazing-fast NVMe drives and powerful processors. Take a ready-made plan or build the configuration yourself.
Minex
Perfect for personal projects and small websites.
€3.20/mo
Save €0.80 per month
  • 1 vCPU core
  • 1 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 20 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • 1 TB traffic
Basex
A great balance of power and affordable price.
€4.80/mo
Save €1.20 per month
  • 2 vCPU cores
  • 2 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 40 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • 2 TB traffic
Most popular
Corex
For growing applications and businesses.
€7.20/mo
Save €1.80 per month
  • 4 vCPU cores
  • 4 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 50 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • Unlimited traffic
Midex
Resources for high-load projects.
€9.60/mo
Save €2.40 per month
  • 4 vCPU cores
  • 6 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 60 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • Unlimited traffic
Proex
Maximum power and scalability.
€12.00/mo
Save €3.00 per month
  • 6 vCPU cores
  • 8 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 70 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • Unlimited traffic
Scalex
Resources for scaling.
€16.00/mo
Save €4.00 per month
  • 6 vCPU cores
  • 10 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 150 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • Unlimited traffic
Maxex
A large reserve of power.
€44.00/mo
Save €11.00 per month
  • 8 vCPU cores
  • 16 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 200 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • Unlimited traffic
Apex
The top configuration.
€79.99/mo
Save €20.00 per month
  • 16 vCPU cores
  • 32 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 400 GB NVMe SSD
  • Full root access
  • 1 dedicated IPv4
  • Unlimited traffic

What you can do with PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism is a self-hosted photo and video manager built for people who want Google Photos-style browsing, tagging, and search without handing their photo library to a third party. It uses a local TensorFlow-based classifier to detect objects, colors, and locations, and groups images by the faces it recognizes — useful for photographers, families archiving decades of pictures, or teams sharing a shoot. Access works over WebDAV, so you can mount the library like a network drive from Windows Explorer or Finder.

What sets it apart is that the entire recognition pipeline runs on your own hardware, not a vendor's servers — no photo, face, or GPS coordinate ever leaves the machine it's stored on. That's the direct case for running it self-hosted: you decide who touches genuinely sensitive metadata like your location history and family photos, and a VPS for PhotoPrism gives that pipeline dedicated resources instead of sharing them with anyone else's account.

Get started
The applications screen of the control panel with one-click install

PhotoPrism features

A server surrounded by app icons — applications running on a VPS

A typical PhotoPrism installation on Docker unlocks the following core capabilities out of the box, running as a container on your VPS via photoprism/photoprism:

01

AI auto-tagging

The built-in TensorFlow model labels content, scenery, and quality without sending anything to an external API.

02

Face recognition

Photos are automatically clustered by the people in them, so you can browse a library by "who," not just "when.".

03

RAW file handling

RAW formats are indexed and converted to JPEG previews on the fly, no manual batch conversion needed.

04

Duplicate detection

The indexer flags exact and near-duplicate files so repeat imports don't clutter the library.

05

WebDAV access

Connect PhotoPrism as a network drive or sync it directly with the PhotoSync mobile app.

06

Geolocation maps

Four high-resolution world maps plot where each photo was taken, useful for reconstructing a trip timeline.

07

Live Photos & video playback

Live Photos animate on hover, and video files are transcoded for browser playback.

08

Installable PWA

The web interface installs to a phone or tablet home screen like a native app.

Requirements

Which server to run it on

Minimum requirements for PhotoPrism and the configuration worth starting with.
Minimum
  • CPU2 vCPU
  • Minimum RAM4 GB
  • Disk40 GB
Recommended
VPS Corex
  • CPU4 vCPU
  • Minimum RAM4 GB
  • Disk50 GB

Installation is free — you only pay for the server

Getting started

How to deploy PhotoPrism

Three steps and the app is running on your server.
Step 1
Choose a server

Take a plan with at least 4 GB RAM — PhotoPrism's TensorFlow indexer needs headroom for CPU and memory beyond storage size, and this is what actually lets you install PhotoPrism on a VPS without indexing stalling on large libraries.

Step 2
Pick the app

The one-click PhotoPrism install provisions the container together with a MariaDB database, so you skip manually wiring up the database connection yourself.

Step 3
Get your credentials

You'll get the admin panel URL along with the username and password to sign in and start importing your originals folder.

Official websitephotoprism.app
GitHub repositorygithub.com
Documentationdocs.photoprism.app
Why us

Why Host PhotoPrism on Leneex

Speed, protection and support you can rely on — on every plan, with no hidden limits.
Deployment speed
A PhotoPrism instance you can deploy in one click means you're importing your first photos the same day, without hand-configuring a MariaDB connection string yourself.
Free installation
PhotoPrism Community Edition is already free and AGPL-licensed — paying nothing for the install means your only ongoing cost is server hosting for PhotoPrism, not a setup fee on top of it.
DDoS protection
Once you turn on share links to send an album to family or clients, that link is a public endpoint — DDoS protection keeps it reachable instead of getting knocked offline by a traffic spike.
Control and support
Root access lets you tune container memory limits for the TensorFlow indexing worker and adjust MariaDB settings as your photo library grows, with engineers on hand if the tuning gets technical.
99.9% uptime with SLA compensation
A photo library people rely on for WebDAV sync and mobile uploads needs to be reachable on their schedule, not yours — the uptime SLA backs that with compensation, not just a promise.
Flexible payment
Whether you're paying personally by card or crypto, or need an invoice for a team archive, hosting for PhotoPrism accepts the payment method that fits.
What to choose

PhotoPrism: Self-Hosted vs Cloud — Which to Choose

PhotoPrism does not offer an official cloud SaaS product from the developers themselves. It offers paid memberships (Essentials, Plus, and Pro) that remain self-hosted and simply unlock additional features within your own installation, as well as third-party managed hosting through its partner PikaPods. Therefore, the second column below presents an average overview of a typical cloud photo storage service (similar to Google Photos), rather than a product offered by PhotoPrism itself.
Ready-made SaaS
Self-hosted on LeneexRecommended
Resources and limitsShared computing resources; processing speed limits apply to free and basic plansDedicated CPU and RAM exclusively for your library and indexing
Control and accessSettings are limited to the service interface, with no access to the server-side infrastructureFull root access, with customizable database configuration and recognition models
Feature limitsFace recognition, RAW processing, and advanced search are often restricted to paid subscriptionsAll tagging, face recognition, and RAW conversion features are already available in the free Community Edition
ScalingIncreasing storage capacity requires upgrading to a more expensive planUpgrade disk space and RAM with a single click as your archive grows
CostCosts increase with the volume of stored photos and videosFixed VPS pricing regardless of your photo library size
Who it fitsUsers who want a ready-to-use service without configuration and are not concerned about where their metadata is storedUsers who want full control over facial recognition data and geolocation metadata in their personal photos

Since PhotoPrism has no official cloud tier of its own, self-hosting on a PhotoPrism VPS hosting plan is simply the practical way to run it with full control over the face-recognition and location data it generates — not a trade-off against a vendor's SaaS product that doesn't exist.

Frequently Asked Questions about PhotoPrism on VPS

What people ask most about PhotoPrism and our servers.

  • Yes — copy your originals and storage folders (and the MariaDB database dump if you're upgrading from SQLite) to the new server, point the Docker Compose file at them, and PhotoPrism will re-index anything not already tagged.

  • Disk and RAM upgrades apply to the running server without touching the originals or storage volumes, so your indexed library, faces, and albums stay exactly as they were.

  • Check with the Leneex team on whether a domain-based certificate is issued automatically for the panel.

  • PhotoPrism's own documentation recommends at least 2 CPU cores and 4 GB RAM as a baseline; the exact photo count a minimum Leneex plan comfortably indexes depends on file sizes and RAW usage.

  • Updates come down to pulling the newer photoprism/photoprism image and redeploying the container — effectively a one-click automation of PhotoPrism's maintenance rather than a manual patch process, though you decide when to trigger it.

What's already configured out of the box

The one-click deploy provisions the photoprism/photoprism Docker container alongside a MariaDB database, with the container's restart policy set to relaunch automatically if it stops. The originals and storage folders are mounted as persistent volumes, so your photo files and generated thumbnails/index data survive container restarts and updates.

First login

Sign in at the admin panel using the username "admin" (PhotoPrism's default admin account) together with the password generated or set during the one-click setup. The web interface itself listens on port 2342 inside the container.

Importing your first photos

Upload files into the mounted originals folder — over WebDAV, SFTP, or by syncing with the PhotoSync mobile app — then trigger indexing from the admin panel, or let PhotoPrism's automatic file watcher pick up new files if it's enabled. Large initial imports with lots of RAW files will take longer to index than JPEGs, since each RAW gets converted to a preview before tagging runs.

Deploy PhotoPrism in about 7 minutes

Choose a server — we do the rest: install, configure and send you the credentials.

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