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Practice

Routine AFTER new added

Index

Don't really know when the PhotoPrism will do it automatically, so prefer to do this manually whenever new added to the collection.

docker exec photoprism photoprism index

Covert

This forced convert is worth to do to avoid on-demand-convert for all video files, so it avoid long time spinning to load a video.

docker exec photoprism photoprism convert

Show live log

docker logs photoprism -f

Disable heavy AI stuff

Add the following two line in default docker-compose.yml

      PHOTOPRISM_DISABLE_FACES: "true"
      PHOTOPRISM_DISABLE_CLASSIFICATION: "true"
Verify these with this command:
docker exec photoprism photoprism config | grep -i "disable-faces\|classification"
│ disable-faces             │ true                                                                                        │
│ disable-classification    │ true

What You Still Keep

By disabling Face Recognition and AI Classification, you still retain all the core photo management features:

  • ✅ Timeline view
  • ✅ Albums
  • ✅ Search by year/month/date
  • ✅ GPS locations (if photos contain coordinates)
  • ✅ Camera and lens metadata
  • ✅ EXIF information
  • ✅ Keywords already embedded in photos
  • ✅ Manual albums and favorites

What You Disable

By disabling these AI features, PhotoPrism no longer spends CPU time on:

  • ❌ Face detection
  • ❌ Face clustering
  • ❌ People recognition
  • ❌ Automatic object labels
  • ❌ Background image classification

Result

This configuration is ideal for large, well-organized personal photo collections where:

  • Photos are already organized into folders and albums
  • Face recognition is not important
  • AI-generated labels are not needed
  • Fast browsing and a responsive web UI are preferred over AI features

Benefits include:

  • 🚀 Lower CPU usage
  • 🚀 Faster web UI response
  • 🚀 Less background processing
  • 🚀 Reduced indexing time
  • 🚀 Better overall user experience

Reindex photo

docker exec -it photoprism bash

photoprism index -f

Reindex people

docker exec -it photoprism bash

photoprism faces index