PhotoPrism, the open-source photo management application designed for self-hosted setups, has released an update introducing new face detection and embedding models. According to the developers, PhotoPrism can now detect more faces, including smaller ones in group photos.
Importantly, existing PhotoPrism libraries will not automatically switch to the new face recognition model. Users who want to use it need to run the new photoprism faces migrate command, which re-embeds existing faces while preserving assigned names.
Face management has also received several improvements. Updating faces in large libraries is now faster, and memory usage when naming clusters has been reduced. PhotoPrism also fixes an issue where two people could be merged accidentally when reassigning a face.
Moreover, several new CLI commands have been introduced for inspecting and troubleshooting face data, including faces status, faces subjects, faces ls, and faces markers. There is also a new faces reset --all option to reset face information without detecting all faces again.
Privacy controls around people have been expanded. Individuals can now be marked as Private or Hidden, preventing their names and face regions from showing to non-privileged accounts. The photos remain visible, so this does not remove the person’s images from the library.
Another notable addition is native support for 360-degree media from Insta360 cameras. PhotoPrism can now display 360-degree photos and videos directly, along with fisheye DNG files, making the application more useful for users working with action and panoramic cameras.
The list of supported formats has grown, too. The indexer now understands Cineon and ORI files, along with additional camcorder video formats.
Users with large video collections should benefit from a change to the default maximum indexed file size, now raised to 5 GB. Just for reference, previously, users with larger files had to adjust their configuration manually.
On the mapping side, PhotoPrism has upgraded MapLibre GL JS from version 5 to 6. The new version requires WebGL 2, so older browsers or graphics environments without WebGL 2 support may no longer use the map interface properly.
Several smaller improvements are made throughout the application. Album, label, and folder covers now load from the thumbnail cache. Oversized preview requests fall back to the largest available thumbnail. New configuration options provide more control over face crops and clustering behavior.
Finally, this release includes several dependency and security updates. libheif has been upgraded from version 1.23.1 to 1.23.4, addressing eight CVEs, while the Go toolchain has moved from version 1.26.5 to 1.27.1. ONNX Runtime, used for AI-related functionality, has also been updated from version 1.26.0 to 1.29.0.
For additional details, visit the changelog. The developers recommend running PhotoPrism through its official Docker images on private servers and NAS systems.
