Dependencies

These tools are not strictly required, but if they are installed in your system, Photofield will use them to improve performance, metadata extraction, thumbnail generation, and video previews.

• ExifTool: Extracts metadata from many more formats than the embedded goexif.
• FFmpeg: Generates video thumbnails and previews and adds support for more image formats including HEIC/HEIF (iOS photos), MOV (QuickTime videos), and basic RAW formats. (v7.0+ recommended)
• djpeg (libjpeg-turbo): Accelerates JPEG decoding of big images in cases where there are no other appropriate thumbnails available.
• libwebp: Enables high-performance WebP encoding via dynamic library loading. When available, the go-libwebp encoder can use the native libwebp dynamic shared library for faster encoding (webp-jackdyn) compared to pure Go implementations (webp-jacktra).

TIP

To use semantic search, deduplication or face detection, install the photofield-ai service and configure it in the ai section of the configuration.

Quick Install

Docker

All dependencies are included in the Docker image by default.

Windows (scoop)

scoop install exiftool ffmpeg libjpeg-turbo libwebp

macOS (brew)

brew install exiftool ffmpeg libjpeg-turbo webp

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt install exiftool ffmpeg libjpeg-turbo-progs libwebp-dev

CentOS/RHEL/Fedora

sudo dnf install exiftool ffmpeg libjpeg-turbo-utils libwebp