Docker Compose

Open a terminal and change to the folder where the docker-compose.yml file is located.1 Now run the following commands to download the most recent version from our private registry and restart your instance in the background:2

docker compose pull
docker compose stop
docker compose up -d

Pulling a new version can take several minutes, depending on your internet connection speed. Advanced users can add this to a Makefile so that they only have to type a single command like make update.

Even when you use an image with the :latest tag, Docker does not automatically download new images for you. You can either manually upgrade as shown above, or set up a service like Watchtower to get automatic updates.

Config Examples

We recommend that you compare your own docker-compose.yml with our latest examples from time to time, as they may include new config options or other enhancements relevant to you.

View examples chevron_right

Development Preview

You can test upcoming features and enhancements by changing the image from photoprism/photoprism:latest to photoprism/photoprism:preview in your docker-compose.yml. Then pull the most recent image and restart your instance as shown above.

Learn more chevron_right

Watchtower

Adding Watchtower as a service to your docker-compose.yml will automatically keep images up-to-date:

services:
  watchtower:
    image: containrrr/watchtower
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"

Automatic updates may interrupt indexing and import operations. Only enable Watchtower if you are comfortable with this.

Pure Docker

Open a terminal on your server, and run the following command to pull the most recent container image:2

docker pull photoprism/photoprism:latest

Complete Rescan

We recommend performing a complete rescan after major updates to take advantage of new search filters and sorting options. Be sure to read the notes for each release to see what changes have been made and if they might affect your library, for example, because of the file types you have or because new search features have been added. If you encounter problems that you cannot solve otherwise (i.e. before reporting a bug), please also try a rescan and see if it solves the problem.

You can start a rescan from the user interface by navigating to Library > Index, selecting "Complete Rescan", and then clicking "Start". Manually entered information such as labels, people, titles or descriptions will not be modified when indexing, even if you perform a "complete rescan".

Be careful not to start multiple indexing processes at the same time, as this will lead to a high server load.

MariaDB Server

Our configuration examples are generally based on the current stable version to take advantage of performance improvements. This does not mean that older versions are no longer supported and you must upgrade immediately. We recommend not using the :latest tag for the MariaDB Docker image and to upgrade manually by changing the tag once we had a chance to test a new major version, e.g.:

services:
  mariadb:
    image: mariadb:10.11
    ...

If MariaDB fails to start after upgrading from an earlier version (or migrating from MySQL), the internal management schema may be outdated. See Troubleshooting MariaDB Problems for instructions on how to fix this.

PhotoPrism® Documentation

For detailed information on specific product features, services, and related resources, see our Knowledge Base, or read the User Guide for help using the web user interface:

  1. The default Docker Compose config filename is docker-compose.yml. For simplicity, it doesn't need to be specified when running docker compose or docker-compose in the same directory. Config files for other apps or instances should be placed in separate folders. ↩

  2. Our guides use the new docker compose command by default. If your server does not yet support it, the old docker-compose command will still work. Users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux® and compatible Linux distributions such as CentOS, Fedora, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux can substitute the docker and docker compose commands with podman and podman-compose as drop-in replacements. ↩ ↩