What is Frameleaf?

Frameleaf is a photo and video library you run on your own hardware: a NAS, a home server or any Linux machine with Docker. Your phones back up to it, your family shares it, and the originals stay on your disks as ordinary files.

It’s built for home and family libraries: Google Photos-style discovery, with every bit of processing (faces, search, descriptions) done on your own server.

The three parts

• The server, which stores your library, recognises faces, powers search and serves the web app. The open-source edition is the Frameleaf Library community edition, licensed under AGPLv3.
• The apps for iPhone and Android, which back up your camera roll and browse the whole library.
• Frameleaf Cloud, an optional subscription for remote access, off-site backup and cloud GPU processing. Nothing on your server needs it. See Frameleaf Cloud.

What’s inside the server

A Frameleaf installation is a small group of Docker containers started from one Compose file:

Container	What it does
frameleaf_server	The server, the web app and the API. Listens on port 2283.
frameleaf_machine_learning	Face recognition, smart search and other on-device models.
frameleaf_postgres	The database, which holds your albums, people, descriptions and settings.
frameleaf_redis	A small job queue the server uses to run background work.

Your photos and videos live in one folder on the host, set by UPLOAD_LOCATION. The database lives in another, set by DB_DATA_LOCATION.

What you get

Everything you’d expect from a family photo service, plus a lot that’s unique to Frameleaf:

• Backup and browsing on phone and web, with a timeline, albums, shared albums, partners and public links.
• Search in plain words, such as “photos of Alice in Calgary from April 2024”, with faces, places and dates worked out on your server.
• People and pets, memories and a world map.
• Locked content: keep sensitive photos (medical, financial, identity documents) in your normal albums but hidden behind your PIN.
• AI descriptions and tags for photos and videos, written by a model on your own server, with smart albums that fill themselves.
• Nested albums with folders, custom icons and drag-and-drop ordering.
• Non-destructive editing for photos and videos, and Studio, a multitrack video editor.
• Library Care to find missing and damaged originals and put back verified copies.
• Duplicate review that keeps your HEIC or RAW original rather than a bigger re-encoded JPG, and physical deduplication so a family doesn’t store the same file twice.
• Imports from Google Photos and iCloud Photos, and a verified server-to-server move.

See the features overview for the full list.

Keep your own backups

Frameleaf looks after your library carefully, but it can’t stop a disk from failing. Follow a 3-2-1 backup plan: three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one off-site. See Backup and restore.

Where to start

1. Check the requirements.
2. Install the server with Docker Compose, or follow the guide for Unraid, Synology or TrueNAS. Other options are in Other ways to install.
3. Open the web app and work through first steps: the admin account, other people, your phone and backups.
4. Bring in the rest of your photos from Google Photos, iCloud Photos or an existing folder with an external library.

Already running Immich? See Moving from Immich.