That article addresses how to do a "scrubbable" infinite scroll for their timeline view.
Rendering correctly-scaled images is a different issue: Google Photos renders the image to the precise viewport dimensions (which is why it takes sometimes a couple seconds to render).
When I designed PhotoStructure, I knew I wanted everything to show instantly, so resizing is done to several common viewport sizes at import time (and these sizes are customizable). When you're browsing your library, your browser fetches the smallest variant that will still show with high quality based on native display resolution.
I tested it a few months ago hosted on my desktop (Ryzen 2600 6 core CPU, 16gb of RAM) with my entire photo library of around 100k photos - or about 60gb of data, and the performance was better than I expected. The ML image classification stuff it does took a few hours for sure, I left it go overnight, but then in the morning the ability to filter for specific classifications or jump to a specific date was pretty much as fast as you'd expect it to be (almost instant). This was using the default SQLite config.
The one thing I wished was that the ML Classification stuff it did was better - because it was nowhere near as good as what Google does with Photos, and nowhere near as useful for that reason. I still deeply miss Google Photos.
For context, my setup is pretty old fashioned these days. I plug my phone in, and use Shotwell to import the photos into my local photo library. Duplicati does a backup of all my photos once a week to Backblaze. Photoprism reads from my local copy and allows me to effectively browse my photos at home.
I have been following it since release of OwnPhotos. Back then it was a messy university project of the original developer mixing different tech to achieve the goal. It simply stopped working with bigger sets of images.
I tried this fork as well, it has the same problem. Normally I would provide some pull requests but in this case the code base seemed too much hacked together from random things.
The problem with this thing is that it doesn't work.
So having played with this for several hours today
* installation was ok, but I had to reach out to the discord channel to be able to configure it properly
* started to index the photos; at 16480 photos (After about 1h) it stopped progressing with no error message
* for the photos that are listed as indexed, when going to the gallery, there are no thumbnails
* it appears that there is no metadata being indexed for those photos either
In short, this is not ready for prime time yet
I currently run PhotoStructure what works ok with indexing, but has other gaps (no tagging, face recognition, etc..)
Local face recognition, if it doesn't make it into this release, will be in the following release: most of the detection, aggregation, and backend storage is already implemented in my feature branch.
What I'm looking for is Lightroom-album style tagging (keyword and star-rating) that I can apply to photos manually - I dont' have my archive tagged in anywhere, and I need to do that somewhere
I'm thinking about biting the bullet and import everything in Lightroom just to get tagging :(
