A self-hosted 'best shot' photo-culling tool that scores and shortlists the keepers from an Immich library

other real project • single request

A self-hoster with ~30k photos in Immich wants to auto-surface the best shots from each trip/event to print albums, and the thread agrees nothing Immich-native/self-hosted does it. Immich browses, tags, face-recognizes, and de-dupes but does not hand back a best-in-album shortlist; PhotoPrism has automatic quality scoring, but it is a separate library and review queue rather than an Immich-integrated culling workflow. The gap is a local, Immich-integrated tool that groups near-duplicates, scores sharpness and eyes-open shots, and hands back the keepers.

builder note

Resist building a general 'photo organizer' -- the entire job is one opinionated verb, 'pick the keepers from this trip,' so an Immich plugin/sidecar that groups near-dupes and scores sharpness/eyes-open and returns a shortlist beats a feature-sprawl app; on-device vision models make this a local-first feature, not a cloud one.

landscape (4 existing solutions)

Culling is partially solved in standalone photo managers and pro desktop workflows, but not for Immich-centered self-hosters who want a local service to score a trip or album in place and return a keeper shortlist.

Immich Does browsing, face recognition, semantic search, and duplicate detection, but does not rank or cull for 'best shot' within a burst, trip, or album.

PhotoPrism Creates an automatic 1-5 quality score and review queue, but it is a separate photo library and low-quality review mechanism, not an Immich-sidecar workflow that selects best shots from a specific event and writes a shortlist back to Immich.

czkawka Finds near-duplicates by hashing, which thins bursts, but doesn't judge quality (sharpness, eyes-open, composition) to pick the keeper.

Aftershoot / Imagen Dedicated pro culling tools; Aftershoot runs locally/offline, but the workflow is still desktop/pro-shoot oriented and subscription-based, with no self-hosted service that plugs into an Immich library.

sources (1)

other https://lemmy.world/post/48499000 "it will choose the "best" pictures for printing" 2026-06-22

self-hostedimmichphotoscullinglocal-ai