Stream App Help
What is Stream app?
Stream is a personal photo management tool designed for NAS users. It is just a management interface and does not store your photo data, so using Stream will not affect your original data. You can stop using Stream at any time without losing any data.
Which media sources are supported?
Currently, Stream supports Photoprism, Immich and local photo albums.
Media Source | Tested Version |
---|---|
Immich | v1.118.2 |
Photoprism | Build 240915-e1280b2fb |
Local Photos | iOS 18 |
Due to limited resources, we are only able to test a limited range of versions. If you encounter any issues with media source support, please provide feedback through the app’s settings page.
What operations are supported?
Currently supported operations include Favorite, Archive, Restore, Private, Unprivate, Delete, and Approve. The table below shows the corresponding operations in different types of media sources:
Stream | Photoprism | Immich | Local Photos |
---|---|---|---|
Favorite | Favorite | Favorite | Favorite |
Archive / Restore | Archive / Restore | Archive / Unarchive | (not supported *) 1 |
Private / Unprivate | Private / Unprivate | (not supported *) 1 | Hide |
Delete | Delete 2 | Delete 2 | Delete |
Approve | Approve 3 | (not supported) | (not supported) |
How to manage multiple media sources simultaneously?
Stream combines and displays photos from different media sources. When you perform operations like private, archive, or delete on merged photos, you are actually performing batch operations on the original media sources.
How are photos merged?
By default, Stream merges photos based on basic information such as file name, capture time, and file resolution using simple rule matching. You can also enable hashing to improve merging accuracy. However, keep in mind that enabling hashing will increase the time and power consumption of merging operations.
What is User Marks Data?
User Marks Data represents your interactions with photos, such as favorites, archives, and private flags.
Key points about Marks Data:
- Stored separately from photos
- Cannot be recovered if lost
- To migrate between systems, you need both photos and marks data
Most photo apps keep this data locked within their platforms. Stream believes this data belongs to you and should be easily migrated and managed.
How does Stream handle user marks data?
Media sources have different capabilities (Local Photos can’t archive, Immich doesn’t support private), but Stream fills these gaps by managing these unsupported features internally.
Currently, Stream only manages marks unsupported by certain media sources. Our vision is to expand this support to all User Marks Data, giving you complete control over your photo data.
How to use vector search?
Guide
- Enable
Vector Search
in settings. Note, this requiresThumbnail Auto-Download
to be enabled and it may consume more battery power. - Download the two AI models:
image encoder
andtext encoder
. - Once the models are ready, tap
Run Job
to start index creation. - Upon every app cold-start, the Indexer runs automatically after a few seconds.
Search skills
The Vector Search feature matches based on the similarity of image content. Make sure to input descriptions that are as relevant to the image content as possible.
For example:
- If you’re searching for a book cover, you might input
book with a blue cover
- If you’re looking for a specific type of dog, your description could be
fluffy golden retriever
Remember, the more descriptive and accurate your input, the better your search results will be.
Reset Search Index
in the Search Index
section.Model Comparison
Model | Indexing Speed (photos/min) | Size (MB) | Supported Languages |
---|---|---|---|
clip | ~5300 | ~280 | English |
mobileClipS0 | ~6500 | ~100 | English |
uform | ~1200 | ~180 | Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese (21 languages total) |
- AI model accuracy varies, try and compare to choose the best for you
- Indexing Speed tested on iPhone 15 with local thumbnail cache, download time excluded
- for detailed comparison data, see uform3-image-text-multilingual-base
-
These operations are not natively supported by the media source, but Stream provides support for them. For more details, refer to the User Marks Data section. ↩︎ ↩︎
-
You can enable the “Archive instead of delete” feature in Photoprism/Immich settings. This is useful for read-only media sources. ↩︎ ↩︎
-
Photoprism marks low-quality photos as pending approval, which need to be manually approved to display normally in the album. ↩︎