Coppermine Photo Gallery vs Ente
| Tagline | Feature-rich PHP photo gallery with albums, user management, and comments | End-to-end encrypted self-hosted photo backup with native mobile apps |
| Category | Photo Management | Photo Management |
| Replaces | Google Photos | Google Photos, iCloud Photos |
| GitHub stars | 130 | 27k |
| Language | PHP | Docker |
| License | GPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 3/5 Moderate |
| Deploy options | Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 1 month ago | 5 days ago |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Coppermine Photo Gallery
- UI is dated and not mobile-first
- No automatic organization or AI tagging
- No Docker image; requires manual LAMP stack setup
Ente
- No AI-based automatic photo tagging, scene recognition, or search by content due to E2E encryption
- Self-hosted setup requires configuring S3-compatible object storage separately
- Smaller ecosystem of third-party integrations compared to Google Photos
- Collaborative album features are less mature than Google Photos shared libraries
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Ente for the larger community and ecosystem. Ente has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Coppermine Photo Gallery
Feature-rich PHP photo gallery with albums, user management, and comments