Comment on Immich relies on a third-party service that seems shady to me
sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 3 months ago
I read through your comments and the reply from devs regarding OSM. I will add a few points that can be part of the feature request. I have some experience dealing with maps, and my understanding is you can set up an offline version of OSM, which will get updated only when required.
leaflet.offline is a library which provides a similar functionality. I think with some modifications this can be implemented to significantly reduce the load on OSM that using it directly.
Even with a very large zoom level say 11 to 15, a large area of maps takes like a few hundred MBs. We once cached the entire region of California with all the details and it was around 240 MB IIRC. But Immich does not need this much details and it is possible to restrict zoom levels to be included.
For someone self hosting several hundreds of GBs of photos, this should be doable without using too much storage. I think the problem will be that this is a huge engineering effort. Depending on the priority of the feature it may not be easy to do this.
There is a site called Switch2OSM which details almost everything you need to know. The previous link is on how to serve map tiles on your own. Again it is a daunting task and not suitable for everyone.
If anyone needs a live update of OSM as things get added, look into the commercial offerings.
In conclusion, it is possible to include a highly optimised version of OSM, instead of putting their servers under huge load. The catch is, it is not easy and will need a huge engineering effort. I think developers should take a call on this.
pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 3 months ago
Thanks for sharing your experience and for the links.
Do you think it would be doable to make/host a tileserver that only generates the first few zoom levels for the whole planet by default, and is able to generate tiles for more detailed zoom levels only for specific locations ? I’m thinking of a feature where Immich asks the tile server to generate the appropriate tiles based on the locations of photos. Since we only ever zoom on locations where photos have been taken, and we often take several photos at the same locations, could this decrease the requirements enough for self-hosting ?
sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 3 months ago
If you are asking about vector maps, I am not really sure, because I have no experience with it. So can’t really comment on that. On raster maps, as you already know every tile is a PNG. The behaviour you described is very similar to the client side caching that usually happens in the browser. Depending on the coordinates in the viewport and zoom level the server provides the tiles.
Usually to save the map most offline map making tools will ask you to draw a rectangle and select the required zoom levels. In an interactive map, the rectangle is the viewport of the device. So there can be a feature which will download and store the tiles around a specific gps location for a fixed geographical area. That should be doable without much issue. But in this case that may not be a good idea.
If you visualise all zoom levels stacked over each other, the images need to be retrieved when the user zooms into a point the geographical area will not stay the same. Smaller geographical area is only needed with higher zoom levels. If we only take all the tiles that get downloaded in every layer, it may produce a shape similar to an inverted pyramid. So saving the images as a user zooms in for the first time, may be the best idea.
Then the saved tiles need to be used again when users zoom in the same area. Also these tiles need not be updated frequently and maybe even once in every 3 months might be enough, that too only when the user zooms in again in that area.
This can be a little tricky as almost all the tools that create offline maps do it for a fixed area and selected zoom levels, every point in that area gets equal priority. But in this case the point is the important element. The area nearby may not be relevant at all. So that is the part that needs some exploration.
pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 3 months ago
I’ll try clarifying what I had in mind :
I tried running maptiler to generate tiles from OSM’s data, which required an insane amount of time and resources (not doable for most self-hosters including myself, even for a single country) to process the data and store the results. I was wondering if there would be a way to ask maptiler (or another equivalent tool) to only generate tiles that contain points from a given set (in this case, photos) and maybe the tiles adjacent to them. What about doing this for every zoom level ? This would require generating at most
zoom_levels * n_photos(* 9if we include adjacent) tiles, and a lot less for the typical person taking several photos at the same place.sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Hey I understood what you meant. The result that you are trying to achieve is very close to the browser caching normally present is what I meant. When you zoom in it will only load that area. And I don’t think you can specify the number of tiles to be a specific number, since the zoom levels are not linear.
The offline leaflet I shared in the previous comment actually does the same thing you want to achieve. The difference is the offline mode is discarded immediately when the system is back online. So that library must be adaptable to incorporate the time dependency and users visiting a point again I specified in the last comment.
Regarding OSM data, there are zip files available for downloading. Geofabrik and openstreetmap.fr are examples. Another tool is Protomaps, where you can download by drawing a polygon. But these are not going to be the ideal solution for a product like Immich.
By the way I saw your update. Great job on following up and providing a fix for others. I really really appreciate it.