Advanced Backup Guide

A backup of PhotoPrism should include, at a minimum, the files in your originals folder and a copy of the index database. We also recommend backing up the storage folder so that you don't need to recreate the thumbnails and your backup includes all config files.

You can create an index SQL backup by running this command in a terminal:

photoprism backup -i [filename]

Or the following for docker-compose:

docker compose exec -T photoprism photoprism backup -i - > photoprism-db.sql

As seen above, you can use - as filename to write the backup to stdout. This is done to ensure the backup resides outside of the container environment.

If you leave the filename empty, the backup will be written to the default backup folder configured via PHOTOPRISM_BACKUP_PATH.

If you want, you can also export your cache and thumbnails, but it can also be re-generated after restore. It will save you from re-generating thumbnails from scratch however.

Helpful information can be found on GitHub as well.

SQLite Backups

Creating SQL dumps from SQLite is currently not supported by the photoprism backup command, since SQLite files are located in the storage folder and thus should automatically be part of any backup.

However, if you prefer to have a dump, you can run this command to create one:

docker compose exec -T photoprism sqlite3 /photoprism/storage/index.db .dump > photoprism-db.sql

If you use pure docker, you can run the following (or replace docker with podman on Red Hat-based Linux distributions):

docker exec -t PhotoPrism sqlite3 /photoprism/storage/index.db .dump > photoprism-db.sql

Restore Backups

See our user guide to learn how to restore backups.

Help improve these docs! You can contribute by clicking to send a pull request with your changes.