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Migrating from SQLite to MariaDB

For advanced users only: The instructions for these migrations were provided by a contributor and are not part of the original software distribution. As such, they have not been officially released, recommended, or extensively tested by us. You can contribute by clicking to send a pull request with your changes.

  • Install techouse/sqlite3-to-mysql on your host. (openSUSE: zypper in python-sqlite3-to-mysql)
  • Shutdown your current stack: docker compose down
  • Add the current snippet of the MariaDB to your Sqlite Photoprism docker compose with the addition of the extra ports section where you expose port 3306 to the Host. In my case this looked like attachment 1.
  • Start the stack again: docker compose up -d
  • Stop Photoprism: docker compose stop photoprism
  • On the host now run sudo sqlite3mysql -f <PATH_TO_STORAGE_MOUNT>/storage/index.db -d photoprism -u root --mysql-password 'insecure'
  • Shutdown your current stack again: docker compose down
  • Edit your docker-compose.yml so it uses the MariaDB database you added before. Don't forget to remove the ports section of the MariaDB Container.
  • Start your stack again with docker compose up -d
  • If this worked you may want to delete the file index.db in the storage mount since it contains out of date information.

Attachment 1:

services:
  mariadb:
    restart: unless-stopped
    image: mariadb:10.9
    ports:
      - 3306:3306 # Expose Port 3306 
    security_opt:
      - seccomp:unconfined
      - apparmor:unconfined
    command: mysqld --innodb-buffer-pool-size=1G >
      --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --character-set-server=utf8mb4
      --collation-server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci --max-connections=512
      --innodb-rollback-on-timeout=OFF --innodb-lock-wait-timeout=120
    volumes:
      - "./database:/var/lib/mysql" # DO NOT REMOVE
    environment:
      MARIADB_AUTO_UPGRADE: "1"
      MARIADB_INITDB_SKIP_TZINFO: "1"
      MARIADB_DATABASE: "photoprism"
      MARIADB_USER: "photoprism"
      MARIADB_PASSWORD: "insecure"
      MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD: "insecure"

Bad Performance

Many users reporting poor performance and high CPU usage have migrated from SQLite to MariaDB, so their database schema is no longer optimized for performance. For example, MariaDB cannot handle rows with text columns in memory and always uses temporary tables on disk if there are any.

If this is the case, please make sure that your migrated database schema matches that of a fresh, non-migrated installation. It may help to run the migrations manually in a terminal using the migrations subcommands. However, this does not guarantee that all issues such as missing indexing are resolved.

View Database Schema ›