20 ms·

Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

565 points by rzk 1y ago

petethepig 1y ago
I have terabytes of iphone photos/videos accumulated over the years. Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries so I’ve been splitting them by year which is fine for archiving but horrible for actually browsing photos. Immich has been absolutely awesome for this — I can finally look at all my pictures from any year from anywhere in the world. I’m very happy and hope the creators find a way to sustainably finance the project. The upload feature in the mobile app is not a 1 to 1 replacement of apple photos import so i still do that via apple photos, but that’s something I can live with.
- Dennip 1y ago
  For a while I was running a windows VM with the iCloud for windows utility that syncs your photos to a folder on your windows PC, iirc it worker reasonably well as an 'automated' sync solution. (under the surface the folder was a share on my NAS, which in turn fed into a separate immich instance)
- dsego 1y ago
  > Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries Some would say it's deliberately made to keep the library cluttered so you have to pay more for cloud storage. Why Are Our Photo Libraries Such a MESS? (Ben Vallack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYeVWyNxaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYeVWyNxaY
sanex 1y ago
I was hoping we'd have immich stable earlier in 2025, now it's starting to look like maybe 2026 but they haven't pushed it on the roadmap so I'm holding out hope.
- tbabej 1y ago
  Immich is extremely stable even if not labeled as such. My personal experience is zero maintenance (other than updating docker container) since deployment several years ago.
  - sanex 1y ago
    I went through one upgrade a year or so ago that forced me to redo my backup so I'm a little shy of going all in again until they say stable.
    - gedy 1y ago
      This sounds a bit like my experience with Home Assistant, it's very stable as long as I don't frequently update it. If I install every update I've frequently messed up my installation/config.
      - smt88 1y ago
        > If I install every update I've frequently messed up my installation/config. I've had it running for a year and have fearlessly and immediately updated. Never messed anything up, somewhat remarkably.
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    Stability also implies that we don’t have to update our server version every couple of days/weeks because otherwise the mobile app stops working. I’m ok upgrading but it gets old wondering why the photos aren’t showing up and then realizing that it’s because the versions are out of sync and the mobile app just refuses to talk to the server.
    - kevincox 1y ago
      Yeah, short compatibility ranges between the app and sever is one of my biggest pain points right now.
mschild 1y ago
Highly recommend [0]selfh.st if you are looking for software to run locally. Its a maintained directory for open and closed source software. [0] https://selfh.st/apps/ https://selfh.st/apps/
- atentaten 1y ago
  The colors of the select box text (Tags, Alternatives, Sort, Search) are the same (or very close) color as the background making them unreadable.
  - brovonov 1y ago
    I think that has fixed, they appear as two contrasting colors for me.
- oceanhaiyang 1y ago
  Don’t support their fake use of RSS
righthand 1y ago
I just started looking into Ente which works very well but I don’t like 100MB Dart chromium app (I may build my own native frontend in iced.rs). However I’m wondering how Immich compares it seems less interested in the encryption security and sharing aspects and more heavy on the image editor aspect. Both are selfhostable. So it maybe an effort to migrate one day.
- denysvitali 1y ago
  Immich uses Flutter as well, fyi
  - righthand 1y ago
    There’s no escape. People just gotta write Javascript apps when we could have none.
    - fngjdflmdflg 1y ago
      Flutter does not use JavaScript, although it can compile to JavaScript. It also does not use chromium. I'm not sure why ente is 300MB but that is not standard for a Flutter app.
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  Immich isn't an editor at all, I don't think it can even rotate an image 90 degrees. It's very focused on having multiple users upload photos and create shared albums (public or just to other users). Doesn't do any encryption at all tho.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Perhaps I’m confusing it with another self host-able solution then.
shadowpho 1y ago
Been running it and it’s a beauty! Runs great on a weak-ish mini pc with pictures via nfs on a NAS
sciencesama 1y ago
Can we make it into an app ?? For windows and mac like click and install ? That can scan all the folders and do all its stuff !??
- dpcx 1y ago
  macOS on arm, you can download the ios app and install it. That's what I did to import my wife's photos.
N-Krause 1y ago
Runs on a Pi4 in a cabinet with a lot of other self hosted stuff. Data is stored on a NAS. Performance on the Pi4 isn't the greatest, but it works without any annoyance. It has been hosting my SO's and my photos for a few months, the transition from Google Photos was pretty easy and it is almost a drop in replacement. I love it. Make sure to checkout https://github.com/simulot/immich-go https://github.com/simulot/immich-go, it was a great help migrating my Google Takeout to Immich.
- rustyminnow 1y ago
  How do you expose the service for your SO when away from home? Do you use tailscale/cloudflare tunnel/vpn? public port on your router? I've been trying tailscale for myself, but there's a hair more friction than my SO would accept.
  - conqrr 1y ago
    Not op, but a combination of tailscale and a public VM is my setup for this. VM from oracle is free btw.
  - cuu508 1y ago
    Not op, I use cloudflare tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports "local" and "external" connection settings, so it can connect to the Immich instance directly when on home wifi, and use the tunnel when out and about.
  - close04 1y ago
    I use Tailscale for this, always connected and Immich pointing at the TS IP. I haven’t yet made the jump to full syncing, so I have a manually curated library of photos that I access anywhere but I am planning on starting to test this feature soon (I take a lot of junk throwaway photos with the phone and don’t want to sync everything). I’ll have to see how it best works for me. But Immich is a great app, minimal to no fuss setting it up in a container on my NAS. My only potentially unfounded concern is when I upgrade the images. They changed the different component containers images over time, sometime with breaking changes. So I always half expect that an upgrade will screw up the setup and I’ll have to start from scratch with the indexing.
javipas 1y ago
I've been using it for a couple of years and I find absolutely stellar. I wrote the (quite long) of my process to find the perfect alternative (for me) to Google Photos, so in case anyone's interested https://medium.com/@javipas/thats-how-i-ve-replaced-google-photos-0f5723719a7d https://medium.com/@javipas/thats-how-i-ve-replaced-google-p...
Liftyee 1y ago
This serves as a great reminder for me to set up Immich when I get time, and a reason/excuse to purchase a better GPU. I have been uneasy with my dependence on Google for a while now. [EDIT]: the following was intended as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45168333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45168333 I understand the author's point against the perceived complexity of 1-5 star rating systems, but it's worthy of note that star ratings are extremely common (ubiquitous?) in more advanced photo management/editing software such as Darktable and Lightroom. As a photographer, I see why the feature might have been included.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  Does Immich have features that need a high-end GPU? I hosted it on a machine with a 1050Ti, and see others in this comment section mentioning using a RPi.
  - LeFantome 1y ago
    Mine is running as a container on an old Mac Pro 2013 (running Proxmox). My GPU is not even as good as yours. It runs great. The “beta timeline” required hashing that took forever but this was on my wife’s iPhone and nothing to do with the back-end (she has 50,000 photos). The machine-learning stuff uses the GPU. Facial recognition for example. It takes longer on low-end hardware but I am not sure why that is a problem.
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    It runs great in a container on my synology NAS which has no GPU at all.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    The image categorization can use GPU acceleration, many seem to be noting it runs well enough on CPU mode even on modest hardware, but importing say hundreds of gigs may take longer for classification (ingress) steps.
nullify88 1y ago
I just wish it didn't need Postgres and SQLite was an option.
- smashed 1y ago
  It uses pgvector extension for search (?) so it's not as easy as changing the db engine. Using the provided docker compose file it's very manageable and the default/recommended layout keeps all data files in a single directory.
  - rovr138 1y ago
    There’s also a vector extension on SQLite. Or it could be handed off to milvus lite or something else.
    - Implicated 1y ago
      Or Redis :D
knadh 1y ago
Been self-hosting for a while. Amazing set of features and web and mobile apps work flawlessly.
andreldm 1y ago
Any opinion on why Immich instead of Photoprism? I’m considering to pick one of them for my media library and Immich not being labeled as stable scares me a bit.
- krs_ 1y ago
  Also interested in this. I've been running photoprism for several years now using their docker image and don't really have much to complain about but always open to other alternatives. One thing Immich supports which Photoprism doesn't is multiple user accounts. That doesn't really bother me too much but it's a pretty big advantage. Edit: Actually one thing I can complain a bit about is the object recognition accuracy. Face recognition I think works decently enough but objects are frequently not identified in my photos. How's Immich in this regard?
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  I tried both ~1,5 years ago, Immich won the "spouse test" as I could get my partner to use the app on her phone (with her own profile) instead of the native gallery. Photoprism didn't support profiles or have an app (back then at least, don't know about today), and I couldn't convince her of using some other gallery in the browser... I for myself liked the Photoprism GUI, but I could never get the face recognition to work well, and manually tagging people/places (or basically doing anything) on thousands of pictures was quite painful.
- gh02t 1y ago
  IIRC, Immich started as a project after Photoprism changed their licensing to restrict several features, and then picked up a ton of momentum very fast. They've pledged they won't ever pay-gate features, which isn't always a positive as those features help sustain a project long term, but they have so much community support and love that I'm not worried about that in this case. Feature wise I think they are pretty comparable (vs the paid version of Photoprism), and I like the UI of Immich slightly more. Immich also supports singe sign on via OIDC easily, which I rather appreciate so my family doesn't have to remember 10 different passwords. Regarding stability it's actually pretty reliable. I've been running it for a long time via Docker in the form of the TrueNAS plugin and have never had any issues, like ever, so I think it being marked as unstable was a bit overly cautious. I think they have also recently moved to a new phase of development that is also going to be even more stable. Even if it does break, all of your media is stored in a nicely organized directory structure on the filesystem so you're not going to lose anything.
poidos 1y ago
I would love to self-host this stuff (using Immich, or Ente) but my family's bus factor is 1 and the risk of losing all the pictures really prevents me from taking this step. Sure, maybe my wife could reach out to my techie friends but why create the problem in the first place?
- CryptoBanker 1y ago
  If you can't backup your essential local data then self hosting isn't really ever an option for you
  - poidos 1y ago
    It's not about backing up. It's about non-technical family members being able to reliably recover the data.
- kaffekaka 1y ago
  What solution are you using now? I feel the same, so I keep photos on hard drives and usb drives in different locations. I have a Restic backup at Backblaze but that is where the bus factor comes in. I don't know what would be best.
  - poidos 1y ago
    Just iCloud for now.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  The solution is packaging. My Immich server performs a nightly backup to a 2tb flash drive labelled "PHOTOS" attached to the router. My partner knows where it is and what it's for, and everyone knows how to use a flash drive.
  - poidos 1y ago
    Are you rotating flash drives and such? I would worry about something happening to me, then she goes to use the flash drive, and the data is corrupt or the drive is fried.
vr46 1y ago
Recently installed and it’s chewing through 25 years of digital photos, has been some weeks now and expecting it to take another week. But - seems great. I was prompted to do this after the death of a friend and the subsequent hunt for photos, so I’m hoping the facial recognition lives up to its billing. I don’t really like having the NAS on 24/7 but I do like the idea of having that local photo sync. Probably cheaper to start with iCloud given the costs of 20TB drives and energy prices, however.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  The facial recognition can tell my kids apart better than I can (with just the cropped face; other context makes it obvious which kid is which).
- prism56 1y ago
  How many and size?
ochronus 1y ago
I'm a happy user and supporter, it's awesome software!
InfinityByTen 1y ago
I have been looking for such a thing for so long! Since this can be too much to develop from scratch I was hoping I could use Claude or something to start off on it. I have gone for days in rage because Google photos would hog on memory and I had no folder view to know which pictures/videos were the culprit and I wouldn't get a folder view. If this works, I might spend some time working on this project, just to pay my regards.
packetlost 1y ago
I've been using immich for awhile now and it has been great!
Brajeshwar 1y ago
I’ve been testing with PikaPods and costs less than $6 a month. Been happy with it; actually, pretty happy with whatever comes to PikaPods (no affiliation). https://www.pikapods.com/apps#photo https://www.pikapods.com/apps#photo
esperent 1y ago
I would love to use Immich but I'm not into running a home server - electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay. Also I just don't want to manage the hardware. I've looked into cloud hosting. But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space. Object storage is cheap but not supported by Immich. Block storage is not cheap. I did look into s3fuse but the concensus seemed to be that lots of tiny files like thumbnails wouldn't perform well. Does anyone cloud host it? What's your solution?
- jdc0589 1y ago
  this is pretty much the situation I'm in re the storage. I'm perfectly fine running a home server, I already do, but workloads with heavy storage requirements scare me away from it. I don't want to have to think about that at home, and the cost of pretty much anything other than object storage in the cloud is prohibitive, and as you mentioned obj store support is non-existent or hacky and slow with most of these products.
  - j45 1y ago
    Self-hosting seems easiest to think about as a home appliance. Out of compute, storage, database, networking, etc, which is most preferable to be just an appliance? It's pretty reasonable to get reliable storage self-hosted without the headache. If a big setup isn't needed, it's reasonably attractive to set up your own storage with reasonable power draw, which can be kept up with more reasonable UPS'. Just because one can build and run a storage array on their own, doesn't mean it would be the best allcoation of their ongoing attention to maintain and be on call for a daycare for hard drives. If seamless storage as good (and sometimes better) than a cloud is the minimum, it has to be something trustable, and run like a reliable home appliance needing minimum maintenance. Lots of folk choose NAS enclosures that have raid mirroring and hot-swap drives built in quite inexpensively using things like Synology or QNAPs. The web admin interfaces on them are reasonable, and it's trivial to poke along with a youtube video to setup a RAID 5-10, and send email notifications how you like if it wanted to bring something to your attention. Other things that become way more valuable over the years: - NAS can be configured to backup offsite to the cloud backup of your choice, or another NAS. I know folks running them for 5-10 years and never think about it. Decent NAS with appropriate drives, secured of course. Some people even mail the enclosure to a datacenter and have them plug it in and keep it online. - If you get a reasonably basic NAS with an intel Celeron CPU, power usage can remain low, but ram can be upgraded on it to run a few services as needed on it, both directly, and as docker images. It's pretty wild. - If you do consider it, my recommendation is to pick one that has 2 extra drive slots than you need, and start from there. People who buy two bays can outgrow them quick, plus it's only a mirrored raid between two drives. Raid 5 and higher is great, if one drive is starting to have issues, you can just swap it while it's all running and the storage will heal. Hope that helps. Having data close to crunch can be valuable.
ls-a 1y ago
I can't get past the name. So cringe makes me not want to come near it
- semiquaver 1y ago
  Perhaps I’m missing something. What makes the name cringe?
- hereme888 1y ago
  Download the repo, open in VS Code, and do a search + replace from "Immich", as well as the "Immich" part of file names to whatever you want. Then, go into the design folder of the repo and replace all the images with whatever logo names you want.
  - ls-a 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - hereme888 1y ago
      I'm not a formally trained programmer, so I won't pretend to know better than Immich's engineering team. But feel free to create pull requests to improve it. You're free to choose any other software.
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      Wild assumption. There are lots of alternatives in the space and immich stands out among them at near feature-parity to google and apple photos while being super easy to self host.
    - toomim 1y ago
      On the contrary, I have seen tons of good choices after getting past the choice in name.
  - rolymath 1y ago
    And then apply to ycombinator.
greysonp 1y ago
Absolutely love immich. Prior to the release of the new "Beta timeline", it was difficult to recommend without reservation, because there were a lot of performance issues on Android, and syncing was just non-functional on my wife's iPhone. However, since enabling the beta timeline, the app is basically perfect now. I've been running it for months without issue, and having a first-class CLI means I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup. Big thanks to the immich team!
- rclkrtrzckr 1y ago
  CLI? Didn't even know that! A doc pointer would be awesome
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface/ https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface/
- ashenke 1y ago
  Thank you for this, I updated some time ago but never really switched. Night and day difference ! The other thing I'm waiting for is search results ordered by date instead of relevance. When I'm searching for a picture in particular I know was taken 3 years ago, and search keywords to find it, it's impossible to find this specific photo because the ordering seem random
- dpcx 1y ago
  The only problem I've had with it so far is that the date on photos coming from icloud is when they were uploaded, not the date that the photo was created or even the date that I've marked the photo as being taken. Makes seeing photos from 90 years ago kind of strange.
  - mnmalst 1y ago
    Does iCloud by any chance strip the exif data from the photos, so the real date is simply not available anymore?
lazzurs 1y ago
Fantastic software, I am surprise more people don't use it.
palla89 1y ago
I'm considering a migration from Synology Photos to this, is this supported in some way or I should transfer / reimport everything manually?
- azuanrb 1y ago
  I've migrated from Synology Photos. It's pretty seamless, since Immich now supports External Library. I use Docker Compose in Synology, so basically all I have to do is just mount existing Synology Photos folders to Immich. Works fine, no issue so far. However, I'm back to Synology Photos. I'm using Immich iOS apps. The upload/syncing is noticeably a lot slower than Synology. Gave it a few months, but it's not getting any better. Moved back to Synology Photos for now.
LetMeLogin 1y ago
I love immich!
NoboruWataya 1y ago
I have been using Nextcloud Photos because I already use Nextcloud to store all my photos. I have always been interested in Immich though. NC Photos has pretty much all the features I need (except maybe face recognition) but the performance isn't great. Has anyone switched from NC Photos -> Immich and have any thoughts on the process (and how well Immich plays with NC if I keep my photos stored there)?
- hamdingers 1y ago
  Immich edges it out on people recognition and context search but otherwise similar in features. The Immich interface is much more like Google Photos and I find that to be better. Regardless of where you're coming from I recommend migrating to Immich by "uploading" all your photos using the immich cli, and letting it manage the library.
- eptcyka 1y ago
  Nextcloud was dog slow for me, Immich just flies. And the client app is far better both on iOS and Android. Nextcloud never worked for my SO, Immich just does.
- hagbard_c 1y ago
  I switched from Nextcloud Photos to Nextcloud Memories to Immich. I submitted a patch [1] to Immich to make it possible to directly login via (Nextcloud) OIDC which, in combination with the Nextcloud 'External Sites' app makes it possible to integrate Immich directly into Nextcloud. I do not automatically add all photo and video material synced to Nextcloud into Immich yet, relying on a set of scripts I've been using for years to maintain all our media in a single repository. It should be possible to either use Nextcloud to sync media which is then shown in Immich through its 'External Libraries' feature (this is how I use it) as well as to use Immich to sync media and access it that way. No matter how it is used Immich can be integrated to be as easily accessible as any 'native' Nextcloud app. Performance is far better than Nextcloud Memories, this was my main reason for moving away from the latter. The search and facial recognition features in Immich do not require a server with GPU access, performance is fine on my by now rather aged DL380 G7. [1] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18763/commits/fe7afd71f5573facc924af257467bdc84f810613 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18763/commits/fe7a...
aanet 1y ago
Previously: 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40772809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40772809 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42984617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42984617 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537564 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731179
- dang 1y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Immich Progress Update [July 2024] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859102 - July 2024 (5 comments) Immich – Self-hosted photo and video management solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 - June 2024 (5 comments) AGPL Self-hosted photo and video management solution (Docker + iOS/Android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030151 - April 2024 (3 comments) Immich is changing its license from MIT to AGPLv3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336890 - Feb 2024 (46 comments) Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673224 - July 2023 (344 comments) Immich: Self-hosted photos and videos backup for Android and iOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)
codethief 1y ago
I recently looked into both Immich and Ente.io for syncing and also sharing photos since 1) Syncthing has been rather unreliable for me in the last year, 2) my photo library has become too big to just sync it across devices, 3) I was never really happy with NextCloud for sharing photos. Immich looked really nice but in the end I went with Ente because of its E2E encryption. So far I'm really happy!
- wonger_ 1y ago
  How has syncthing been unreliable for you? Curious as I was going to start using it more. Was it something about large files or many files?
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    Not op but personally I don’t really trust syncthing on iOS. Something about how Möbius sync works on the apple OS makes it so occasionally my folders disappear locally on my phone, triggering a deletion on all other devices.
  - codethief 1y ago
    It used to work very reliably for many years and I used it for pretty much everything (photos, ebooks, notes, Signal backups, …). However, last fall it simply stopped syncing (traffic at 0 B/s) in 90% of the cases, no matter the file size, even though my devices see each other and Syncthing recognizes that files are out of sync. I have already reset and reinstalled Syncthing various times – no idea what's going on. My gut feeling says that it's the Android client[0], but I'll have to find the time to look into this more closely. [0]: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android
    - gausswho 1y ago
      I've also encountered this periodically and the way I've gotten things back to normal was to 'reset database' in Syncthing-Fork's troubleshooting settings. Is that what you meant by reset?
avinassh 1y ago
any opinion on how does this compare with ente?
esel2k 1y ago
Its great however I still think they could simplify usage: - admin vs config menu - I always search in both - mounted folders vs backup folders: I would welcome a Simple Filter in the main view as I find the folder view ugly - Initial setup with all the jobs a big complicated
cyp0633 1y ago
Really great job, been happy so far. Would be better if the text is searchable via OCR.
- clueless 1y ago
  ah it's not? that would be a blocker for me
  - lucketone 1y ago
    We truly live in the future already, where OCR is a normal expectation. (And possible)
prism56 1y ago
I run a homeserver and self host applications (freshrss, linkding). I just don't understand the security enough to trust my photos. I've gone with Ente.io. Their 3 tiered backup and my local backup should be good enough. The other issue is my family use my account and don't want to be in charge if my backups fail. I do love what immich is doing though and would love to run it.
Bombthecat 1y ago
Just wish it could compress pictures, is there an alternative which compresses pictures?
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  I'd really like to build a bolt-on to immich that makes calls to imagemagick just to do simple stuff like rotate and compress, there's a ton of forks tho there must be someone who's thrown in one of those web editor suites
- globular-toast 1y ago
  Are cameras that don't support compression common?
yboris 1y ago
Humbly sharing my own project: Video Hub App which lets you browse your videos in an elegant infinite scroll gallery with various ways of searching, filtering, and tagging. Only local - nothing goes online with my app. https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ and it's open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- atentaten 1y ago
  Looks nice. Does this allow the export of the organizational and meta data?
  - yboris 1y ago
    The "hub" or database / save file has extension `.vha2` but it's a simple text JSON with this format: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfaces/final-object.interface.ts#L17 https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfac...
    - atentaten 1y ago
      Cool. Why not an embedded player, it would make browsing much faster than opening opening up the default system player?
      - yboris 1y ago
        Variety of reasons, not all fitting everyone. For my preference I like the minimalist MPC-BE interface at full screen on a separate monitor; others might prefer GridPlayer or something else. I feel like external player gives everyone the customization they prefer. Embedded player would require making a tremendous number of design options: where does it reside in the interface, what does it cover up when open? and if it can pop out as a separate window, what value does it bring over an external player?
joob123 1y ago
If you're not looking to self host immich, try PixelUnion.eu
joob123 1y ago
[dead]
xchip 1y ago
Loving Immich
rlpb 1y ago
I would love to give this a try but its software supply chain story seems like a car crash, with dependency bumps needed every few days: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/package.json https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/pac... I'm keen to use it as soon as the dependency story is mature (eg. it is packaged in Debian). This doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. I'm sure many people won't care about this. But for me, it's a measure of quality. I expect to be able to deploy and not worry about it, except for security updates, for at least a couple of years, preferably more. Constantly moving dependencies spidering out to a multitude of other projects, and Docker Compose, provide no such confidence. Edit: Ironically, just after posting that I came across this, which I think proves why my concern is warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657 Debian isn't immune to this, but it's much harder for such an attack to be successful when dependencies aren't constantly changing.
- dalenw 1y ago
  To be fair, there’s a massive banner on their front page warning users it’s in beta. Until they settle on a proper release it’ll continue to be a bit chaotic. All software development is like that.
  - izacus 1y ago
    This looks like one of those projects that will never settle and have a stable slower release cycle.
    - fivestones 1y ago
      I don’t think so. They are steadily approaching their defined and published goals for stable release. I’m guessing it will come this year.
    - rhizome 1y ago
      v0.46.4_p3
- deleted 1y ago
lbrito 1y ago
Google Photo's sneakily imposed storage limitations a few years ago, after a long time advertising "unlimited" storage for standard quality photos. The constant bitching that I was almost out of space, and the wasted time in an effort to free up space, were what pushed me to finally look for a self hosted solution. I've been very pleased using immich for about a year now.
kevinsync 1y ago
Immich is fantastic. I'm itching to reply but not 100% sure what I want to say, I've got like a bunch of immediate, parallel thought processes about it. 1. I've got 25 years of photos and video that I originally organized by folder (date + title of contents) but got very unwieldy once my wife and I both got smartphones back in mid-late-00's -- this archive has lived on external HDDs (spinning disk) and copied to new ones as capacities increased. In early-mid 2010's I got 2TB with Google and uploaded to Google Photos; it was great, but neither of us ever really utilized it, so I was just paying for cloud backup. 2. I am old-ish, have no concept of "home lab" (because everybody who had one or more computers and messed around with computers basically had what's now called home lab), and tend to keep/repurpose tech that goes out of service -- I've always hosted where it was appropriate (home, colo, cloud, whatever), and always have run many devices in a closet. Given the ~1TB of personal media, it was inevitable that I'd want some kind of self-run solution if only for speed + physical access. 3. I liked Google Photos interface; getting out of it was impossible. Add in 15+ years of unorganized iPhone photo/video backups (pulled out via iExplorer and other apps) in real folders on a real hard drive, and it really was a godsend in starting with a "normal" (yet dysfunctional) archive of original content. Once I set up Immich, I was able to upload all of it and at the bare minimum have a year/month-organized archive of stuff, written to an enterprise HDD (while keeping the old source hard drive(s)). The iOS app is pretty good (way more performant now with the beta timeline) and the CLI + API are great. 4. I have an Ubuntu server in the dusty closet; decent little piece of crap 8-core / 32gb that runs some websites and services. That's where I installed a refurb 12TB drive and Immich. I had an HP Z420 with 128gb ram that was my workstation for a few years, I upgraded to a Z640 dual-xeon with 256gb, and just had the old stuff sitting around -- I installed TrueNAS on that and threw in a bunch of cheap Ironwolf drives, set up a ZFS pool, run Immich on the Ubuntu box and then Syncthing all of it to the NAS for duplication. I recognize that having a bunch of equipment around is a luxury and a privilege, but I'm also a cheap POS and buy everything used/off-lease/refurbished/eBay/etc, and reuse what I can as it gets upgraded. That said, you can get massive local storage and compute if you look around, be patient, and don't impulse-buy. 5. Since Immich predated the NAS and I'm still running it on the Ubuntu box versus in a TrueNAS container, upgrades are less turnkey; for instance, I let mine sit idle from 1.29x to 1.41x, and there were three breaking upgrades in between. It took some fiddling and staggered upgrading on command line to get from where I was all the way to latest; I experienced no data loss though, everything moved over, but it wasn't one-click/one-command. Syncthing backups from machine A to B aren't exactly invisible either, because if A shits the bed it would probably corrupt B, and even if it didn't, while I do have the files duplicated, I'd have to more or less replicate the original install and copy the files from B->A to get the interface running again. 6. The mobile app + features are very seamless and good at this point; my wife hates computers but can find what she needs on her phone super easily. And the beta timeline is very performant with regards to handling a quarter million photos and videos. I haven't fully vetted the latest app-initiated from-phone automated backups, but did notice mine were flowing from my phone to server without even realizing it. That helps a LOT with the inevitable couple-times-a-decade phone upgrade since the main "backup bottleneck" is getting all that personal media out of there. The rest just goes easily with iCloud backups and device-to-device restorations. 7. I don't back any of this up to cloud; I thought about maybe Backblaze or something, but haven't pulled the trigger on anything. Syncing to and restoring from sounds like a nightmare. Since 1998 I think I've only had 2 or 3 drives actually die on me; one was recently (the NOT important one) which prompted the TrueNAS box. I ended up with multiple 2xMIRROR pairs striped in a VDEV pool and feel pretty OK about that for now, which the Immich archive also syncs to. End of the day, anything is better than being imprisoned by Google Photos or iCloud Photos. 8. I also don't expose any of this stuff to the internet; outside of the home network, we have to VPN in to get access. Also don't have external contributors or anything. YMMV because I know a lot of people like to share out to family, or set extended family up to archive with them. End of the day, fiddly upgrade annoyances aside, it's the only Franken-solution I've found thus far that gives easy access to a giant archive, and spreads itself out enough to where I'm not terrified of losing everything. Really well-done stuff!
nhumrich 1y ago
I have a raspi sitting idle and would love to use it to run this! What are common solutions for backups? I would hate to lose all my photos. Is buying a Synology the only option?
- azuanrb 1y ago
  In my case, all photos are stored in Synology, then run nightly backup to Backblaze.
- tracker1 1y ago
  There's lots of other options... I'm not sure I could recommend Synology these days as they've started to vendor lock to only their drives, etc. You could get a NAS from TerraMaster and swap the OS for TruNAS Scale or Unraid. They're relatively reasonable for the hardware, you can also DIY the hardware but that brings in other issues. Got an F4-424 Pro for a backup NAS myself. Worth noting a few big drives will cost you more than the other hardware though. 12TB was the pricing sweet spot when I got mine. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPPD51B9?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPPD51B9?th=1
Kodiack 1y ago
I set up Immich last week and I absolutely love it. Docker is my "happy place" and I found the setup pretty straightforward, though it does have some rough edges that I anticipate will be sorted out as the project continues to mature. I showed Immich to my partner and they loved it so much that we've ordered significantly more storage for the server to accommodate it. We're currently using both Google Photos and OneDrive, but with this we'll be ditching OneDrive and filling that niche with Immich (as well as expanded network storage in general). The website and documentation is super clear about not using it as the only source of photos. This is why we'll keep using Google Photos, and why I'll also be backing up Immich and portions of the network storage to B2 via restic. I've used this snapshotting pattern for my general server data for years, and it's even saved me a couple of times. Backups are something you hope to never need to use, but boy are they satisfying when you do need to use them and have them set up properly!
Rhubarrbb 1y ago
I use immich every day and I'm a big fan of it, but the search feature is dismal and still falls short of any other major image hosting provider: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/8377 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/8377 The way that semantic search works, they don't cap a relevance score (since it's all relative), and they don't allow you to sort through some kind of time index either.
QuantumNoodle 1y ago
Years ago I've passed on Immich because it was "prone to breakage" and went with a directory organization and syncthing for syncing. I still see immich doesn't have a stable release which is a bummer, although people report it is quite stable. I'm glad I went with the organization method I did. I do a lot more pruning of photos and less hoarding. I actually am able to view photos without getting "burnt out".
ropable 1y ago
A review from having used this project seriously for three months (self-hosted on a small NAS device, deployed/updated via Docker Compose): it's great. The web application is stable and very configurable (though ML performance will depend on the host). The Android web app is excellent, and a drop-in replacement for Google Photos. I'm still running the two side-by-side until they get to a stable release, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this as a self-hosted solution.
rkagerer 1y ago
Is there any reason tagging isn't supported in the mobile app? Also, the first two links Documentation and About both point to the same place.
MrContent04 1y ago
Immich looks like the first real alternative to Google Photos that doesn’t feel like a toy project. For a lot of us, self-hosting isn’t just about privacy — it’s about not being locked out of 10+ years of memories if a company decides to pivot or shut down.
charles_f 1y ago
I had been on Flickr for 15y for personal photos hosting, and switched to immich a little over 2y ago, no looking back. The feature set is nice, and goes the right direction. A project I'm happy to support.

565 points by rzk 1y ago

I have terabytes of iphone photos/videos accumulated over the years. Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries so I’ve been splitting them by year which is fine for archiving but horrible for actually browsing photos. Immich has been absolutely awesome for this — I can finally look at all my pictures from any year from anywhere in the world. I’m very happy and hope the creators find a way to sustainably finance the project. The upload feature in the mobile app is not a 1 to 1 replacement of apple photos import so i still do that via apple photos, but that’s something I can live with.

Dennip 1y ago
For a while I was running a windows VM with the iCloud for windows utility that syncs your photos to a folder on your windows PC, iirc it worker reasonably well as an 'automated' sync solution. (under the surface the folder was a share on my NAS, which in turn fed into a separate immich instance)
dsego 1y ago
> Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries Some would say it's deliberately made to keep the library cluttered so you have to pay more for cloud storage. Why Are Our Photo Libraries Such a MESS? (Ben Vallack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYeVWyNxaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYeVWyNxaY

sanex 1y ago

I was hoping we'd have immich stable earlier in 2025, now it's starting to look like maybe 2026 but they haven't pushed it on the roadmap so I'm holding out hope.

tbabej 1y ago
Immich is extremely stable even if not labeled as such. My personal experience is zero maintenance (other than updating docker container) since deployment several years ago.
- sanex 1y ago
  I went through one upgrade a year or so ago that forced me to redo my backup so I'm a little shy of going all in again until they say stable.
  - gedy 1y ago
    This sounds a bit like my experience with Home Assistant, it's very stable as long as I don't frequently update it. If I install every update I've frequently messed up my installation/config.
    - smt88 1y ago
      > If I install every update I've frequently messed up my installation/config. I've had it running for a year and have fearlessly and immediately updated. Never messed anything up, somewhat remarkably.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Stability also implies that we don’t have to update our server version every couple of days/weeks because otherwise the mobile app stops working. I’m ok upgrading but it gets old wondering why the photos aren’t showing up and then realizing that it’s because the versions are out of sync and the mobile app just refuses to talk to the server.
  - kevincox 1y ago
    Yeah, short compatibility ranges between the app and sever is one of my biggest pain points right now.

mschild 1y ago

Highly recommend [0]selfh.st if you are looking for software to run locally. Its a maintained directory for open and closed source software. [0] https://selfh.st/apps/ https://selfh.st/apps/

atentaten 1y ago
The colors of the select box text (Tags, Alternatives, Sort, Search) are the same (or very close) color as the background making them unreadable.
- brovonov 1y ago
  I think that has fixed, they appear as two contrasting colors for me.
oceanhaiyang 1y ago
Don’t support their fake use of RSS

righthand 1y ago

I just started looking into Ente which works very well but I don’t like 100MB Dart chromium app (I may build my own native frontend in iced.rs). However I’m wondering how Immich compares it seems less interested in the encryption security and sharing aspects and more heavy on the image editor aspect. Both are selfhostable. So it maybe an effort to migrate one day.

denysvitali 1y ago
Immich uses Flutter as well, fyi
- righthand 1y ago
  There’s no escape. People just gotta write Javascript apps when we could have none.
  - fngjdflmdflg 1y ago
    Flutter does not use JavaScript, although it can compile to JavaScript. It also does not use chromium. I'm not sure why ente is 300MB but that is not standard for a Flutter app.
jazzyjackson 1y ago
Immich isn't an editor at all, I don't think it can even rotate an image 90 degrees. It's very focused on having multiple users upload photos and create shared albums (public or just to other users). Doesn't do any encryption at all tho.
- righthand 1y ago
  Perhaps I’m confusing it with another self host-able solution then.

shadowpho 1y ago

Been running it and it’s a beauty! Runs great on a weak-ish mini pc with pictures via nfs on a NAS

sciencesama 1y ago

Can we make it into an app ?? For windows and mac like click and install ? That can scan all the folders and do all its stuff !??

dpcx 1y ago
macOS on arm, you can download the ios app and install it. That's what I did to import my wife's photos.

N-Krause 1y ago

Runs on a Pi4 in a cabinet with a lot of other self hosted stuff. Data is stored on a NAS. Performance on the Pi4 isn't the greatest, but it works without any annoyance. It has been hosting my SO's and my photos for a few months, the transition from Google Photos was pretty easy and it is almost a drop in replacement. I love it. Make sure to checkout https://github.com/simulot/immich-go https://github.com/simulot/immich-go, it was a great help migrating my Google Takeout to Immich.

rustyminnow 1y ago
How do you expose the service for your SO when away from home? Do you use tailscale/cloudflare tunnel/vpn? public port on your router? I've been trying tailscale for myself, but there's a hair more friction than my SO would accept.
- conqrr 1y ago
  Not op, but a combination of tailscale and a public VM is my setup for this. VM from oracle is free btw.
- cuu508 1y ago
  Not op, I use cloudflare tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports "local" and "external" connection settings, so it can connect to the Immich instance directly when on home wifi, and use the tunnel when out and about.
- close04 1y ago
  I use Tailscale for this, always connected and Immich pointing at the TS IP. I haven’t yet made the jump to full syncing, so I have a manually curated library of photos that I access anywhere but I am planning on starting to test this feature soon (I take a lot of junk throwaway photos with the phone and don’t want to sync everything). I’ll have to see how it best works for me. But Immich is a great app, minimal to no fuss setting it up in a container on my NAS. My only potentially unfounded concern is when I upgrade the images. They changed the different component containers images over time, sometime with breaking changes. So I always half expect that an upgrade will screw up the setup and I’ll have to start from scratch with the indexing.

javipas 1y ago

I've been using it for a couple of years and I find absolutely stellar. I wrote the (quite long) of my process to find the perfect alternative (for me) to Google Photos, so in case anyone's interested https://medium.com/@javipas/thats-how-i-ve-replaced-google-photos-0f5723719a7d https://medium.com/@javipas/thats-how-i-ve-replaced-google-p...

Liftyee 1y ago

This serves as a great reminder for me to set up Immich when I get time, and a reason/excuse to purchase a better GPU. I have been uneasy with my dependence on Google for a while now. [EDIT]: the following was intended as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45168333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45168333 I understand the author's point against the perceived complexity of 1-5 star rating systems, but it's worthy of note that star ratings are extremely common (ubiquitous?) in more advanced photo management/editing software such as Darktable and Lightroom. As a photographer, I see why the feature might have been included.

aidenn0 1y ago
Does Immich have features that need a high-end GPU? I hosted it on a machine with a 1050Ti, and see others in this comment section mentioning using a RPi.
- LeFantome 1y ago
  Mine is running as a container on an old Mac Pro 2013 (running Proxmox). My GPU is not even as good as yours. It runs great. The “beta timeline” required hashing that took forever but this was on my wife’s iPhone and nothing to do with the back-end (she has 50,000 photos). The machine-learning stuff uses the GPU. Facial recognition for example. It takes longer on low-end hardware but I am not sure why that is a problem.
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  It runs great in a container on my synology NAS which has no GPU at all.
- tracker1 1y ago
  The image categorization can use GPU acceleration, many seem to be noting it runs well enough on CPU mode even on modest hardware, but importing say hundreds of gigs may take longer for classification (ingress) steps.

nullify88 1y ago

I just wish it didn't need Postgres and SQLite was an option.

smashed 1y ago
It uses pgvector extension for search (?) so it's not as easy as changing the db engine. Using the provided docker compose file it's very manageable and the default/recommended layout keeps all data files in a single directory.
- rovr138 1y ago
  There’s also a vector extension on SQLite. Or it could be handed off to milvus lite or something else.
  - Implicated 1y ago
    Or Redis :D

knadh 1y ago

Been self-hosting for a while. Amazing set of features and web and mobile apps work flawlessly.

andreldm 1y ago

Any opinion on why Immich instead of Photoprism? I’m considering to pick one of them for my media library and Immich not being labeled as stable scares me a bit.

krs_ 1y ago
Also interested in this. I've been running photoprism for several years now using their docker image and don't really have much to complain about but always open to other alternatives. One thing Immich supports which Photoprism doesn't is multiple user accounts. That doesn't really bother me too much but it's a pretty big advantage. Edit: Actually one thing I can complain a bit about is the object recognition accuracy. Face recognition I think works decently enough but objects are frequently not identified in my photos. How's Immich in this regard?
rickdeckard 1y ago
I tried both ~1,5 years ago, Immich won the "spouse test" as I could get my partner to use the app on her phone (with her own profile) instead of the native gallery. Photoprism didn't support profiles or have an app (back then at least, don't know about today), and I couldn't convince her of using some other gallery in the browser... I for myself liked the Photoprism GUI, but I could never get the face recognition to work well, and manually tagging people/places (or basically doing anything) on thousands of pictures was quite painful.
gh02t 1y ago
IIRC, Immich started as a project after Photoprism changed their licensing to restrict several features, and then picked up a ton of momentum very fast. They've pledged they won't ever pay-gate features, which isn't always a positive as those features help sustain a project long term, but they have so much community support and love that I'm not worried about that in this case. Feature wise I think they are pretty comparable (vs the paid version of Photoprism), and I like the UI of Immich slightly more. Immich also supports singe sign on via OIDC easily, which I rather appreciate so my family doesn't have to remember 10 different passwords. Regarding stability it's actually pretty reliable. I've been running it for a long time via Docker in the form of the TrueNAS plugin and have never had any issues, like ever, so I think it being marked as unstable was a bit overly cautious. I think they have also recently moved to a new phase of development that is also going to be even more stable. Even if it does break, all of your media is stored in a nicely organized directory structure on the filesystem so you're not going to lose anything.

poidos 1y ago

I would love to self-host this stuff (using Immich, or Ente) but my family's bus factor is 1 and the risk of losing all the pictures really prevents me from taking this step. Sure, maybe my wife could reach out to my techie friends but why create the problem in the first place?

CryptoBanker 1y ago
If you can't backup your essential local data then self hosting isn't really ever an option for you
- poidos 1y ago
  It's not about backing up. It's about non-technical family members being able to reliably recover the data.
kaffekaka 1y ago
What solution are you using now? I feel the same, so I keep photos on hard drives and usb drives in different locations. I have a Restic backup at Backblaze but that is where the bus factor comes in. I don't know what would be best.
- poidos 1y ago
  Just iCloud for now.
hamdingers 1y ago
The solution is packaging. My Immich server performs a nightly backup to a 2tb flash drive labelled "PHOTOS" attached to the router. My partner knows where it is and what it's for, and everyone knows how to use a flash drive.
- poidos 1y ago
  Are you rotating flash drives and such? I would worry about something happening to me, then she goes to use the flash drive, and the data is corrupt or the drive is fried.

vr46 1y ago

Recently installed and it’s chewing through 25 years of digital photos, has been some weeks now and expecting it to take another week. But - seems great. I was prompted to do this after the death of a friend and the subsequent hunt for photos, so I’m hoping the facial recognition lives up to its billing. I don’t really like having the NAS on 24/7 but I do like the idea of having that local photo sync. Probably cheaper to start with iCloud given the costs of 20TB drives and energy prices, however.

aidenn0 1y ago
The facial recognition can tell my kids apart better than I can (with just the cropped face; other context makes it obvious which kid is which).
prism56 1y ago
How many and size?

ochronus 1y ago

I'm a happy user and supporter, it's awesome software!

InfinityByTen 1y ago

I have been looking for such a thing for so long! Since this can be too much to develop from scratch I was hoping I could use Claude or something to start off on it. I have gone for days in rage because Google photos would hog on memory and I had no folder view to know which pictures/videos were the culprit and I wouldn't get a folder view. If this works, I might spend some time working on this project, just to pay my regards.

packetlost 1y ago

I've been using immich for awhile now and it has been great!

Brajeshwar 1y ago

I’ve been testing with PikaPods and costs less than $6 a month. Been happy with it; actually, pretty happy with whatever comes to PikaPods (no affiliation). https://www.pikapods.com/apps#photo https://www.pikapods.com/apps#photo

esperent 1y ago

I would love to use Immich but I'm not into running a home server - electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay. Also I just don't want to manage the hardware. I've looked into cloud hosting. But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space. Object storage is cheap but not supported by Immich. Block storage is not cheap. I did look into s3fuse but the concensus seemed to be that lots of tiny files like thumbnails wouldn't perform well. Does anyone cloud host it? What's your solution?

jdc0589 1y ago
this is pretty much the situation I'm in re the storage. I'm perfectly fine running a home server, I already do, but workloads with heavy storage requirements scare me away from it. I don't want to have to think about that at home, and the cost of pretty much anything other than object storage in the cloud is prohibitive, and as you mentioned obj store support is non-existent or hacky and slow with most of these products.
- j45 1y ago
  Self-hosting seems easiest to think about as a home appliance. Out of compute, storage, database, networking, etc, which is most preferable to be just an appliance? It's pretty reasonable to get reliable storage self-hosted without the headache. If a big setup isn't needed, it's reasonably attractive to set up your own storage with reasonable power draw, which can be kept up with more reasonable UPS'. Just because one can build and run a storage array on their own, doesn't mean it would be the best allcoation of their ongoing attention to maintain and be on call for a daycare for hard drives. If seamless storage as good (and sometimes better) than a cloud is the minimum, it has to be something trustable, and run like a reliable home appliance needing minimum maintenance. Lots of folk choose NAS enclosures that have raid mirroring and hot-swap drives built in quite inexpensively using things like Synology or QNAPs. The web admin interfaces on them are reasonable, and it's trivial to poke along with a youtube video to setup a RAID 5-10, and send email notifications how you like if it wanted to bring something to your attention. Other things that become way more valuable over the years: - NAS can be configured to backup offsite to the cloud backup of your choice, or another NAS. I know folks running them for 5-10 years and never think about it. Decent NAS with appropriate drives, secured of course. Some people even mail the enclosure to a datacenter and have them plug it in and keep it online. - If you get a reasonably basic NAS with an intel Celeron CPU, power usage can remain low, but ram can be upgraded on it to run a few services as needed on it, both directly, and as docker images. It's pretty wild. - If you do consider it, my recommendation is to pick one that has 2 extra drive slots than you need, and start from there. People who buy two bays can outgrow them quick, plus it's only a mirrored raid between two drives. Raid 5 and higher is great, if one drive is starting to have issues, you can just swap it while it's all running and the storage will heal. Hope that helps. Having data close to crunch can be valuable.

ls-a 1y ago

I can't get past the name. So cringe makes me not want to come near it

semiquaver 1y ago
Perhaps I’m missing something. What makes the name cringe?
hereme888 1y ago
Download the repo, open in VS Code, and do a search + replace from "Immich", as well as the "Immich" part of file names to whatever you want. Then, go into the design folder of the repo and replace all the images with whatever logo names you want.
- ls-a 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - hereme888 1y ago
    I'm not a formally trained programmer, so I won't pretend to know better than Immich's engineering team. But feel free to create pull requests to improve it. You're free to choose any other software.
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    Wild assumption. There are lots of alternatives in the space and immich stands out among them at near feature-parity to google and apple photos while being super easy to self host.
  - toomim 1y ago
    On the contrary, I have seen tons of good choices after getting past the choice in name.
- rolymath 1y ago
  And then apply to ycombinator.

greysonp 1y ago

Absolutely love immich. Prior to the release of the new "Beta timeline", it was difficult to recommend without reservation, because there were a lot of performance issues on Android, and syncing was just non-functional on my wife's iPhone. However, since enabling the beta timeline, the app is basically perfect now. I've been running it for months without issue, and having a first-class CLI means I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup. Big thanks to the immich team!

rclkrtrzckr 1y ago
CLI? Didn't even know that! A doc pointer would be awesome
- barbazoo 1y ago
  https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface/ https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface/
ashenke 1y ago
Thank you for this, I updated some time ago but never really switched. Night and day difference ! The other thing I'm waiting for is search results ordered by date instead of relevance. When I'm searching for a picture in particular I know was taken 3 years ago, and search keywords to find it, it's impossible to find this specific photo because the ordering seem random
dpcx 1y ago
The only problem I've had with it so far is that the date on photos coming from icloud is when they were uploaded, not the date that the photo was created or even the date that I've marked the photo as being taken. Makes seeing photos from 90 years ago kind of strange.
- mnmalst 1y ago
  Does iCloud by any chance strip the exif data from the photos, so the real date is simply not available anymore?

lazzurs 1y ago

Fantastic software, I am surprise more people don't use it.

palla89 1y ago

I'm considering a migration from Synology Photos to this, is this supported in some way or I should transfer / reimport everything manually?

azuanrb 1y ago
I've migrated from Synology Photos. It's pretty seamless, since Immich now supports External Library. I use Docker Compose in Synology, so basically all I have to do is just mount existing Synology Photos folders to Immich. Works fine, no issue so far. However, I'm back to Synology Photos. I'm using Immich iOS apps. The upload/syncing is noticeably a lot slower than Synology. Gave it a few months, but it's not getting any better. Moved back to Synology Photos for now.

LetMeLogin 1y ago

I love immich!

NoboruWataya 1y ago

I have been using Nextcloud Photos because I already use Nextcloud to store all my photos. I have always been interested in Immich though. NC Photos has pretty much all the features I need (except maybe face recognition) but the performance isn't great. Has anyone switched from NC Photos -> Immich and have any thoughts on the process (and how well Immich plays with NC if I keep my photos stored there)?

hamdingers 1y ago
Immich edges it out on people recognition and context search but otherwise similar in features. The Immich interface is much more like Google Photos and I find that to be better. Regardless of where you're coming from I recommend migrating to Immich by "uploading" all your photos using the immich cli, and letting it manage the library.
eptcyka 1y ago
Nextcloud was dog slow for me, Immich just flies. And the client app is far better both on iOS and Android. Nextcloud never worked for my SO, Immich just does.
hagbard_c 1y ago
I switched from Nextcloud Photos to Nextcloud Memories to Immich. I submitted a patch [1] to Immich to make it possible to directly login via (Nextcloud) OIDC which, in combination with the Nextcloud 'External Sites' app makes it possible to integrate Immich directly into Nextcloud. I do not automatically add all photo and video material synced to Nextcloud into Immich yet, relying on a set of scripts I've been using for years to maintain all our media in a single repository. It should be possible to either use Nextcloud to sync media which is then shown in Immich through its 'External Libraries' feature (this is how I use it) as well as to use Immich to sync media and access it that way. No matter how it is used Immich can be integrated to be as easily accessible as any 'native' Nextcloud app. Performance is far better than Nextcloud Memories, this was my main reason for moving away from the latter. The search and facial recognition features in Immich do not require a server with GPU access, performance is fine on my by now rather aged DL380 G7. [1] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18763/commits/fe7afd71f5573facc924af257467bdc84f810613 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18763/commits/fe7a...

aanet 1y ago

Previously: 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40772809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40772809 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42984617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42984617 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537564 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731179

dang 1y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Immich Progress Update [July 2024] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859102 - July 2024 (5 comments) Immich – Self-hosted photo and video management solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 - June 2024 (5 comments) AGPL Self-hosted photo and video management solution (Docker + iOS/Android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030151 - April 2024 (3 comments) Immich is changing its license from MIT to AGPLv3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336890 - Feb 2024 (46 comments) Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673224 - July 2023 (344 comments) Immich: Self-hosted photos and videos backup for Android and iOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)

codethief 1y ago

I recently looked into both Immich and Ente.io for syncing and also sharing photos since 1) Syncthing has been rather unreliable for me in the last year, 2) my photo library has become too big to just sync it across devices, 3) I was never really happy with NextCloud for sharing photos. Immich looked really nice but in the end I went with Ente because of its E2E encryption. So far I'm really happy!

wonger_ 1y ago
How has syncthing been unreliable for you? Curious as I was going to start using it more. Was it something about large files or many files?
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Not op but personally I don’t really trust syncthing on iOS. Something about how Möbius sync works on the apple OS makes it so occasionally my folders disappear locally on my phone, triggering a deletion on all other devices.
- codethief 1y ago
  It used to work very reliably for many years and I used it for pretty much everything (photos, ebooks, notes, Signal backups, …). However, last fall it simply stopped syncing (traffic at 0 B/s) in 90% of the cases, no matter the file size, even though my devices see each other and Syncthing recognizes that files are out of sync. I have already reset and reinstalled Syncthing various times – no idea what's going on. My gut feeling says that it's the Android client[0], but I'll have to find the time to look into this more closely. [0]: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android
  - gausswho 1y ago
    I've also encountered this periodically and the way I've gotten things back to normal was to 'reset database' in Syncthing-Fork's troubleshooting settings. Is that what you meant by reset?

avinassh 1y ago

any opinion on how does this compare with ente?

esel2k 1y ago

Its great however I still think they could simplify usage: - admin vs config menu - I always search in both - mounted folders vs backup folders: I would welcome a Simple Filter in the main view as I find the folder view ugly - Initial setup with all the jobs a big complicated

cyp0633 1y ago

Really great job, been happy so far. Would be better if the text is searchable via OCR.

clueless 1y ago
ah it's not? that would be a blocker for me
- lucketone 1y ago
  We truly live in the future already, where OCR is a normal expectation. (And possible)

prism56 1y ago

I run a homeserver and self host applications (freshrss, linkding). I just don't understand the security enough to trust my photos. I've gone with Ente.io. Their 3 tiered backup and my local backup should be good enough. The other issue is my family use my account and don't want to be in charge if my backups fail. I do love what immich is doing though and would love to run it.

Bombthecat 1y ago

Just wish it could compress pictures, is there an alternative which compresses pictures?

jazzyjackson 1y ago
I'd really like to build a bolt-on to immich that makes calls to imagemagick just to do simple stuff like rotate and compress, there's a ton of forks tho there must be someone who's thrown in one of those web editor suites
globular-toast 1y ago
Are cameras that don't support compression common?

yboris 1y ago

Humbly sharing my own project: Video Hub App which lets you browse your videos in an elegant infinite scroll gallery with various ways of searching, filtering, and tagging. Only local - nothing goes online with my app. https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ and it's open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

atentaten 1y ago
Looks nice. Does this allow the export of the organizational and meta data?
- yboris 1y ago
  The "hub" or database / save file has extension `.vha2` but it's a simple text JSON with this format: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfaces/final-object.interface.ts#L17 https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfac...
  - atentaten 1y ago
    Cool. Why not an embedded player, it would make browsing much faster than opening opening up the default system player?
    - yboris 1y ago
      Variety of reasons, not all fitting everyone. For my preference I like the minimalist MPC-BE interface at full screen on a separate monitor; others might prefer GridPlayer or something else. I feel like external player gives everyone the customization they prefer. Embedded player would require making a tremendous number of design options: where does it reside in the interface, what does it cover up when open? and if it can pop out as a separate window, what value does it bring over an external player?

joob123 1y ago

If you're not looking to self host immich, try PixelUnion.eu

joob123 1y ago

[dead]

xchip 1y ago

Loving Immich

rlpb 1y ago

I would love to give this a try but its software supply chain story seems like a car crash, with dependency bumps needed every few days: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/package.json https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/pac... I'm keen to use it as soon as the dependency story is mature (eg. it is packaged in Debian). This doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. I'm sure many people won't care about this. But for me, it's a measure of quality. I expect to be able to deploy and not worry about it, except for security updates, for at least a couple of years, preferably more. Constantly moving dependencies spidering out to a multitude of other projects, and Docker Compose, provide no such confidence. Edit: Ironically, just after posting that I came across this, which I think proves why my concern is warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657 Debian isn't immune to this, but it's much harder for such an attack to be successful when dependencies aren't constantly changing.

dalenw 1y ago
To be fair, there’s a massive banner on their front page warning users it’s in beta. Until they settle on a proper release it’ll continue to be a bit chaotic. All software development is like that.
- izacus 1y ago
  This looks like one of those projects that will never settle and have a stable slower release cycle.
  - fivestones 1y ago
    I don’t think so. They are steadily approaching their defined and published goals for stable release. I’m guessing it will come this year.
  - rhizome 1y ago
    v0.46.4_p3
deleted 1y ago

lbrito 1y ago

Google Photo's sneakily imposed storage limitations a few years ago, after a long time advertising "unlimited" storage for standard quality photos. The constant bitching that I was almost out of space, and the wasted time in an effort to free up space, were what pushed me to finally look for a self hosted solution. I've been very pleased using immich for about a year now.

kevinsync 1y ago

Immich is fantastic. I'm itching to reply but not 100% sure what I want to say, I've got like a bunch of immediate, parallel thought processes about it. 1. I've got 25 years of photos and video that I originally organized by folder (date + title of contents) but got very unwieldy once my wife and I both got smartphones back in mid-late-00's -- this archive has lived on external HDDs (spinning disk) and copied to new ones as capacities increased. In early-mid 2010's I got 2TB with Google and uploaded to Google Photos; it was great, but neither of us ever really utilized it, so I was just paying for cloud backup. 2. I am old-ish, have no concept of "home lab" (because everybody who had one or more computers and messed around with computers basically had what's now called home lab), and tend to keep/repurpose tech that goes out of service -- I've always hosted where it was appropriate (home, colo, cloud, whatever), and always have run many devices in a closet. Given the ~1TB of personal media, it was inevitable that I'd want some kind of self-run solution if only for speed + physical access. 3. I liked Google Photos interface; getting out of it was impossible. Add in 15+ years of unorganized iPhone photo/video backups (pulled out via iExplorer and other apps) in real folders on a real hard drive, and it really was a godsend in starting with a "normal" (yet dysfunctional) archive of original content. Once I set up Immich, I was able to upload all of it and at the bare minimum have a year/month-organized archive of stuff, written to an enterprise HDD (while keeping the old source hard drive(s)). The iOS app is pretty good (way more performant now with the beta timeline) and the CLI + API are great. 4. I have an Ubuntu server in the dusty closet; decent little piece of crap 8-core / 32gb that runs some websites and services. That's where I installed a refurb 12TB drive and Immich. I had an HP Z420 with 128gb ram that was my workstation for a few years, I upgraded to a Z640 dual-xeon with 256gb, and just had the old stuff sitting around -- I installed TrueNAS on that and threw in a bunch of cheap Ironwolf drives, set up a ZFS pool, run Immich on the Ubuntu box and then Syncthing all of it to the NAS for duplication. I recognize that having a bunch of equipment around is a luxury and a privilege, but I'm also a cheap POS and buy everything used/off-lease/refurbished/eBay/etc, and reuse what I can as it gets upgraded. That said, you can get massive local storage and compute if you look around, be patient, and don't impulse-buy. 5. Since Immich predated the NAS and I'm still running it on the Ubuntu box versus in a TrueNAS container, upgrades are less turnkey; for instance, I let mine sit idle from 1.29x to 1.41x, and there were three breaking upgrades in between. It took some fiddling and staggered upgrading on command line to get from where I was all the way to latest; I experienced no data loss though, everything moved over, but it wasn't one-click/one-command. Syncthing backups from machine A to B aren't exactly invisible either, because if A shits the bed it would probably corrupt B, and even if it didn't, while I do have the files duplicated, I'd have to more or less replicate the original install and copy the files from B->A to get the interface running again. 6. The mobile app + features are very seamless and good at this point; my wife hates computers but can find what she needs on her phone super easily. And the beta timeline is very performant with regards to handling a quarter million photos and videos. I haven't fully vetted the latest app-initiated from-phone automated backups, but did notice mine were flowing from my phone to server without even realizing it. That helps a LOT with the inevitable couple-times-a-decade phone upgrade since the main "backup bottleneck" is getting all that personal media out of there. The rest just goes easily with iCloud backups and device-to-device restorations. 7. I don't back any of this up to cloud; I thought about maybe Backblaze or something, but haven't pulled the trigger on anything. Syncing to and restoring from sounds like a nightmare. Since 1998 I think I've only had 2 or 3 drives actually die on me; one was recently (the NOT important one) which prompted the TrueNAS box. I ended up with multiple 2xMIRROR pairs striped in a VDEV pool and feel pretty OK about that for now, which the Immich archive also syncs to. End of the day, anything is better than being imprisoned by Google Photos or iCloud Photos. 8. I also don't expose any of this stuff to the internet; outside of the home network, we have to VPN in to get access. Also don't have external contributors or anything. YMMV because I know a lot of people like to share out to family, or set extended family up to archive with them. End of the day, fiddly upgrade annoyances aside, it's the only Franken-solution I've found thus far that gives easy access to a giant archive, and spreads itself out enough to where I'm not terrified of losing everything. Really well-done stuff!

nhumrich 1y ago

I have a raspi sitting idle and would love to use it to run this! What are common solutions for backups? I would hate to lose all my photos. Is buying a Synology the only option?

azuanrb 1y ago
In my case, all photos are stored in Synology, then run nightly backup to Backblaze.
tracker1 1y ago
There's lots of other options... I'm not sure I could recommend Synology these days as they've started to vendor lock to only their drives, etc. You could get a NAS from TerraMaster and swap the OS for TruNAS Scale or Unraid. They're relatively reasonable for the hardware, you can also DIY the hardware but that brings in other issues. Got an F4-424 Pro for a backup NAS myself. Worth noting a few big drives will cost you more than the other hardware though. 12TB was the pricing sweet spot when I got mine. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPPD51B9?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPPD51B9?th=1

Kodiack 1y ago

I set up Immich last week and I absolutely love it. Docker is my "happy place" and I found the setup pretty straightforward, though it does have some rough edges that I anticipate will be sorted out as the project continues to mature. I showed Immich to my partner and they loved it so much that we've ordered significantly more storage for the server to accommodate it. We're currently using both Google Photos and OneDrive, but with this we'll be ditching OneDrive and filling that niche with Immich (as well as expanded network storage in general). The website and documentation is super clear about not using it as the only source of photos. This is why we'll keep using Google Photos, and why I'll also be backing up Immich and portions of the network storage to B2 via restic. I've used this snapshotting pattern for my general server data for years, and it's even saved me a couple of times. Backups are something you hope to never need to use, but boy are they satisfying when you do need to use them and have them set up properly!

Rhubarrbb 1y ago

I use immich every day and I'm a big fan of it, but the search feature is dismal and still falls short of any other major image hosting provider: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/8377 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/8377 The way that semantic search works, they don't cap a relevance score (since it's all relative), and they don't allow you to sort through some kind of time index either.

QuantumNoodle 1y ago

Years ago I've passed on Immich because it was "prone to breakage" and went with a directory organization and syncthing for syncing. I still see immich doesn't have a stable release which is a bummer, although people report it is quite stable. I'm glad I went with the organization method I did. I do a lot more pruning of photos and less hoarding. I actually am able to view photos without getting "burnt out".

ropable 1y ago

A review from having used this project seriously for three months (self-hosted on a small NAS device, deployed/updated via Docker Compose): it's great. The web application is stable and very configurable (though ML performance will depend on the host). The Android web app is excellent, and a drop-in replacement for Google Photos. I'm still running the two side-by-side until they get to a stable release, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this as a self-hosted solution.

rkagerer 1y ago

Is there any reason tagging isn't supported in the mobile app? Also, the first two links Documentation and About both point to the same place.

MrContent04 1y ago

Immich looks like the first real alternative to Google Photos that doesn’t feel like a toy project. For a lot of us, self-hosting isn’t just about privacy — it’s about not being locked out of 10+ years of memories if a company decides to pivot or shut down.

charles_f 1y ago

I had been on Flickr for 15y for personal photos hosting, and switched to immich a little over 2y ago, no looking back. The feature set is nice, and goes the right direction. A project I'm happy to support.