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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

662 points by birdculture 11mo ago

cuu508 11mo ago
I'm running Immich on NanoPi R6C (arm64, even lower idle power usage, still plenty fast for running Immich). I use Cloudflare tunnel to make it available outside the home network. I've set up two DNS names – one for accessing it directly in the local network, and and a second one that goes through the tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports internal/external connection settings – it uses the direct connection when connected to home wifi, and the tunnel when out and about. For uploading photos taken with a camera I either use immich-go (https://github.com/simulot/immich-go https://github.com/simulot/immich-go) or upload them through the web UI. There's a "publish to Immich" plugin for Adobe Lightroom which was handy, but I've moved away from using Lightroom.
- CuteDepravity 11mo ago
  Are you also facing the the 100mb upload limit when using cloudflare tunnel? Sometimes I want to upload a video from my phone will away from home but I can't and need to vpn
  - geekologist 11mo ago
    You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.
    - cuu508 11mo ago
      > I just ended up exposing my public IP. I considered doing that too. My main problem with it is privacy. Let's say I set up some sort of dynamic DNS to point foo.bar.example.org to my home IP. Then, after some family event, I share an album link (https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string) with friends and family. The album link gets shared on, and ends up on the public internet. Once somebody figures out foo.bar.example.org points to my home IP, they can look up my home IP at all times.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - geekologist 11mo ago
        It's another cost but running a reverse proxy from a VPS would solve this right?
shadowpho 11mo ago
Love Immich. Runs smoothly on an amd 4700u ($200) with minimum cpu/ram usage
- digitalDM 11mo ago
  I agree, and simple to me $200 new PC does this task just fine.
  - shadowpho 11mo ago
    Yep and it also runs 30+ more containers without a hitch! Crazy times we live in.
WD-42 11mo ago
Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. I can honestly say Immich is better in every way than Google Photos or whatever Apple calls it. The only thing is having to set it up yourself.
- ptk 11mo ago
  How does sharing an album with others work on Immich?
  - jasonjayr 11mo ago
    You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it. Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser. I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
    - cromka 11mo ago
      OK. Then you concede your security, as I can't imagine any single person self-hosting can be better at keeping their public service more secure than engineers at Google can. Especially with limited time.
      - lurking_swe 11mo ago
        I mean, if you’re confident about security best practices, have a moderate amount of networking experience, and are a seasoned web developer, it’s not too scary at all. I realize that’s a lot of prerequisites though. it’s not a fair comparison with Google because Google has a much bigger target on their back. There are millions of users of Google, so the value of hacking Google is very high. The value of hacking a random Immich instance is extremely low.
      - kristjank 11mo ago
        You definitely have a dull imagination. If the software itself is secure, containerized version of Immich behind a containerized version of nginx proxy manager is probably as secure as you can get. Also google security tends to be mainly leaning towards securing google and less towards securing google's (non paying) customers.
drekipus 11mo ago
Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project. I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do it in the moment and both have access. I would probably estimate 90% Of my photos are junk, But I want to isolate and share the 10% that are really special. My app failed, but I'm thinking about reviving it as an alternative front-end to immich, to build upon that.. But I feel like I'm the only one who wants this. Everyone else seems fine with bulk photo backup for everything.
- youainti 11mo ago
  just disable auto-upload and then manually upload the ones you want to. There is a setting to share your immich library with someone else. Between those two features, you should get something close to what you want.
  - drekipus 11mo ago
    For me one of the killer things would be to click "share" on a photo I took, and then have the immich albums show up so I can put them in that specific place as like a 3 click process. That's basically what I was building my whole app around
    - omnimus 11mo ago
      Just have immich app to sync only certain album? And add photos to that album. Seems like solved feature?
      - DrammBA 11mo ago
        I don't think he's here looking for a solution.
        11mo ago
stavros 11mo ago
I adore Immich. I set it up a while ago, and I'm finally looking at my photos again. I was previously using Nextcloud for photos, but it was such a slog to find anything that I never took or looked at photos. Immich put the joy back in photography for me, it's so easy to find anything, even with just searching with natural language.
- Topgamer7 11mo ago
  Yeah I started with memories for nextcloud. But it was buggy/slow unfortunately. Being able to scroll to dates with immich is golden. And the facial recognition is on device and works great.
  - esperent 11mo ago
    I don't have that experience with Nextcloud Memories. Everything works well and it's comparably fast with Google Photos for me, and scrolling to specific dates works fine. How long ago did you try it? I've only been using it for a few months so maybe it's improved over time.
- oulipo2 11mo ago
  I do that with DayOne and curation, but obviously this means I keep only 2/3 pictures per event, but most of the time that's enough (and even better, since I choose the ones I prefer and keep those)
oliyoung 11mo ago
Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple
- vvpan 11mo ago
  Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.
  - AnonC 11mo ago
    Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.
    - Sanzig 11mo ago
      Even if you are self hosting in the cloud or on a rented box, Tailscale is still really nice from a security perspective. No need to expose anything to the internet, and you can easily mix and match remotely hosted and home servers since they all are on the same Tailnet.
    - lucb1e 11mo ago
      I host at home and can access the things at home just fine by having the server as DMZ in the router, or whatever it is called these days. This doesn't really answer what Tailscale does more than port forwarding. If it punches NAT, that sounds like it actually makes you rely on a third party to host your STUN, i.e. you're not self hosting the Tailscale server?
      - AnonC 11mo ago
        Yes, it does NAT traversal. If you don’t trust Tailscale servers, you can host the open source equivalent, Headscale (headscale.net) and use the open source Tailscale clients.
  - 11mo ago
hjaveed 11mo ago
this is super cool.
websiteapi 11mo ago
immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly, just because certain things I want to do are just not possible with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for that eventually too tho. I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a family is way cheaper than the equivalent s3 storage assuming frequent access, even assuming a 50% discount. so that's nice.
- darknavi 11mo ago
  One option is use immich just to browse photos. I back my photos up to various places, one of which is my NAS. You can set up immich to browse but not modify photos so you can still use it as a "front end".
- utopiah 11mo ago
  > because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365 Yes I don't recommend doing that. My experience is that people understand you are human because they know you. They don't expect 9 9s availability but if they somehow do that can be clarified from the start : "I'm hosting this free of charge for family members because (insert your reasons here, it's important to clarify WHY it's different because Apple and BigTech in general somehow still have a ton of goodwill) but as you know as also have a job and our family life. Consequently sometimes, e.g. electricity outage or me having to update the server, there will be down time. Do no panic when this happens as the files are always safe (backup details if you want) but please do be patient. Typically it might take (insert your realistic expectation, do NOT be too optimistic) a day per month for updates. If you do have better solutions please do contribute." ... or something of the kind. I've been doing that for years and people are surprisingly understanding. IMHO it stems from the why. The "way cheaper than the equivalent" argument reminds me of, and apologies I know it's a bit rough, Russian foreign minister days ago who criticize the EU for its plan to decouple with their oil & gas saying something like "Well if they do that they will pay a lot more elsewhere" and he's right. The point isn't the money though, the point is agency and sovereignty.
krick 11mo ago
I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just auto-managed cache, where everything you didn't access in the last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it itself, and if all the data is fully portable. FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-maker.
- killingtime74 11mo ago
  Key features that matter to me: 1) backup from android or iOS. This helps when I have switched phones over the years. 2) shared albums with family or friends where invited people can both see and contribute photos. Think kids albums, weddings, holidays. 3) ability to re-download at full resolution
  - lucb1e 11mo ago
    1) You don't have backups of other data on your phone (chat history, 2FA secrets and private keys, text notes, anki cards, game progress, configuration of all apps, etc.)? I had assumed everyone who cares about their data has backups of their data anyway, so that's not really a selling point to install another app for 2) that's nice! 3) "it doesn't throw my data away" is the last selling point?! Isn't that just assumed?!
    - killingtime74 11mo ago
      1) I do have separate backups, as well as this, which runs more frequently (after picture is taken) vs daily for device backup 3) not compared to iCloud photos which I migrated from. You can export a whole album with Google at original quality with 1 click. With Apple you can only do 1000 at a time. For apple you can ask for a whole account export, but that takes a few days and gives you all photos. (Similar to Google Takeout).
Groxx 11mo ago
I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed. The project as a whole feels competent. Stuff that should be fast is fast. E.g. upload a few tens of thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in the scroll bar - odds are very good that it'll have the thumbnails fully rendered in like a quarter of a second, and fuzzy ones practically instantly. It's transparently fast. And the image folder structure is very nearly your full data, with metadata files along side the images, so 99% backups and "immich is gone, now what" failure modes are quite easy. And if you change the organization, it'll restructure the whole folder for you to match the new setup, quietly and correctly. Image content searching is not perfect (is it ever?), but I can turn it on in a couple clicks, search for the breed of my dog, and get hundreds of correct matches before the first mistake. That's more than good enough to be useful, and dramatically better than anything self-hosted that I've tried before, and didn't take an hour of reading to enable. It's "this is like actually decent" levels that I haven't seen much in self-hosted stuff. Usually it's kinda janky but still technically functional in some core areas, or abysmally slow and weird like nextcloud, but nope. Just solid all around. Highly recommended.
- ku1ik 11mo ago
  This 100x.
- palata 11mo ago
  How does the mobile syncing work? Really looking for a system where I can install the app on my parents' iPhones and it backs up their photos to my server without them having to even know about the app. They won't open it, ever. Nextcloud fails at that.
  - Groxx 11mo ago
    It's pretty easy to set it up to upload automatically, if that's the question. No need to launch it. I've only got my server on my home network so I can't sync while away, and I occasionally check to make sure it's working - no problems at all yet, a few months in.
azuanrb 11mo ago
I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow. Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future. I started looking for alternatives after Synology became more restrictive with their hardware. I'm curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.
- Bishonen88 11mo ago
  Long time synology user. Switched 3 weeks ago to ugreen. They rolled back their fiasco decision about drives (synology), but I wanted some good hardware in 2025. Everything that synology offers is outdated and slow. Got myself a 6800 pro. It chewed through 98k photos, many of which are raw, within 24h AFAIK. Then came face recognition, text recognition etc. Within 2-3 days all was done. The performance is night and day. Photos and movies load instantly. Finally can watch home movies on my TV without stuttering (4k footage straight from a nikon). The photos app is similar to the synology one. Face recognition was better for me. Have compared the amount of photos tagged to a few people and ugreen found 15% more. Have seen photos of my grandma which I didn't see for years! There's much more positive i could say. For the negatives: no native drive app (nextcloud which supposedly was an alternative doesn't sync folders on android), no native security cam app. I am running now 10 docker containers without a sweat. My ds920+ was so slow, that I gave up on docker entirely after a few attempts. The photos app has some nice features which synology didn't have. Conditional albums. Baby albums.
  - sylens 11mo ago
    does the ugreen NAS reserve port 80/443 for its own reverse proxy solution? It annoys me that Synology does that
- Jnr 11mo ago
  My guess would be that Synology is an expensive but weak computer, bare minimum for NAS. Immich does require some CPU and also GPU for video transcoding and vector search embedding generation. I had Immich (and many other containers) running successfully on AMD Ryzen 2400G for years. And recently I upgraded to 5700G since it was a cheap upgrade.
prh8 11mo ago
This is great timing, I'm just setting up a homelab and planning to run Immich on a mini PC server connected to a NAS. I did find icloudpd, which seems like a pretty reliable syncing tool for people in Apple ecosystem. https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
- para_parolu 11mo ago
  I just sync from my mac and iphone to immich. Works well
  - palata 11mo ago
    On iOS, does it keep syncing if you "swipe away" the app and never open it for e.g. a couple months? I really would like something like this.
    - volemo 11mo ago
      As far as I understand iOS’s behaviour, there’s no way to do what you’re asking unless you’re Apple Inc.
      - palata 11mo ago
        The Nextcloud app kind of does it, it seems. The fact that it stops working seems unrelated: starting the app doesn't make it recover, so it just seems buggy. Nextcloud uses the location permission for some reason, presumably to wake up the app in the background once in a while? At least it can be closed (and "swiped away") for 2 months and keep syncing. Until it breaks and stops working entirely.
        volemo 11mo ago
        That’s surprising to hear! I’d love to know how they managed it. (I’m not willing to familiarise myself with the codebase, of course.)
skittleson 11mo ago
One thing I really like is the performance... its smooth and fluid. The api is really useful as well: I wrote a small job to auto add descriptions and tags to the images.
nntwozz 11mo ago
Anyone used https://lycheeorg.dev https://lycheeorg.dev for a comparison? I'm curious to know which one would suit me best.
- rbren 11mo ago
  I use lychee. It’s been great. Uploads could be a bit rough a few versions back but they’ve been seamless for a while
- wiether 11mo ago
  > Albums within albums I didn't knew about Lychee previous to your comment, but given that they support what should be a basic feature of photo management software (unlike Immich), I'll give it a try Thanks for the suggestion!
subhajeet2107 11mo ago
I use ente which is also the same, a bit tricky to setup but the app looks great
- prism56 11mo ago
  Not self hosted. But I pay for ente for me and my family. Covers 5 of us for £10 a month. Not the cheapest but ente works amazing.
  - sylens 11mo ago
    You can self host it. It used to be a fairly complicated procedure but I think they simplified it recently, but I haven’t tried it again since then
    - prism56 11mo ago
      Yeah i'm not fully opposed to the self host option, I self host quite a few services. However in this case i'm a bit nervous being in charge of families photos and their backups. This way, even if they don't backup. Ente has a pretty robust duplication strategy.
tuxtimo 11mo ago
The only thing that's really missing is a feature on the mobile app to delete local copies of uploaded assets ... Something like Google Photos "Free up space" feature.
- CountGeek 11mo ago
  It has that. Select the media you want to delete, tap & hold, then scroll to the right in the menu and select Delete from device. At least on Android this is the way.
trizic 11mo ago
There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration file. I find this really powerful and simpler than docker and docker-compose. But don't get me wrong, I am all for containerization when it comes to other OS/distros. Yes, there is a learning curve for the Nix language and creating your own packages. But anyone who can install a distro can install NixOS. Instead of running your apt/dnf/pacman commands, you edit a file with your package names and services you want to enable, and run `nixos-rebuild switch`. Though, you might find standalone binaries such as uv and its portable Python bundles don't work out the box, there is a a few lines configuration to get it working. Having a single language for configuring all services/applications (neovim,nginx,syncthing,systemd, etc) is refreshing. And of course combined with generative AI, you can set up a lot quickly. Immich is one of the only apps on iOS that properly does background sync. There is also PhotoSync which is notable for working properly with background sync. I'll take a wild guess that Ente may have got this working right too (at least I'd hope). This works around the limitation that iOS apps can't really run as background apps (appears to me that the app can wake up on some interval, run/sync for a little and try again on the next interval). This is much more usable then for example, the Synology apps for photo sync, which is, the last time I tried, for some reason insanely slow and the phone needs to have the app open and screen on for it fully sync. Some issues I ran into is the Immich iOS app updating and then being incompatible with the older version of the server installed on my machine. You'd have to disable app updates for all apps, as iOS doesn't support disabling updates for individual apps. In my specific scenario, the latest version of Immich for NixOS didn't perform a certain migration for my older version of Immich. I had to track down the specific commit that contained the version of Immich which had the migration, apply that, then I was able to get back to the latest version. Luckily, even though I probably applied a few versions before getting the right one, it didn't corrupt the Immich install.
- behnamoh 11mo ago
  But what's the performance of NixOS compared to other distros? Also, I imagine CUDA installation is not as simple as changing a few lines of config file?
  - 11mo ago
gbil 11mo ago
Immich is wonderful in docker setup passing the gpu for ML which works pretty good and the amazing new OCR feature does miracles, I’m able to find notes that I photographed for this purpose but then forgot, I’m able to find memories just by remembering the name of the place and searching for it and everything is running local!
globular-toast 11mo ago
I've been running Immich on my Kubernetes cluster for a few months now. It was one of the harder things to install. I didn't use the "official" Helm chart because I didn't like it, instead just set it up myself. I use Cloud Native Postgres for DBs so I have backups already configured. I had to use a special image with vectorchord in it. It auto updates with flux and has been fine. The only time it wasn't fine was when I needed to manually upgrade vectorchord in the db. The Android app is good but does quite often fail to open, just getting stuck on the splash screen indefinitely. Means I have to have another app for viewing photos on my phone. One of the main reasons I wanted to install it is because my partner runs out of space on her iPhone and I don't want to pay Apple exorbitant amounts for piffling storage. Unfortunately it doesn't quite work for that; I can't find an option to delete local copies after upload.
ragebol 11mo ago
[dead]
WilcoKruijer 11mo ago
How do people handle backups with Immich? Ideally I’d like all my images to be uploaded to object storage if I’m self-hosting.
- andrew_eu 11mo ago
  I have the main volume for images in a zpool with two SSDs in a raid-1 configuration. I also have a daily cronjob that makes an encrypted off-site backup with Borg. I've also got healthchecks.io jobs setup so that if the zpool becomes unhealthy, the backups fail, or anything stops, then both me and my partner get alerted. My partner isn't very technical, but having an Immich server we are both invested in has gotten her much more interested in self hosting and the skills to do it.
- ProfDreamer 11mo ago
  I'm using restic to backup the Immich photo directories as well as automatically generated Immich database dumps to an external drive and a Hetzner Storage Box.
- PhilipRoman 11mo ago
  Personally I do a daily sync from the underlying gocryptfs to Backblaze B2. It's also on btrfs so I can do snapshots, etc.
- denysvitali 11mo ago
  Unfortunately Immich doesn't (yet) support object storage natively, which IMHO would make things way easier in a lot of ways. You can still mount an object storage bucket to the filesystem, but it's not supported officially by Immich and you anyways have additional delay caused by the fact that your device reaches out to your server, and your server reaches out to the bucket. It would be amazing (and I've been working on that) to have an Immich that supports natively S3 and does everything with S3. This, together with the performance issues of Immich, is what pushed me to create immich-go-backend (https://github.com/denysvitali/immich-go-backend https://github.com/denysvitali/immich-go-backend) - a complete rewrite of Immich's backend in Go. The project is not mature enough yet, but the goal is to reach feature parity + native S3 integration.
cromka 11mo ago
Immich is great, but I like Ente more because of the E2E encryption. I don't trust that someday my hardware wouldn't get stolen and all photos get in possession of someone else.
- andrew_eu 11mo ago
  Ente looks interesting and worth looking into, thanks for mentioning it. In the context of having a phone stolen, it's possible to at least limit the damage and revoke accesses via the Tailscale control server. Then the files on device are still vulnerable, but not everything in Immich (or whatever other service is running).
  - lucb1e 11mo ago
    Why would you need Tailscale for revoking an access token in an unrelated service? Just kick the device out of the sessions list in Immich, or change your password if that's stored directly on the device
- JamesAdir 11mo ago
  Why not encrypt your server? Or store the photos on an encrypted partition?
  - volemo 11mo ago
    I have this dilemma. > Why not encrypt your server? I’d like to provide the service to my semi-extended family — not just me and my partner, but also my parents and siblings. And I respect their privacy, so I want to eliminate even the possibility of me, system administrator, accessing their photos.
  - cromka 11mo ago
    I specifically care about my server getting stolen. You need Luks encryption in place for that, but also some clever password automation so you don’t type it in each time
- seszett 11mo ago
andrew_eu 11mo ago
Very nice the author uses tailscale serve! It's an underrated, and unfortunately under documented, way to host a web service directly to Tailscale. With that you can run a docker compose stack with one extra tailscale container, and then it's immediately a self contained and reasonably portable web server in your tailnet. Immich really is fantastic software, and their roadmap is promising. I hope they have enough funding to keep going.
jatsakthi 11mo ago
learnt a lot from this! Thanks.
fsh 11mo ago
My biggest worry with Immich is how to future-proof the albums. With photos sorted into folders, it should be no problem to access them in a couple of decades. With Immich, I have to rely on the software still working or finding some kind of tool to dump the database.
- andrew_eu 11mo ago
  I share this worry. You can configure the storage template for the photos and include an "album" part, so if a photo is in some album it'll get sorted into that folder. Then the file tree on disk is as you wish. I haven't tested what it does when a photo is in multiple albums, but it does handle the no album case fine as well.
- anotherpaul 11mo ago
  Thank you, well put. thats why I am using next cloud and manual curation. Folders is the ultimate future proof structure. But I do see the value of a nice UI. But immich hides the files from me too much for my taste. Although I am sure I can back them up to my PC somehow. But having them just on the server is not my favourite solution.
- riedel 11mo ago
  I remember that Immich has a mode to not use cryptic hashes but folders for storage. When I used it it was somehow deprecated due to some problems, but supported. I actually stopped using Immich because newer versions run the keep alive via socket.io with a Prostgres notify, which does constant empty WAL flushes, triggering empty page writes on idle.
  - DrammBA 11mo ago
    Storage template is not deprecated https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ Also according to https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge the notify issue was fixed July 2024.
    - 11mo ago
vekerdyb 11mo ago
Surprised that neither the article, nor the comments mention Photoprism from what I can see. It’s not I’ve been hosting Photoprism and syncing my photos with PhotoSync from my iPhone for a while now. I would consider switching to another solution if it had in-browser basic editing (cropping, contrast / white balance adjustment, etc). https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/
- anotherpaul 11mo ago
  So am I seeing this right: Immich, ente and photoprism all compete in a similar space? Seems immich is the most polished webpage, but which solution will become the next cloud for photos is to be seen. Surely it's not next cloud anymore, considering the comments here.
  - palata 11mo ago
    > Surely it's not next cloud anymore, considering the comments here. I have been testing Nextcloud for backing up photos from my family members' phones. Wouldn't recommend. The sync on iOS works well for a while, then it stops working, then some files are "locked" and error messages appear, or it just stops syncing, and the only way I find to recover is to essentially restart the sync from scratch. It will then reupload EVERYTHING for hours, even though 95% images are already on the server. Note that in my use-case, the user never opens the app. It has to work in the background, always, and the user should not have to know about it.
- andrejserafim 11mo ago
  I've switched from photoprism to immich. Immich is a much more active project, bugs are fixed, face recognition is an order of magnitude better, just an overall more solid experience. If you are choosing, I wouldn't doubt for a second to go with immich.
- arendtio 11mo ago
  Same here. I also have an ente account, but only to check if they made relevant progress. So far, I don't understand why Ente has so much traction when PhotoPrism has the better feature set, in my opinion.
teekert 11mo ago
I also run NixOS (btw) but opted for the container. My Docker compose setup has moved from Arch to Ubuntu to NixOS now, so I like the flexibility of that setup. I also use Tailscale, and use cloudflare as nameserver and Caddy in front of Immich to get an nice url and https. For DNS redirects I use Adguard on the tailnet, but (mostly for family) I also set some redirects in my Mikrotik hEX (E50UG). This way Immich is reachable from anywhere and not on the internet. Unfortunately it looks like the Immich app caches the IP address somewhere? Because it always reports as disconnected whenever Tailscale turns off when I'm at home or the other way around and takes some time/attempts/restarts to get going again. It's been pretty flaky that way... Other than that: Best selfhosted app ever. It has reminded me that video > photos, for family moments. Regularly I go back through the years for that day, love that feature.
Ringz 11mo ago
Immich struggles to act as a true unifying solution for users with large, existing archival collections (DSLRs, scanned film, etc.). Since those „Archival Assets“ are often decades old, already organized into complex, user-defined file structures (e.g., 1998/DATE_PLACE_PROJECT/PLACE_PROJECT_DATE.jpg), and frequently contain incomplete or inconsistent metadata (missing dates, no GPS, different file formats). Immich's current integration solutions (like "External Libraries") treat the archive as a read-only view, which leads to a fragmented user experience: - Changes, facial recognition, or tagging remain only within Immich’s database, failing to write metadata back to the archival files in their original directory structure (last time I checked, might be better now. - My established, meaningful directory structure is ignored or flattened in the Immich view, forcing the user to rely entirely on Immich’s internal date/AI-based organization. My goal (am I the only one?) of having one app view all photos while maintaining the integrity and organizational schema of the archival files on disk is not yet fully met. Immich needs a robust, bi-directional import/sync layer that respects and enhances existing directory structures, rather than just importing files into its own schema.
- rcarmo 11mo ago
  This is where I'm at, really. I have my own filing hierarchy and storage templates can't really deal with it (and I don't get why they would be needed when all I want is for it to handle an "uploads" directory and re-scan the file tree after I file things)
- nickthegreek 11mo ago
  This is my main issue with Immich. I had 300gb of local photos organized into folders from digital cameras. Then I wanted to move google photos into it. Ran the scripts only to discover that the imported images were in a rats nest of folders in the immich internal library. I loathed this fragmentation keep hoping for a solution. It looks like I could maybe use PhotoSync to dump everything to folders and just keep everything as an 'External library' in immich, but this is not ideal,
camillomiller 11mo ago
> For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of my data for backup purposes and independence. I know how much Adobe is hated around any creative circle, but tbf I find that Lightroom CC does this pretty well. Adobe has a well done simple helper app that does just that: downloads the entire of your library locally, with all pictures, all edits, everything. For backup purposes is perfect. Lightroom might be expensive for amateurs, but if you even just do a couple of photo jobs per year, it's worth every cent.
wiether 11mo ago
Given how many times I've read praises about Immich here, I tried it a few weeks ago and was quite disappointed. The fact that they don't support sub-albums make it an absolute no-go to me.
flymaipie 11mo ago
I prefer Photoview’s simplicity over Immich. Immich leans too much toward mimicking Google Photos for my taste.
- esperent 11mo ago
  I would disagree there. I've tried lots of photo managers, and for organizing thousands of photos, I think Google Photos has it pretty much nailed. When choosing a photo/video manager, "works pretty much exactly like Google Photos but without all the AI bullshit and privacy issues" is a major selling point for me. Ideally it would even have the same shortcuts so that my muscle memory still works.
rodwyersoftware 11mo ago
I found the sync clients for iOS to stuck unfortunately, meaning I cannot use this.
rcarmo 11mo ago
I've had nothing but trouble with Immich. It's a CPU hog if you enable any kind of AI/ML (face detection is a notable culprit) or when preprocessing even small phone videos, I can't get it to import an existing photo tree from a filesystem, and the iOS app can't seem to sync reliably...
renegade-otter 11mo ago
Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Photos for others.
- gjsman-1000 11mo ago
  I was just telling a nonprofit the other day, who in the name of “self hosting” was running their business on a 73 plugin WordPress site: Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Integrate the two. Stop self hosting. (They’re not large enough to do it well; and it already caused them a two week outage.)
  - skydhash 11mo ago
    If you need 73 plugins for wordpress, then Wordpress is a poor technology choice for your usecase.
  - em-bee 11mo ago
    disagree. as the sister comment mentions, wordpress may have been the wrong choice, but self hosting is never wrong, especially for a non profit who may not have the resources to deal with a situation if a hosting service decides to shut them out.
    - crote 11mo ago
      If they don't have the resources to switch to a different hosting provider, why do you assume they will have the resources to fix things when their self-host solution shits the bed?
      - wobfan 11mo ago
        You're comparing apples to oranges. Switching the ecosystem from something like Shopify to some other shop software requires a lot of manual work, and some of the stuff won't even be transferable 1:1. Fixing some issue with your WordPress installation will require a person who can google and knows a little stuff about webservers, and maybe containers, and will usually go pretty fast, as WordPress is open source and runs almost half the internet, and almost every problem that will come up will have been solved in some StackOverflow thread or GitHub issue. Usually though, if you run WordPress and you're not doing a lot of hacky stuff, you will not encounter problems. Vendors shutting you down, increasing their pricing, or shutting down vital features in their software, happens regularly though. And if it happens, shit hits the fan.
sylens 11mo ago
I’ve experimented with both Immich and Ente over the last year and run Immich in parallel with Google Photos right now for my family. Once they add a few more features to support things like smart albums, I’ll be able to drop Google Photos entirely. I love that the consumer space is getting this kind of attention. It’s one of the biggest opportunities for big tech to lock people into their ecosystem, as photos are something everyone cherishes. You can extort people with ever increasing subscription fees because over time they reach a scale with their own photos that makes it inconvenient to manage themselves. It’s nice to have multiple options that are not Google or Apple.
tgiba 11mo ago
I use my Immich instance locally as photos and videos storage for 7-8 months now. It's really amazing. Reading comments here I'd say it's medium-difficulty tier to set up. I have it on my Elitedesk 800 G3 mini, in Docker Compose, with hardware encoding and it's more than sufficient to handle this work. Never had a bug.
- wobfan 11mo ago
  I fail to get the problems with self hosting Immich. I mean, obviously you gotta have a server ready, and at least some knowledge about self hosting and docker. But apart from that, installing Immich was like a breeze. It was actually not more than pasting some lines into a docker-compose, and running it. Have been using it for about 1.5 years, and I have not a single problem, which is quite incredible for a software that basically has all features that Google Photos has.
- Groxx 11mo ago
  As a counter-anecdote: literally just `docker compose up` on a spare laptop for me, and it's working great (though it's only available on the local network). There might be stuff to tune (e.g. I'm pretty sure it's not using my GPU), but it's almost totally unnecessary for just one household of people's use - the initial huge google-photos-takeout took an hour or three to finish indexing with all the features enabled, but all new stuff is done within seconds. The most I've done is to swap the actual photo storage to an external drive, which is just a "move that folder, custom mapping in the docker command" change. On hardware that doesn't have docker, or is significantly more resource constrained somehow: yea, I completely believe it. I haven't tried that, but given the features it makes total sense that it'd be harder.
uzername 11mo ago
I had immich running great for a while, maybe for months. It would seamlessly sync photos from phone to local home server. I was going to setup nightly outbound sync too (1 is none, 2 is some). I updated the container for usual appliance maintenance. Entire thing is toast. Metadata files can't be read, mounted, permission issues and more. It's been four months since.
- majkinetor 11mo ago
  That is why you should never update stuff that works :)
- Trasmatta 11mo ago
  This is why I just can't deal with self hosting... I'm already burnt out on this kind of stuff in my day job. And something like this will ALWAYS happen eventually.
- Groxx 11mo ago
  > permission issues as an un-solicited drive-by suggestion: see if they're owned by root? you may have sudo'd the original run. since you're at least a few months behind though, do check for breaking changes: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions?discussions_q=label%3Achangelog%3Abreaking-change+sort%3Adate_created https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions?discussions... they've pretty consistently had instructions, but you unfortunately mostly have to know to look for it. not sure why the upgrade notification doesn't make it super incredibly painfully obvious.
- nickthegreek 11mo ago
  In a similar situation and it just drained all my excitement for immich after I spent so many hours cleaning up and deduping photos. This content is too important to me have to deal with these issues, especially with how immich chooses to store its internal library photos.
raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
I honestly thought there was some app - even one from Google - that let you just run on your Windows or Mac and downloaded all of your Google Photos to your computer. That’s all the author is trying to do. He isn’t trying to avoid or replace Google Photos - just have a local backup. Even Apple has a Windows app that does that for iCloud Photos
konart 11mo ago
I personally prefer Photoprism more. Much more responsive and clear UI, golang backend are two main subjective advantages.
LightBug1 11mo ago
This will be my Christmas project. Thanks, author.
miladyincontrol 11mo ago
As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer. Its not perfect but its great to be able to just search for things in a photo and find any matches across dozens of TBs of raws, without having to have some 3rd party cloud AI nonsense do all the work. The only thing I wish they could get integrated is support for jxl compressed raws, which requires them compile libraw with adobe's sdk.
- TacticalCoder 11mo ago
  > As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer. I installed immich in a VM. And the VM is using GPU passthrough. I don't see how it's overkill: immich is a kitchen sink with hundreds if not thousands of dependencies and hardly a month goes by without yet another massive exploit affecting package managers. I'm not saying VM escapes exploit aren't a thing but this greatly raises the bar. When one install a kitchen sink as gigantic as immich, anything that can help contain exploits is most welcome. So: immich in a VM and if you want a GPU, just do GPU passthrough. I agree that the search using facial recognition is nice in immich that said.
- qskousen 11mo ago
  It seems like you are saying the AI features don't work if you don't have a GPU, if I understood correctly, but I have my install on a server with no GPU and the object search and facial recognition features work fine. Probably slower to generate the embeddings, but I don't have any comparison to make.
darrmit 11mo ago
I have been experimenting with Immich off and on for over a year, first in docker-compose and now in podman. It is slick and seamless in a lot of ways, but the portability and upgrade ability are questionable, as others have highlighted. For example, when they moved between Postgres container versions, it required a manual edit to the compose file to adjust the image. Even if you managed to get it set up initially in docker, it’s these sorts of concepts that are way more advanced than the vast majority of people who may even be interested in self-hosting. For a hobbyist self-hoster it’s cool and fun, but not something at this point I’d trust my photos to alone. I have considered Ente for that but today it’s still iCloud Photos.
guluarte 11mo ago
that PC is overkill for that
pavel_lishin 11mo ago
> Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup. I didn't even realize this tool existed. I tried something like it awhile back, but it didn't work to my satisfaction (I don't remember why), so my awful, awful, awful workflow is to use the Google Takeout functionality to generate something like 8 .tar.gz files (50 gigabytes each), manually download each one (being prompted for authentication each time), and then rsyncing them over to my local server, and finally uncompressing them. It's very lovely how much Google doesn't want you to exfiltrate your own data. I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it.
- hombre_fatal 11mo ago
  > I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it. LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo. After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the service to Tailscale, and then give me a todo list reminder of what I needed to do to mirror my Macbook iCloud/Photo.app gallery to it and then see it on my iPhone... ...than any of the times I've had to work around "black box says no", much like your example. Just a couple years ago, this wasn't the case. I didn't have the energy to ssh into my server and remember how things are set up and then read a bunch of docs and risk having to go into a manual debug loop any time a service breaks. LLM does all that. I never even read Nix docs. LLM does that too. In fact, it was fairly fun to finally get a good cross-platform setup working in general to divest from Apple thanks to LLM + Nix. I really like where things are going in this regard. I don't need any of this crap anymore that I used to use because it was the only way to get something that Just Worked. By the time I lose my software job and have to compete with you lot, H1Bs, and teenagers to fold sweaters at Hollister, I won't need to use a single bit of proprietary software. It will be a huge consolation.
  - 11mo ago
lucb1e 11mo ago
https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements > RAM: Minimum 4GB, recommended 6GB Wow. When factoring in the OS, that's an entire system's worth of RAM dedicated to just hosting files! What does it use all this for? Or is this just for when it occasionally (upon uploading new pictures) loads the image recognition neural net? I'd have to stop Immich whenever I want to do some other RAM-heavy task. All my other services (including database, several web servers with a bunch of web services, a Windows VM, git server, email, redis...) + the host OS and any redundancy caused by using containers, use 4.6GB combined, peaking to 6GB on occasion > CPU: Minimum 2 cores, recommended 4 cores Would be good to know how fast those cores should be. My hardware is a mobile platform from 2012, and I've noticed each core is faster than a modern Pi as well as e.g. the "dedicated cores" you get from DigitalOcean. It really depends what you run it on, not how many of them you have
- neurostimulant 11mo ago
  It has modern features that requires relatively heavy processing such as facial recognition, finding similar images, ocr, transcoding videos, etc. I think it only needs those computing resources when you upload new images/videos.
  - lucb1e 11mo ago
    Any idea how much it uses when you're not uploading new pictures? If it just needs it on occasion (and I can control when by not uploading at times where I'm using it for other purposes), that would probably be worth it since I have the spare capacity 99% of the time
    - neurostimulant 11mo ago
      I think you can disable machine learning stuff in the settings. And yes, you can control when the sync happen, or even have it only triggered manually and never automatically. My instance when not running any photo/video processing job: - immich server: cpu: 0.51% ram: 753MiB - immich redis: cpu: 0.48 ram: 19.64MiB - immich machine learning: cpu: 0% ram: 209.3MiB

662 points by birdculture 11mo ago

cuu508 11mo ago

I'm running Immich on NanoPi R6C (arm64, even lower idle power usage, still plenty fast for running Immich). I use Cloudflare tunnel to make it available outside the home network. I've set up two DNS names – one for accessing it directly in the local network, and and a second one that goes through the tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports internal/external connection settings – it uses the direct connection when connected to home wifi, and the tunnel when out and about. For uploading photos taken with a camera I either use immich-go (https://github.com/simulot/immich-go https://github.com/simulot/immich-go) or upload them through the web UI. There's a "publish to Immich" plugin for Adobe Lightroom which was handy, but I've moved away from using Lightroom.

CuteDepravity 11mo ago
Are you also facing the the 100mb upload limit when using cloudflare tunnel? Sometimes I want to upload a video from my phone will away from home but I can't and need to vpn
- geekologist 11mo ago
  You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.
  - cuu508 11mo ago
    > I just ended up exposing my public IP. I considered doing that too. My main problem with it is privacy. Let's say I set up some sort of dynamic DNS to point foo.bar.example.org to my home IP. Then, after some family event, I share an album link (https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string) with friends and family. The album link gets shared on, and ends up on the public internet. Once somebody figures out foo.bar.example.org points to my home IP, they can look up my home IP at all times.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - geekologist 11mo ago
      It's another cost but running a reverse proxy from a VPS would solve this right?

shadowpho 11mo ago

Love Immich. Runs smoothly on an amd 4700u ($200) with minimum cpu/ram usage

digitalDM 11mo ago
I agree, and simple to me $200 new PC does this task just fine.
- shadowpho 11mo ago
  Yep and it also runs 30+ more containers without a hitch! Crazy times we live in.

WD-42 11mo ago

Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. I can honestly say Immich is better in every way than Google Photos or whatever Apple calls it. The only thing is having to set it up yourself.

ptk 11mo ago
How does sharing an album with others work on Immich?
- jasonjayr 11mo ago
  You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it. Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser. I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
  - cromka 11mo ago
    OK. Then you concede your security, as I can't imagine any single person self-hosting can be better at keeping their public service more secure than engineers at Google can. Especially with limited time.
    - lurking_swe 11mo ago
      I mean, if you’re confident about security best practices, have a moderate amount of networking experience, and are a seasoned web developer, it’s not too scary at all. I realize that’s a lot of prerequisites though. it’s not a fair comparison with Google because Google has a much bigger target on their back. There are millions of users of Google, so the value of hacking Google is very high. The value of hacking a random Immich instance is extremely low.
    - kristjank 11mo ago
      You definitely have a dull imagination. If the software itself is secure, containerized version of Immich behind a containerized version of nginx proxy manager is probably as secure as you can get. Also google security tends to be mainly leaning towards securing google and less towards securing google's (non paying) customers.

drekipus 11mo ago

Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project. I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do it in the moment and both have access. I would probably estimate 90% Of my photos are junk, But I want to isolate and share the 10% that are really special. My app failed, but I'm thinking about reviving it as an alternative front-end to immich, to build upon that.. But I feel like I'm the only one who wants this. Everyone else seems fine with bulk photo backup for everything.

youainti 11mo ago
just disable auto-upload and then manually upload the ones you want to. There is a setting to share your immich library with someone else. Between those two features, you should get something close to what you want.
- drekipus 11mo ago
  For me one of the killer things would be to click "share" on a photo I took, and then have the immich albums show up so I can put them in that specific place as like a 3 click process. That's basically what I was building my whole app around
  - omnimus 11mo ago
    Just have immich app to sync only certain album? And add photos to that album. Seems like solved feature?
    - DrammBA 11mo ago
      I don't think he's here looking for a solution.
      - 11mo ago

stavros 11mo ago

I adore Immich. I set it up a while ago, and I'm finally looking at my photos again. I was previously using Nextcloud for photos, but it was such a slog to find anything that I never took or looked at photos. Immich put the joy back in photography for me, it's so easy to find anything, even with just searching with natural language.

Topgamer7 11mo ago
Yeah I started with memories for nextcloud. But it was buggy/slow unfortunately. Being able to scroll to dates with immich is golden. And the facial recognition is on device and works great.
- esperent 11mo ago
  I don't have that experience with Nextcloud Memories. Everything works well and it's comparably fast with Google Photos for me, and scrolling to specific dates works fine. How long ago did you try it? I've only been using it for a few months so maybe it's improved over time.
oulipo2 11mo ago
I do that with DayOne and curation, but obviously this means I keep only 2/3 pictures per event, but most of the time that's enough (and even better, since I choose the ones I prefer and keep those)

oliyoung 11mo ago

Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple

vvpan 11mo ago
Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.
- AnonC 11mo ago
  Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.
  - Sanzig 11mo ago
    Even if you are self hosting in the cloud or on a rented box, Tailscale is still really nice from a security perspective. No need to expose anything to the internet, and you can easily mix and match remotely hosted and home servers since they all are on the same Tailnet.
  - lucb1e 11mo ago
    I host at home and can access the things at home just fine by having the server as DMZ in the router, or whatever it is called these days. This doesn't really answer what Tailscale does more than port forwarding. If it punches NAT, that sounds like it actually makes you rely on a third party to host your STUN, i.e. you're not self hosting the Tailscale server?
    - AnonC 11mo ago
      Yes, it does NAT traversal. If you don’t trust Tailscale servers, you can host the open source equivalent, Headscale (headscale.net) and use the open source Tailscale clients.
- 11mo ago

hjaveed 11mo ago

this is super cool.

websiteapi 11mo ago

immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly, just because certain things I want to do are just not possible with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for that eventually too tho. I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a family is way cheaper than the equivalent s3 storage assuming frequent access, even assuming a 50% discount. so that's nice.

darknavi 11mo ago
One option is use immich just to browse photos. I back my photos up to various places, one of which is my NAS. You can set up immich to browse but not modify photos so you can still use it as a "front end".
utopiah 11mo ago
> because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365 Yes I don't recommend doing that. My experience is that people understand you are human because they know you. They don't expect 9 9s availability but if they somehow do that can be clarified from the start : "I'm hosting this free of charge for family members because (insert your reasons here, it's important to clarify WHY it's different because Apple and BigTech in general somehow still have a ton of goodwill) but as you know as also have a job and our family life. Consequently sometimes, e.g. electricity outage or me having to update the server, there will be down time. Do no panic when this happens as the files are always safe (backup details if you want) but please do be patient. Typically it might take (insert your realistic expectation, do NOT be too optimistic) a day per month for updates. If you do have better solutions please do contribute." ... or something of the kind. I've been doing that for years and people are surprisingly understanding. IMHO it stems from the why. The "way cheaper than the equivalent" argument reminds me of, and apologies I know it's a bit rough, Russian foreign minister days ago who criticize the EU for its plan to decouple with their oil & gas saying something like "Well if they do that they will pay a lot more elsewhere" and he's right. The point isn't the money though, the point is agency and sovereignty.

krick 11mo ago

I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just auto-managed cache, where everything you didn't access in the last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it itself, and if all the data is fully portable. FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-maker.

killingtime74 11mo ago
Key features that matter to me: 1) backup from android or iOS. This helps when I have switched phones over the years. 2) shared albums with family or friends where invited people can both see and contribute photos. Think kids albums, weddings, holidays. 3) ability to re-download at full resolution
- lucb1e 11mo ago
  1) You don't have backups of other data on your phone (chat history, 2FA secrets and private keys, text notes, anki cards, game progress, configuration of all apps, etc.)? I had assumed everyone who cares about their data has backups of their data anyway, so that's not really a selling point to install another app for 2) that's nice! 3) "it doesn't throw my data away" is the last selling point?! Isn't that just assumed?!
  - killingtime74 11mo ago
    1) I do have separate backups, as well as this, which runs more frequently (after picture is taken) vs daily for device backup 3) not compared to iCloud photos which I migrated from. You can export a whole album with Google at original quality with 1 click. With Apple you can only do 1000 at a time. For apple you can ask for a whole account export, but that takes a few days and gives you all photos. (Similar to Google Takeout).

Groxx 11mo ago

I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed. The project as a whole feels competent. Stuff that should be fast is fast. E.g. upload a few tens of thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in the scroll bar - odds are very good that it'll have the thumbnails fully rendered in like a quarter of a second, and fuzzy ones practically instantly. It's transparently fast. And the image folder structure is very nearly your full data, with metadata files along side the images, so 99% backups and "immich is gone, now what" failure modes are quite easy. And if you change the organization, it'll restructure the whole folder for you to match the new setup, quietly and correctly. Image content searching is not perfect (is it ever?), but I can turn it on in a couple clicks, search for the breed of my dog, and get hundreds of correct matches before the first mistake. That's more than good enough to be useful, and dramatically better than anything self-hosted that I've tried before, and didn't take an hour of reading to enable. It's "this is like actually decent" levels that I haven't seen much in self-hosted stuff. Usually it's kinda janky but still technically functional in some core areas, or abysmally slow and weird like nextcloud, but nope. Just solid all around. Highly recommended.

ku1ik 11mo ago
This 100x.
palata 11mo ago
How does the mobile syncing work? Really looking for a system where I can install the app on my parents' iPhones and it backs up their photos to my server without them having to even know about the app. They won't open it, ever. Nextcloud fails at that.
- Groxx 11mo ago
  It's pretty easy to set it up to upload automatically, if that's the question. No need to launch it. I've only got my server on my home network so I can't sync while away, and I occasionally check to make sure it's working - no problems at all yet, a few months in.

azuanrb 11mo ago

I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow. Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future. I started looking for alternatives after Synology became more restrictive with their hardware. I'm curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.

Bishonen88 11mo ago
Long time synology user. Switched 3 weeks ago to ugreen. They rolled back their fiasco decision about drives (synology), but I wanted some good hardware in 2025. Everything that synology offers is outdated and slow. Got myself a 6800 pro. It chewed through 98k photos, many of which are raw, within 24h AFAIK. Then came face recognition, text recognition etc. Within 2-3 days all was done. The performance is night and day. Photos and movies load instantly. Finally can watch home movies on my TV without stuttering (4k footage straight from a nikon). The photos app is similar to the synology one. Face recognition was better for me. Have compared the amount of photos tagged to a few people and ugreen found 15% more. Have seen photos of my grandma which I didn't see for years! There's much more positive i could say. For the negatives: no native drive app (nextcloud which supposedly was an alternative doesn't sync folders on android), no native security cam app. I am running now 10 docker containers without a sweat. My ds920+ was so slow, that I gave up on docker entirely after a few attempts. The photos app has some nice features which synology didn't have. Conditional albums. Baby albums.
- sylens 11mo ago
  does the ugreen NAS reserve port 80/443 for its own reverse proxy solution? It annoys me that Synology does that
Jnr 11mo ago
My guess would be that Synology is an expensive but weak computer, bare minimum for NAS. Immich does require some CPU and also GPU for video transcoding and vector search embedding generation. I had Immich (and many other containers) running successfully on AMD Ryzen 2400G for years. And recently I upgraded to 5700G since it was a cheap upgrade.

prh8 11mo ago

This is great timing, I'm just setting up a homelab and planning to run Immich on a mini PC server connected to a NAS. I did find icloudpd, which seems like a pretty reliable syncing tool for people in Apple ecosystem. https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

para_parolu 11mo ago
I just sync from my mac and iphone to immich. Works well
- palata 11mo ago
  On iOS, does it keep syncing if you "swipe away" the app and never open it for e.g. a couple months? I really would like something like this.
  - volemo 11mo ago
    As far as I understand iOS’s behaviour, there’s no way to do what you’re asking unless you’re Apple Inc.
    - palata 11mo ago
      The Nextcloud app kind of does it, it seems. The fact that it stops working seems unrelated: starting the app doesn't make it recover, so it just seems buggy. Nextcloud uses the location permission for some reason, presumably to wake up the app in the background once in a while? At least it can be closed (and "swiped away") for 2 months and keep syncing. Until it breaks and stops working entirely.
      - volemo 11mo ago
        That’s surprising to hear! I’d love to know how they managed it. (I’m not willing to familiarise myself with the codebase, of course.)

skittleson 11mo ago

One thing I really like is the performance... its smooth and fluid. The api is really useful as well: I wrote a small job to auto add descriptions and tags to the images.

nntwozz 11mo ago

Anyone used https://lycheeorg.dev https://lycheeorg.dev for a comparison? I'm curious to know which one would suit me best.

rbren 11mo ago
I use lychee. It’s been great. Uploads could be a bit rough a few versions back but they’ve been seamless for a while
wiether 11mo ago
> Albums within albums I didn't knew about Lychee previous to your comment, but given that they support what should be a basic feature of photo management software (unlike Immich), I'll give it a try Thanks for the suggestion!

subhajeet2107 11mo ago

I use ente which is also the same, a bit tricky to setup but the app looks great

prism56 11mo ago
Not self hosted. But I pay for ente for me and my family. Covers 5 of us for £10 a month. Not the cheapest but ente works amazing.
- sylens 11mo ago
  You can self host it. It used to be a fairly complicated procedure but I think they simplified it recently, but I haven’t tried it again since then
  - prism56 11mo ago
    Yeah i'm not fully opposed to the self host option, I self host quite a few services. However in this case i'm a bit nervous being in charge of families photos and their backups. This way, even if they don't backup. Ente has a pretty robust duplication strategy.

tuxtimo 11mo ago

The only thing that's really missing is a feature on the mobile app to delete local copies of uploaded assets ... Something like Google Photos "Free up space" feature.

CountGeek 11mo ago
It has that. Select the media you want to delete, tap & hold, then scroll to the right in the menu and select Delete from device. At least on Android this is the way.

trizic 11mo ago

There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration file. I find this really powerful and simpler than docker and docker-compose. But don't get me wrong, I am all for containerization when it comes to other OS/distros. Yes, there is a learning curve for the Nix language and creating your own packages. But anyone who can install a distro can install NixOS. Instead of running your apt/dnf/pacman commands, you edit a file with your package names and services you want to enable, and run `nixos-rebuild switch`. Though, you might find standalone binaries such as uv and its portable Python bundles don't work out the box, there is a a few lines configuration to get it working. Having a single language for configuring all services/applications (neovim,nginx,syncthing,systemd, etc) is refreshing. And of course combined with generative AI, you can set up a lot quickly. Immich is one of the only apps on iOS that properly does background sync. There is also PhotoSync which is notable for working properly with background sync. I'll take a wild guess that Ente may have got this working right too (at least I'd hope). This works around the limitation that iOS apps can't really run as background apps (appears to me that the app can wake up on some interval, run/sync for a little and try again on the next interval). This is much more usable then for example, the Synology apps for photo sync, which is, the last time I tried, for some reason insanely slow and the phone needs to have the app open and screen on for it fully sync. Some issues I ran into is the Immich iOS app updating and then being incompatible with the older version of the server installed on my machine. You'd have to disable app updates for all apps, as iOS doesn't support disabling updates for individual apps. In my specific scenario, the latest version of Immich for NixOS didn't perform a certain migration for my older version of Immich. I had to track down the specific commit that contained the version of Immich which had the migration, apply that, then I was able to get back to the latest version. Luckily, even though I probably applied a few versions before getting the right one, it didn't corrupt the Immich install.

behnamoh 11mo ago
But what's the performance of NixOS compared to other distros? Also, I imagine CUDA installation is not as simple as changing a few lines of config file?
- 11mo ago

gbil 11mo ago

Immich is wonderful in docker setup passing the gpu for ML which works pretty good and the amazing new OCR feature does miracles, I’m able to find notes that I photographed for this purpose but then forgot, I’m able to find memories just by remembering the name of the place and searching for it and everything is running local!

globular-toast 11mo ago

I've been running Immich on my Kubernetes cluster for a few months now. It was one of the harder things to install. I didn't use the "official" Helm chart because I didn't like it, instead just set it up myself. I use Cloud Native Postgres for DBs so I have backups already configured. I had to use a special image with vectorchord in it. It auto updates with flux and has been fine. The only time it wasn't fine was when I needed to manually upgrade vectorchord in the db. The Android app is good but does quite often fail to open, just getting stuck on the splash screen indefinitely. Means I have to have another app for viewing photos on my phone. One of the main reasons I wanted to install it is because my partner runs out of space on her iPhone and I don't want to pay Apple exorbitant amounts for piffling storage. Unfortunately it doesn't quite work for that; I can't find an option to delete local copies after upload.

ragebol 11mo ago

[dead]

WilcoKruijer 11mo ago

How do people handle backups with Immich? Ideally I’d like all my images to be uploaded to object storage if I’m self-hosting.

andrew_eu 11mo ago
I have the main volume for images in a zpool with two SSDs in a raid-1 configuration. I also have a daily cronjob that makes an encrypted off-site backup with Borg. I've also got healthchecks.io jobs setup so that if the zpool becomes unhealthy, the backups fail, or anything stops, then both me and my partner get alerted. My partner isn't very technical, but having an Immich server we are both invested in has gotten her much more interested in self hosting and the skills to do it.
ProfDreamer 11mo ago
I'm using restic to backup the Immich photo directories as well as automatically generated Immich database dumps to an external drive and a Hetzner Storage Box.
PhilipRoman 11mo ago
Personally I do a daily sync from the underlying gocryptfs to Backblaze B2. It's also on btrfs so I can do snapshots, etc.
denysvitali 11mo ago
Unfortunately Immich doesn't (yet) support object storage natively, which IMHO would make things way easier in a lot of ways. You can still mount an object storage bucket to the filesystem, but it's not supported officially by Immich and you anyways have additional delay caused by the fact that your device reaches out to your server, and your server reaches out to the bucket. It would be amazing (and I've been working on that) to have an Immich that supports natively S3 and does everything with S3. This, together with the performance issues of Immich, is what pushed me to create immich-go-backend (https://github.com/denysvitali/immich-go-backend https://github.com/denysvitali/immich-go-backend) - a complete rewrite of Immich's backend in Go. The project is not mature enough yet, but the goal is to reach feature parity + native S3 integration.

cromka 11mo ago

Immich is great, but I like Ente more because of the E2E encryption. I don't trust that someday my hardware wouldn't get stolen and all photos get in possession of someone else.

andrew_eu 11mo ago
Ente looks interesting and worth looking into, thanks for mentioning it. In the context of having a phone stolen, it's possible to at least limit the damage and revoke accesses via the Tailscale control server. Then the files on device are still vulnerable, but not everything in Immich (or whatever other service is running).
- lucb1e 11mo ago
  Why would you need Tailscale for revoking an access token in an unrelated service? Just kick the device out of the sessions list in Immich, or change your password if that's stored directly on the device
JamesAdir 11mo ago
Why not encrypt your server? Or store the photos on an encrypted partition?
- volemo 11mo ago
  I have this dilemma. > Why not encrypt your server? I’d like to provide the service to my semi-extended family — not just me and my partner, but also my parents and siblings. And I respect their privacy, so I want to eliminate even the possibility of me, system administrator, accessing their photos.
- cromka 11mo ago
  I specifically care about my server getting stolen. You need Luks encryption in place for that, but also some clever password automation so you don’t type it in each time
seszett 11mo ago

andrew_eu 11mo ago

Very nice the author uses tailscale serve! It's an underrated, and unfortunately under documented, way to host a web service directly to Tailscale. With that you can run a docker compose stack with one extra tailscale container, and then it's immediately a self contained and reasonably portable web server in your tailnet. Immich really is fantastic software, and their roadmap is promising. I hope they have enough funding to keep going.

jatsakthi 11mo ago

learnt a lot from this! Thanks.

fsh 11mo ago

My biggest worry with Immich is how to future-proof the albums. With photos sorted into folders, it should be no problem to access them in a couple of decades. With Immich, I have to rely on the software still working or finding some kind of tool to dump the database.

andrew_eu 11mo ago
I share this worry. You can configure the storage template for the photos and include an "album" part, so if a photo is in some album it'll get sorted into that folder. Then the file tree on disk is as you wish. I haven't tested what it does when a photo is in multiple albums, but it does handle the no album case fine as well.
anotherpaul 11mo ago
Thank you, well put. thats why I am using next cloud and manual curation. Folders is the ultimate future proof structure. But I do see the value of a nice UI. But immich hides the files from me too much for my taste. Although I am sure I can back them up to my PC somehow. But having them just on the server is not my favourite solution.
riedel 11mo ago
I remember that Immich has a mode to not use cryptic hashes but folders for storage. When I used it it was somehow deprecated due to some problems, but supported. I actually stopped using Immich because newer versions run the keep alive via socket.io with a Prostgres notify, which does constant empty WAL flushes, triggering empty page writes on idle.
- DrammBA 11mo ago
  Storage template is not deprecated https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ Also according to https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge the notify issue was fixed July 2024.
  - 11mo ago

vekerdyb 11mo ago

Surprised that neither the article, nor the comments mention Photoprism from what I can see. It’s not I’ve been hosting Photoprism and syncing my photos with PhotoSync from my iPhone for a while now. I would consider switching to another solution if it had in-browser basic editing (cropping, contrast / white balance adjustment, etc). https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/

anotherpaul 11mo ago
So am I seeing this right: Immich, ente and photoprism all compete in a similar space? Seems immich is the most polished webpage, but which solution will become the next cloud for photos is to be seen. Surely it's not next cloud anymore, considering the comments here.
- palata 11mo ago
  > Surely it's not next cloud anymore, considering the comments here. I have been testing Nextcloud for backing up photos from my family members' phones. Wouldn't recommend. The sync on iOS works well for a while, then it stops working, then some files are "locked" and error messages appear, or it just stops syncing, and the only way I find to recover is to essentially restart the sync from scratch. It will then reupload EVERYTHING for hours, even though 95% images are already on the server. Note that in my use-case, the user never opens the app. It has to work in the background, always, and the user should not have to know about it.
andrejserafim 11mo ago
I've switched from photoprism to immich. Immich is a much more active project, bugs are fixed, face recognition is an order of magnitude better, just an overall more solid experience. If you are choosing, I wouldn't doubt for a second to go with immich.
arendtio 11mo ago
Same here. I also have an ente account, but only to check if they made relevant progress. So far, I don't understand why Ente has so much traction when PhotoPrism has the better feature set, in my opinion.

teekert 11mo ago

I also run NixOS (btw) but opted for the container. My Docker compose setup has moved from Arch to Ubuntu to NixOS now, so I like the flexibility of that setup. I also use Tailscale, and use cloudflare as nameserver and Caddy in front of Immich to get an nice url and https. For DNS redirects I use Adguard on the tailnet, but (mostly for family) I also set some redirects in my Mikrotik hEX (E50UG). This way Immich is reachable from anywhere and not on the internet. Unfortunately it looks like the Immich app caches the IP address somewhere? Because it always reports as disconnected whenever Tailscale turns off when I'm at home or the other way around and takes some time/attempts/restarts to get going again. It's been pretty flaky that way... Other than that: Best selfhosted app ever. It has reminded me that video > photos, for family moments. Regularly I go back through the years for that day, love that feature.

Ringz 11mo ago

Immich struggles to act as a true unifying solution for users with large, existing archival collections (DSLRs, scanned film, etc.). Since those „Archival Assets“ are often decades old, already organized into complex, user-defined file structures (e.g., 1998/DATE_PLACE_PROJECT/PLACE_PROJECT_DATE.jpg), and frequently contain incomplete or inconsistent metadata (missing dates, no GPS, different file formats). Immich's current integration solutions (like "External Libraries") treat the archive as a read-only view, which leads to a fragmented user experience: - Changes, facial recognition, or tagging remain only within Immich’s database, failing to write metadata back to the archival files in their original directory structure (last time I checked, might be better now. - My established, meaningful directory structure is ignored or flattened in the Immich view, forcing the user to rely entirely on Immich’s internal date/AI-based organization. My goal (am I the only one?) of having one app view all photos while maintaining the integrity and organizational schema of the archival files on disk is not yet fully met. Immich needs a robust, bi-directional import/sync layer that respects and enhances existing directory structures, rather than just importing files into its own schema.

rcarmo 11mo ago
This is where I'm at, really. I have my own filing hierarchy and storage templates can't really deal with it (and I don't get why they would be needed when all I want is for it to handle an "uploads" directory and re-scan the file tree after I file things)
nickthegreek 11mo ago
This is my main issue with Immich. I had 300gb of local photos organized into folders from digital cameras. Then I wanted to move google photos into it. Ran the scripts only to discover that the imported images were in a rats nest of folders in the immich internal library. I loathed this fragmentation keep hoping for a solution. It looks like I could maybe use PhotoSync to dump everything to folders and just keep everything as an 'External library' in immich, but this is not ideal,

camillomiller 11mo ago

> For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of my data for backup purposes and independence. I know how much Adobe is hated around any creative circle, but tbf I find that Lightroom CC does this pretty well. Adobe has a well done simple helper app that does just that: downloads the entire of your library locally, with all pictures, all edits, everything. For backup purposes is perfect. Lightroom might be expensive for amateurs, but if you even just do a couple of photo jobs per year, it's worth every cent.

wiether 11mo ago

Given how many times I've read praises about Immich here, I tried it a few weeks ago and was quite disappointed. The fact that they don't support sub-albums make it an absolute no-go to me.

flymaipie 11mo ago

I prefer Photoview’s simplicity over Immich. Immich leans too much toward mimicking Google Photos for my taste.

esperent 11mo ago
I would disagree there. I've tried lots of photo managers, and for organizing thousands of photos, I think Google Photos has it pretty much nailed. When choosing a photo/video manager, "works pretty much exactly like Google Photos but without all the AI bullshit and privacy issues" is a major selling point for me. Ideally it would even have the same shortcuts so that my muscle memory still works.

rodwyersoftware 11mo ago

I found the sync clients for iOS to stuck unfortunately, meaning I cannot use this.

rcarmo 11mo ago

I've had nothing but trouble with Immich. It's a CPU hog if you enable any kind of AI/ML (face detection is a notable culprit) or when preprocessing even small phone videos, I can't get it to import an existing photo tree from a filesystem, and the iOS app can't seem to sync reliably...

renegade-otter 11mo ago

Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Photos for others.

gjsman-1000 11mo ago
I was just telling a nonprofit the other day, who in the name of “self hosting” was running their business on a 73 plugin WordPress site: Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Integrate the two. Stop self hosting. (They’re not large enough to do it well; and it already caused them a two week outage.)
- skydhash 11mo ago
  If you need 73 plugins for wordpress, then Wordpress is a poor technology choice for your usecase.
- em-bee 11mo ago
  disagree. as the sister comment mentions, wordpress may have been the wrong choice, but self hosting is never wrong, especially for a non profit who may not have the resources to deal with a situation if a hosting service decides to shut them out.
  - crote 11mo ago
    If they don't have the resources to switch to a different hosting provider, why do you assume they will have the resources to fix things when their self-host solution shits the bed?
    - wobfan 11mo ago
      You're comparing apples to oranges. Switching the ecosystem from something like Shopify to some other shop software requires a lot of manual work, and some of the stuff won't even be transferable 1:1. Fixing some issue with your WordPress installation will require a person who can google and knows a little stuff about webservers, and maybe containers, and will usually go pretty fast, as WordPress is open source and runs almost half the internet, and almost every problem that will come up will have been solved in some StackOverflow thread or GitHub issue. Usually though, if you run WordPress and you're not doing a lot of hacky stuff, you will not encounter problems. Vendors shutting you down, increasing their pricing, or shutting down vital features in their software, happens regularly though. And if it happens, shit hits the fan.

sylens 11mo ago

I’ve experimented with both Immich and Ente over the last year and run Immich in parallel with Google Photos right now for my family. Once they add a few more features to support things like smart albums, I’ll be able to drop Google Photos entirely. I love that the consumer space is getting this kind of attention. It’s one of the biggest opportunities for big tech to lock people into their ecosystem, as photos are something everyone cherishes. You can extort people with ever increasing subscription fees because over time they reach a scale with their own photos that makes it inconvenient to manage themselves. It’s nice to have multiple options that are not Google or Apple.

tgiba 11mo ago

I use my Immich instance locally as photos and videos storage for 7-8 months now. It's really amazing. Reading comments here I'd say it's medium-difficulty tier to set up. I have it on my Elitedesk 800 G3 mini, in Docker Compose, with hardware encoding and it's more than sufficient to handle this work. Never had a bug.

wobfan 11mo ago
I fail to get the problems with self hosting Immich. I mean, obviously you gotta have a server ready, and at least some knowledge about self hosting and docker. But apart from that, installing Immich was like a breeze. It was actually not more than pasting some lines into a docker-compose, and running it. Have been using it for about 1.5 years, and I have not a single problem, which is quite incredible for a software that basically has all features that Google Photos has.
Groxx 11mo ago
As a counter-anecdote: literally just `docker compose up` on a spare laptop for me, and it's working great (though it's only available on the local network). There might be stuff to tune (e.g. I'm pretty sure it's not using my GPU), but it's almost totally unnecessary for just one household of people's use - the initial huge google-photos-takeout took an hour or three to finish indexing with all the features enabled, but all new stuff is done within seconds. The most I've done is to swap the actual photo storage to an external drive, which is just a "move that folder, custom mapping in the docker command" change. On hardware that doesn't have docker, or is significantly more resource constrained somehow: yea, I completely believe it. I haven't tried that, but given the features it makes total sense that it'd be harder.

uzername 11mo ago

I had immich running great for a while, maybe for months. It would seamlessly sync photos from phone to local home server. I was going to setup nightly outbound sync too (1 is none, 2 is some). I updated the container for usual appliance maintenance. Entire thing is toast. Metadata files can't be read, mounted, permission issues and more. It's been four months since.

majkinetor 11mo ago
That is why you should never update stuff that works :)
Trasmatta 11mo ago
This is why I just can't deal with self hosting... I'm already burnt out on this kind of stuff in my day job. And something like this will ALWAYS happen eventually.
Groxx 11mo ago
> permission issues as an un-solicited drive-by suggestion: see if they're owned by root? you may have sudo'd the original run. since you're at least a few months behind though, do check for breaking changes: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions?discussions_q=label%3Achangelog%3Abreaking-change+sort%3Adate_created https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions?discussions... they've pretty consistently had instructions, but you unfortunately mostly have to know to look for it. not sure why the upgrade notification doesn't make it super incredibly painfully obvious.
nickthegreek 11mo ago
In a similar situation and it just drained all my excitement for immich after I spent so many hours cleaning up and deduping photos. This content is too important to me have to deal with these issues, especially with how immich chooses to store its internal library photos.

raw_anon_1111 11mo ago

I honestly thought there was some app - even one from Google - that let you just run on your Windows or Mac and downloaded all of your Google Photos to your computer. That’s all the author is trying to do. He isn’t trying to avoid or replace Google Photos - just have a local backup. Even Apple has a Windows app that does that for iCloud Photos

konart 11mo ago

I personally prefer Photoprism more. Much more responsive and clear UI, golang backend are two main subjective advantages.

LightBug1 11mo ago

This will be my Christmas project. Thanks, author.

miladyincontrol 11mo ago

As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer. Its not perfect but its great to be able to just search for things in a photo and find any matches across dozens of TBs of raws, without having to have some 3rd party cloud AI nonsense do all the work. The only thing I wish they could get integrated is support for jxl compressed raws, which requires them compile libraw with adobe's sdk.

TacticalCoder 11mo ago
> As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer. I installed immich in a VM. And the VM is using GPU passthrough. I don't see how it's overkill: immich is a kitchen sink with hundreds if not thousands of dependencies and hardly a month goes by without yet another massive exploit affecting package managers. I'm not saying VM escapes exploit aren't a thing but this greatly raises the bar. When one install a kitchen sink as gigantic as immich, anything that can help contain exploits is most welcome. So: immich in a VM and if you want a GPU, just do GPU passthrough. I agree that the search using facial recognition is nice in immich that said.
qskousen 11mo ago
It seems like you are saying the AI features don't work if you don't have a GPU, if I understood correctly, but I have my install on a server with no GPU and the object search and facial recognition features work fine. Probably slower to generate the embeddings, but I don't have any comparison to make.

darrmit 11mo ago

I have been experimenting with Immich off and on for over a year, first in docker-compose and now in podman. It is slick and seamless in a lot of ways, but the portability and upgrade ability are questionable, as others have highlighted. For example, when they moved between Postgres container versions, it required a manual edit to the compose file to adjust the image. Even if you managed to get it set up initially in docker, it’s these sorts of concepts that are way more advanced than the vast majority of people who may even be interested in self-hosting. For a hobbyist self-hoster it’s cool and fun, but not something at this point I’d trust my photos to alone. I have considered Ente for that but today it’s still iCloud Photos.

guluarte 11mo ago

that PC is overkill for that

pavel_lishin 11mo ago

> Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup. I didn't even realize this tool existed. I tried something like it awhile back, but it didn't work to my satisfaction (I don't remember why), so my awful, awful, awful workflow is to use the Google Takeout functionality to generate something like 8 .tar.gz files (50 gigabytes each), manually download each one (being prompted for authentication each time), and then rsyncing them over to my local server, and finally uncompressing them. It's very lovely how much Google doesn't want you to exfiltrate your own data. I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it.

hombre_fatal 11mo ago
> I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it. LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo. After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the service to Tailscale, and then give me a todo list reminder of what I needed to do to mirror my Macbook iCloud/Photo.app gallery to it and then see it on my iPhone... ...than any of the times I've had to work around "black box says no", much like your example. Just a couple years ago, this wasn't the case. I didn't have the energy to ssh into my server and remember how things are set up and then read a bunch of docs and risk having to go into a manual debug loop any time a service breaks. LLM does all that. I never even read Nix docs. LLM does that too. In fact, it was fairly fun to finally get a good cross-platform setup working in general to divest from Apple thanks to LLM + Nix. I really like where things are going in this regard. I don't need any of this crap anymore that I used to use because it was the only way to get something that Just Worked. By the time I lose my software job and have to compete with you lot, H1Bs, and teenagers to fold sweaters at Hollister, I won't need to use a single bit of proprietary software. It will be a huge consolation.
- 11mo ago

lucb1e 11mo ago

https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements > RAM: Minimum 4GB, recommended 6GB Wow. When factoring in the OS, that's an entire system's worth of RAM dedicated to just hosting files! What does it use all this for? Or is this just for when it occasionally (upon uploading new pictures) loads the image recognition neural net? I'd have to stop Immich whenever I want to do some other RAM-heavy task. All my other services (including database, several web servers with a bunch of web services, a Windows VM, git server, email, redis...) + the host OS and any redundancy caused by using containers, use 4.6GB combined, peaking to 6GB on occasion > CPU: Minimum 2 cores, recommended 4 cores Would be good to know how fast those cores should be. My hardware is a mobile platform from 2012, and I've noticed each core is faster than a modern Pi as well as e.g. the "dedicated cores" you get from DigitalOcean. It really depends what you run it on, not how many of them you have

neurostimulant 11mo ago
It has modern features that requires relatively heavy processing such as facial recognition, finding similar images, ocr, transcoding videos, etc. I think it only needs those computing resources when you upload new images/videos.
- lucb1e 11mo ago
  Any idea how much it uses when you're not uploading new pictures? If it just needs it on occasion (and I can control when by not uploading at times where I'm using it for other purposes), that would probably be worth it since I have the spare capacity 99% of the time
  - neurostimulant 11mo ago
    I think you can disable machine learning stuff in the settings. And yes, you can control when the sync happen, or even have it only triggered manually and never automatically. My instance when not running any photo/video processing job: - immich server: cpu: 0.51% ram: 753MiB - immich redis: cpu: 0.48 ram: 19.64MiB - immich machine learning: cpu: 0% ram: 209.3MiB