6 ms·

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

by 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.
    - esseph 11mo ago
      If you're not Cloudflare averse... Setup immich VM or docker container with a cloudflare tunnel Front access with Cloudflare Access (ZeroTrust) for free. Set "can only be accessed by users with email = xyz@myuser” Done. Now assuming this is the same user email as the one you shared photos with, there is a base level of security keeping the riffraff away. Home IP is never exposed either, because it's proxied through the cf tunnel.
      - cromka 11mo ago
        I dont need that. I use wireguard to connect to my LAN. I meant risk of getting your data stolen either through physical breakup or some security vulnerability
  - navane 11mo ago
    How safe is that to set up for novice it people? I have a pi with pi-hole on it and am thinking about putting immich on it but the fact that it exposes itself outside my LAN frightens me.
    - kristjank 11mo ago
      I have it set up in a container that I keep updated. Then it's reverse proxied by another container which runs nginx proxy manager, which keeps the HTTPS encryption online. So far, the maintenance has only been checking whether a new version has been released and docker pulling the images, then restarting the containers.
    - Duralias 11mo ago
      If you are worried about that then I can highly recommend https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy I keep that running on a VPS, but with with proper firewalling you could probably run it on the same machine.
- bicepjai 11mo ago
  I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.
  - Bishonen88 11mo ago
    Ugreen has it. It has conditional albums in which one can setup rules like person, file type, location, anniversary and more and share a live album. Or leave all params empty and simply mirror the entire library.
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button. Flip a switch and then what, are you getting a isolated public URL to share? Or you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted?
    - DrammBA 11mo ago
      > you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted I think the previous commenter misunderstood your question, this is the answer (you can also put it behind something like cloudflared tunnels). Immich is a service like any other running on your server, if you want it exposed to the internet you need to do it yourself (get a domain, expose the service to the internet via your home ip or a tunnel like cloudflared, and link that to your domain). After that, Immich allows you to share public folders (anyone with the link can see the album, no auth), or private folders (people have to auth with your immich server, you either create an account for them since you're the admin, or set up oauth with automatic account creation).
    - bicepjai 10mo ago
      I will explain my use case. We use iPhones in our family. We have a 2TB iCloud plan, but we have around 8TB of media from our phones. So I started using boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd to download iCloud photos daily and keep only the past 2 years of media on our phones for iCloud features. I wanted a separate app to view these TBs of media on my phone, tried many services, and settled on Immich. Whenever my wife and I want to share photos, we usually have to create albums and send links or share media through messages. That is a very painful way to view each other's media. I wanted a service to just share all our photos with each other so that they would be in the same timeline. There was none available, and I had seen people complain about that on HN. Immich has that feature, where you can select who to share the whole library with. Enabling that I can see all my photos and my wife's photos in the same timeline and same for my wife. Immich lets everyone log in with their own credentials, and it's hosted on Coolify with a Cloudflare Tunnel.
- cyberax 11mo ago
  If you want to share with family, you can permanently add them as users to your Immich instance. Otherwise, you can create a link that they can use.
euleriancon 11mo ago
There are still some features that a miss from Google photos. There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated. Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google Photos. It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back, but it isn't perfect yet.
- WD-42 11mo ago
  The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me, is that not what you are talking about?
  - j_bum 11mo ago
    It seems like he’s saying that he could create an album and add a rule saying “add all pictures of John and Jan”
  - zeendo 11mo ago
    Not who you're replying to, but no - this isn't the same. You can't share that album with others. Or have others collaborate on it. You can do this with a few scripts and the Immich API - but that's not something the average user will do.
- Vinnl 11mo ago
  I'm waiting for that first point to. The good news is that they just started work on workflows, which should allow for that.
- piquadrat 11mo ago
  That's something that should be possible with the upcoming Workflow feature. Some details can be found in the November Recap blog post. https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap
- Liftyee 11mo ago
  Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face recognition and context/object search to be miles better than Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people. Almost all my Google Photos "people" are mix-and-matched similar looking faces, so it's borderline useless. Immich isn't perfect, but it gives me the control to rerun face recognition and reassign faces when I want, even on my ancient GTX 1060.
jredwards 11mo ago
I'm actually in the process of building a home NAS server primarily for this purpose. Delighted to hear everyone has such a good experience.
petesergeant 11mo ago
Other than redundant hosting, what will I get as an Apple user by setting this up? It would be very easy to set up, just not sure what I’m gaining from it
- big-and-small 11mo ago
  For once iCloud have a terrible sync speed. Even 500GB of photos / videos take forever to sync like a week and I can't imagine what it will take for someone with multi-TB archives.
  - volemo 11mo ago
    Yes, but it's a one times occurrence, isn't it?
    - big-and-small 11mo ago
      I'd imagine if you're person who make a lot of photos / videos slow sync can be pretty annoying. Unfortunately I'm not one of them to tell, but just had to wait like a week for the first sync of my wife's iPhone to finish.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 11mo ago
  I don't think it would add any value for you. For me, it adds value because I only have to turn my head to the left to see the computer that contains all my photos since I started taking pictures with a smartphone.
- yreg 11mo ago
  I plan to set up Immich so that I can have a central photo storage. Apple Photos play poorly when you want to put the library on an external drive (and even more poorly when you want to put it on a networked drive).
- palata 11mo ago
  Supporting someone who is not TooBigTech is a valid concern, IMO. The selling point for me is that it is NOT TooBigTech. It doesn't have to be as good as TooBigTech, but it has to be reliable enough. In my case it means that it should be able to sync from iOS/Android, in the background, even if the user never opens the app, and it should never get out of sync and require setting up everything again. Nextcloud fails at that.
halapro 11mo ago
Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part. How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.
- vachina 11mo ago
  I’d gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a fee forever for essentially… storing files on drives. We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.
  - sebastiennight 11mo ago
    > We got to this stage of having to sync ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶l̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶s̶. "because a company that sells you Cloud storage has very few incentives to give away more local storage, or compress/optimize the files generated by its camera app." might be more accurate
  - dontlaugh 11mo ago
    More device storage wouldn’t help. I couldn’t fit all of my pictures on any phone sold today.
  - volemo 11mo ago
    > We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices. It's not why I use sync services. All my photos fit on my devices (more or less). But I want to have seamless access to my files from both of my devices. And most importantly the sync is my first line of backup, i.e. if my phone gets obliterated I don't loose a day or two of files and photos, I only loose a couple of minutes.
- WD-42 11mo ago
  Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.
realharo 11mo ago
Not in every way. Seems it has issues with Ultra HDR (https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/23094 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/23094)
javier2 11mo ago
For the record, I think Immich is very good, and I use it myself. But there is something about the design and performance in the mobile app that still makes it feel "not quite there yet" on iOS at least.
- SlightlyLeftPad 11mo ago
  Are you on the latest version?
newsoftheday 11mo ago
>Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. Of what I selfhost, I've never felt I was having to concede on anything.

by 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.
  - esseph 11mo ago
    If you're not Cloudflare averse... Setup immich VM or docker container with a cloudflare tunnel Front access with Cloudflare Access (ZeroTrust) for free. Set "can only be accessed by users with email = xyz@myuser” Done. Now assuming this is the same user email as the one you shared photos with, there is a base level of security keeping the riffraff away. Home IP is never exposed either, because it's proxied through the cf tunnel.
    - cromka 11mo ago
      I dont need that. I use wireguard to connect to my LAN. I meant risk of getting your data stolen either through physical breakup or some security vulnerability
- navane 11mo ago
  How safe is that to set up for novice it people? I have a pi with pi-hole on it and am thinking about putting immich on it but the fact that it exposes itself outside my LAN frightens me.
  - kristjank 11mo ago
    I have it set up in a container that I keep updated. Then it's reverse proxied by another container which runs nginx proxy manager, which keeps the HTTPS encryption online. So far, the maintenance has only been checking whether a new version has been released and docker pulling the images, then restarting the containers.
  - Duralias 11mo ago
    If you are worried about that then I can highly recommend https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy I keep that running on a VPS, but with with proper firewalling you could probably run it on the same machine.
bicepjai 11mo ago
I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.
- Bishonen88 11mo ago
  Ugreen has it. It has conditional albums in which one can setup rules like person, file type, location, anniversary and more and share a live album. Or leave all params empty and simply mirror the entire library.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button. Flip a switch and then what, are you getting a isolated public URL to share? Or you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted?
  - DrammBA 11mo ago
    > you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted I think the previous commenter misunderstood your question, this is the answer (you can also put it behind something like cloudflared tunnels). Immich is a service like any other running on your server, if you want it exposed to the internet you need to do it yourself (get a domain, expose the service to the internet via your home ip or a tunnel like cloudflared, and link that to your domain). After that, Immich allows you to share public folders (anyone with the link can see the album, no auth), or private folders (people have to auth with your immich server, you either create an account for them since you're the admin, or set up oauth with automatic account creation).
  - bicepjai 10mo ago
    I will explain my use case. We use iPhones in our family. We have a 2TB iCloud plan, but we have around 8TB of media from our phones. So I started using boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd to download iCloud photos daily and keep only the past 2 years of media on our phones for iCloud features. I wanted a separate app to view these TBs of media on my phone, tried many services, and settled on Immich. Whenever my wife and I want to share photos, we usually have to create albums and send links or share media through messages. That is a very painful way to view each other's media. I wanted a service to just share all our photos with each other so that they would be in the same timeline. There was none available, and I had seen people complain about that on HN. Immich has that feature, where you can select who to share the whole library with. Enabling that I can see all my photos and my wife's photos in the same timeline and same for my wife. Immich lets everyone log in with their own credentials, and it's hosted on Coolify with a Cloudflare Tunnel.
cyberax 11mo ago
If you want to share with family, you can permanently add them as users to your Immich instance. Otherwise, you can create a link that they can use.

euleriancon 11mo ago

There are still some features that a miss from Google photos. There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated. Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google Photos. It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back, but it isn't perfect yet.

WD-42 11mo ago
The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me, is that not what you are talking about?
- j_bum 11mo ago
  It seems like he’s saying that he could create an album and add a rule saying “add all pictures of John and Jan”
- zeendo 11mo ago
  Not who you're replying to, but no - this isn't the same. You can't share that album with others. Or have others collaborate on it. You can do this with a few scripts and the Immich API - but that's not something the average user will do.
Vinnl 11mo ago
I'm waiting for that first point to. The good news is that they just started work on workflows, which should allow for that.
piquadrat 11mo ago
That's something that should be possible with the upcoming Workflow feature. Some details can be found in the November Recap blog post. https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap
Liftyee 11mo ago
Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face recognition and context/object search to be miles better than Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people. Almost all my Google Photos "people" are mix-and-matched similar looking faces, so it's borderline useless. Immich isn't perfect, but it gives me the control to rerun face recognition and reassign faces when I want, even on my ancient GTX 1060.

jredwards 11mo ago

I'm actually in the process of building a home NAS server primarily for this purpose. Delighted to hear everyone has such a good experience.

petesergeant 11mo ago

Other than redundant hosting, what will I get as an Apple user by setting this up? It would be very easy to set up, just not sure what I’m gaining from it

big-and-small 11mo ago
For once iCloud have a terrible sync speed. Even 500GB of photos / videos take forever to sync like a week and I can't imagine what it will take for someone with multi-TB archives.
- volemo 11mo ago
  Yes, but it's a one times occurrence, isn't it?
  - big-and-small 11mo ago
    I'd imagine if you're person who make a lot of photos / videos slow sync can be pretty annoying. Unfortunately I'm not one of them to tell, but just had to wait like a week for the first sync of my wife's iPhone to finish.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 11mo ago
I don't think it would add any value for you. For me, it adds value because I only have to turn my head to the left to see the computer that contains all my photos since I started taking pictures with a smartphone.
yreg 11mo ago
I plan to set up Immich so that I can have a central photo storage. Apple Photos play poorly when you want to put the library on an external drive (and even more poorly when you want to put it on a networked drive).
palata 11mo ago
Supporting someone who is not TooBigTech is a valid concern, IMO. The selling point for me is that it is NOT TooBigTech. It doesn't have to be as good as TooBigTech, but it has to be reliable enough. In my case it means that it should be able to sync from iOS/Android, in the background, even if the user never opens the app, and it should never get out of sync and require setting up everything again. Nextcloud fails at that.

halapro 11mo ago

Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part. How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.

vachina 11mo ago
I’d gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a fee forever for essentially… storing files on drives. We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.
- sebastiennight 11mo ago
  > We got to this stage of having to sync ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶l̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶s̶. "because a company that sells you Cloud storage has very few incentives to give away more local storage, or compress/optimize the files generated by its camera app." might be more accurate
- dontlaugh 11mo ago
  More device storage wouldn’t help. I couldn’t fit all of my pictures on any phone sold today.
- volemo 11mo ago
  > We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices. It's not why I use sync services. All my photos fit on my devices (more or less). But I want to have seamless access to my files from both of my devices. And most importantly the sync is my first line of backup, i.e. if my phone gets obliterated I don't loose a day or two of files and photos, I only loose a couple of minutes.
WD-42 11mo ago
Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.

realharo 11mo ago

Not in every way. Seems it has issues with Ultra HDR (https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/23094 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/23094)

javier2 11mo ago

For the record, I think Immich is very good, and I use it myself. But there is something about the design and performance in the mobile app that still makes it feel "not quite there yet" on iOS at least.

SlightlyLeftPad 11mo ago
Are you on the latest version?

newsoftheday 11mo ago

>Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. Of what I selfhost, I've never felt I was having to concede on anything.