9 ms·

Immich 3.0

650 points by hashier 3mo ago

phikappa 3mo ago
There's a lot of things I spent a ton of time setting up, use once, and then never again. Tons of things that are easy to set up, and provide small benefits every day for a long time. Immich has got to be the thing that I've spent ages setting up, use extremely infrequently but the one time a year I use it I'm so happy I did. Great software.
- prudhvis 3mo ago
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- nickthegreek 3mo ago
  Man, I wish my experience was as nice. I used the proxmox lxc for it and after a 2 months of organizing I had some corruption and didn't have the fortitude to get through the debugging. It might have been related to a big version migration if I remember correctly. It turned me off the stack. The upgrading wasn't as turnkey as I wanted it to be and I dont think the case is different today. I just want to be able to organize my folders outside of some dumb library system and immich at the time fought that as well.
  - altran1502 3mo ago
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  - ravenstine 3mo ago
    I'm not sure I will ever upgrade Immich again. When I upgraded to the next minor version (I forget which off the top of my head), the data migration corrupted my database such that no images would be served. Fortunately I had the old database backed up, so I restored it, rolled back to the older version of Immich, and things were back to normal. I like Immich, but this is not good for software that's beyond the first major version, and also handles archiving people's personal data.
    - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
      > Fortunately I had the old database backed up You say this as if it wasn’t Immich itself that backed up the database automatically next to your image files. I think they’re one of the best self-hosted services when it comes to backup/restore — enabling it by default — and when it comes to migrations — no breaking changes in minor versions after 1.0. Did you report this issue so I could try and reproduce it?
      - stavros 3mo ago
        I had an issue where my thumbnails were borked somehow, so I deleted them all. However, I didn't delete the database entries, so they never got regenerated. I ended up doing that manually, but it's great to see that is now a first class citizen in 3.0.0. I love Immich.
  - Saris 3mo ago
    In proxmox restoring a backup is really easy, I'm surprised you didn't do that!
    - senectus1 3mo ago
      if you have a PBS its just incredibly simple.
    - skottenborg 3mo ago
      Yes! Or even better, use Proxmox snapshots during upgrades for easy rollback on failure
- darkwater 3mo ago
  In my case I spent it not so much time setting it up, some time upgrading with some manual work required from time to time with breaking changes (but not so often) and I use it weekly, it just works and it's wonderful.
DavideNL 3mo ago
I don't want yet another self hosted service to manage (update, backups, possible hardware failures, energy costs, ups, etc.). Unfortunately Immich is not end-to-end encrypted. If that would have be the case i'd use https://pixelunion.eu/ https://pixelunion.eu/ Seems like a great app though. So... i'm still pondering what to do :-)
- mcsniff 3mo ago
  Okay? So don't use it, use a managed service like Google Photos, Apple Photos, Dropbox, etc where your photos and files might be arbitrarily removed or your access to them limited while they are scanned for disavowed content. You can also just use a secure transport layer (like WireGuard or a VPN) instead of relying on every project to implement end-to-end encryption.
- jrm4 3mo ago
  VPN (or other) Tunnel. That's the objective answer. There's no mystery here. That's exactly how you get what you want and it's not too hard. Not trying to dunk on you or anyone one but this is an easily solved problem, and I think I want to highlight it like this to make sure everyone understands. Anything web/internet/network service thing, you can add this on. This composability is important to remember in software, this even goes back to "The Unix Way" type stuff.
  - ravenstine 3mo ago
    It's also a kind of funny thing how HN has the attitude of "never implement your own encrypted anything" but then demand their apps build in e2e encryption. It may be one abstraction higher, but it's still fundamentally the same problem. With the unfortunate exception of web browsers, if I'm going to use something that performs encryption, then I want encryption to be the only job it has.
  - PhilipRoman 3mo ago
    How are VPNs related to end-to-end encryption?
mopsi 3mo ago
Does Immich support read-only source folders yet? I'd like to keep the original files intact, but allow Immich to index them.
- zyberzero 3mo ago
  Yes, at least for a year. There is a ”external library” feature, I think that does what you want.
  - mopsi 3mo ago
    Thank you! That was not available the last time I checked.
    - bo0tzz 3mo ago
      It's been available for nearly three years
- etnoy 3mo ago
  Yes, using external libraries. It's been a feature for several years. Make it read-only by mounting docker compose read only
- slipperybeluga 3mo ago
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MohamedMabrouk 3mo ago
Immich is an amazing software. I use it regularly as an alternative along side Google photos. I keep in it large videos that I wouldn't upload normally to Google photos + the snappy experience at home vs Cloud-Bades solution.
brewtide 3mo ago
Does anyone have any pointers on the best way to import roughly 14 Google takeout chunks into immich? I've downloaded all the chunks once, only to find them corrupted due to... Their 50gb size and using a browser in theory. One also cannot seem to use wget or alternatives because of the auth / session cookies required via Google takeout. I've yet to even broach the aspect of importing each giant bundle into immich because I've not had success in even grabbing the takeout files correctly, but would LOVE pointers on the best way of importing the roughly 700gb into the database without it ALL going wrong. I've had great success with immich running in docker for the past year or so, although I have yet to upgrade to the newest version. Google photos backups have been disabled on my phone for a year or so, but I yet to haul in all of the past years. Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud". Great software.
- altran1502 3mo ago
  You can use this tool to get them into Immich, it will parse all the metadata and recreate albums as you have in GPhotos https://github.com/simulot/immich-go https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
  - exhilaration 3mo ago
    Oh wow, it recreates the Google Photos albums? That's the first time I've heard of a tool doing that. I've spent a ton of time organizing my Google Photos albums, that's a big reason I stay with it.
- etnoy 3mo ago
  immich-go has what you need
  - mrgaro 3mo ago
    This! When you have the pictures on your disk just use immich-go to import them.
- 3mo ago
Cider9986 3mo ago
When I was switching to GrapheneOS from iOS, I decided to self host my photos. I considered Immich, but I settled on Ente because of the encryption. Ente Photos is extremely polished and it's comparable quality to Apple photos. It's cool they keep the server open and selfhostable instead of only open clients like many e2ee projects do. I like how you can share an album and anyone can contribute to it without an account. Another cool feature is that you can select photos to lock when you hand your phone to somebody so they can only see the ones you selected without your device unlock.
- kristopolous 3mo ago
  for people wondering: "Ente Photos is a paid service, but we offer 10GB of free storage. You can also >>clone this repository and choose to self-host<<." So both forms... https://github.com/ente/ente https://github.com/ente/ente
  - esperent 3mo ago
    I've been bitten too many times - is Ente a commercial product that pays lip service to self hosting as form of marketing, but with friction to guide you towards the hosted version (e.g. rocketchat and many others) or does it genuinely support self hosting as a first class product?
    - sylens 3mo ago
      The latter, it works quite well
    - Cider9986 3mo ago
      I self host it and it's polished.
- satvikpendem 3mo ago
  Ente Auth is also the best, because it works on any device, including the one you're trying to access (maybe it defeats the purpose of 2FA but sometimes I don't care).
slipperybeluga 3mo ago
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psadauskas 3mo ago
Has the ios photo sync gotten better? I've got 20k photos on my phone, and last I tried it filled up the storage on my phone with the originals, and never completed the process, even after leaving my phone open, unlocked, and the immich app running in the foreground for several days, on the same local network as the server. I know they were working on it, but haven't kept up, I just want to know if it works better now and I should try again.
- Lukas_Skywalker 3mo ago
  I have synced ~9000 photos from my phone in february. That worked pretty well. I was done in about 10 hours. I don't remember whether the originals were downloaded, or whether they were deleted automatically afterwards. Felt like a smooth process though.
- gunapologist99 3mo ago
  Likely more of an IOS issue than Immich issue. Apple doesn't care for apps that make it easier to exit iCloud.
  - azuanrb 3mo ago
    No, it’s an Immich issue. Not OP, but I was already using Synology Photos. Synology finished syncing my library in two days, while Immich was still syncing after more than a week. I decided it wasn’t worth it after that experience.
    - Larrikin 3mo ago
      Why are you syncing from your phone instead of your Synology then? Can't you sync from your NAS then just have pictures uploaded as you take them? iOS has a lot of restrictions compared to Android so two days really doesn't feel like a meaningful difference from a week.
      - Grombobulous 3mo ago
        I’m not an Immich or Synology user but essentially the mobile apps end up replicating your whole structure a little better, at least when I did the iCloud library to Ente import. I could have done a data download from Apple but essentially leaving the Ente app open and choosing my albums to back up was a “set it and forget it” process.
oliyoung 3mo ago
Immich is such a no-brainer replacement for Apple Photos or Google Photos, combined with VPN like Tailscale, it's almost a drop in replacement
- ivanjermakov 3mo ago
  Beware that migrating back from Immich to iCloud/Google is not something Immich cares about. There is no "download all" anywhere, best way is to go to the server and get raw files from there. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/14365 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/14365
  - Panda4 3mo ago
    A download button would be great but the files are already stored on the device you can copy them with a usb or go on the device and upload it directly.
  - stogot 3mo ago
    There’s no download all in apple photos either unless they added it
    - Terretta 3mo ago
      And yet, the same is true for Apple photos about ease of export: If you set the pref to keep originals locally, they're all on your drive, in original form, as well as the derived versions including caches of raw to jpeg, resolutions, and edited versions. That said, Apple Photos does let you export even if only in cloud. Open the library, select all, and File > Export ... > Export Unmodified Originals. It pauses for a second or two on my quarter million images, but is then happy to comply.
      - konart 3mo ago
        Or you can get all you data from https://privacy.apple.com/account https://privacy.apple.com/account
thenews 3mo ago
Immich is amazing, been using it as a backup since my phone is always full
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3mo ago
I got annoyed with Immich and external storage, because in order for every user to have their own facial recognition data on a large set of photos, you have to add the folder as external storage for each user, which means image previews for each user, even though the source image is the same. So if you have 3 users, you use up 3 times the space for the same thumbnail image. It got to where I had 20% of my space was just thumbnails for each user, even though it was one set of images in the external storage. Maybe that's changed recently.
- Mashimo 3mo ago
  I don't think that has changed, but AFAIK is on the Roadmap. Or at least they talked about it.
morgan814 3mo ago
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AussieWog93 3mo ago
So many comments here about missing end to end encryption, but seriously - why would anyone want this? Lets say burglars break in and steal your homelab. Because you don't have e2ee, they can see all the photos you saved of your dead grandmother! Oh no! Or, in the more likely scenario that something happens to your phone, the lack of e2ee means that even if you lost your keys you didn't lose the only memories that remain of your grandma - you just copy across the .jpgs to a new device.
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  I think we can imagine a scenario where not all of our photos are non-sensitive. I also imagine that a true E2EE architecture means you have more flexibility with cloud storage, managed hosting, and off-site backups.
  - AussieWog93 3mo ago
    I hear ya, I was being a little bit over the top. But I really do think that for every one user who would turn on e2ee and get some genuine benefit out of it, there would be a dozen that turn it on because "encryption good" and accidentally lose all their data.
    - Grombobulous 3mo ago
      True, e2ee is pretty scary as far as data loss. Still, good application design can help mitigate that. Apple does it with their e2ee recovery methods, although Ente does rely on a recovery key that you should print out and put in a safe as well as store in other safe locations. But also, what I love about the E2EE of Ente is that I can securely use a cloud hosted provider but then my home NAS backups are unencrypted. The Ente desktop app has a continuous export feature where I just leave the application on my main desktop computer and it constantly backs it up to my home NAS. It also does the local machine learning and video streaming encoding processing on the desktop. So, if I lose my Ente account, no big deal. I get another one and wipe everything and restore from my NAS backup. I feel like this is the best of all worlds. I get cloud convenience and no real self-hosting burden along with solid ownership of my data. Perhaps Immich doesn’t bother with e2ee since it’s primarily designed for self-hosting, while for Ente it’s meant to be suitable for both a paid cloud service and self-hosting.
rewgs 3mo ago
Immich is the best self-hosted app I use. Hats off to the developers!
poisonborz 3mo ago
I wish they would better support external image sources - images not uploaded/managed by Immich, just a folder of images it has access to - especially if it's read only. It mostly works, but the UI and logic breaks in a lot of little ways.
- etnoy 3mo ago
  We know, and it's something we're working on. The plan is to unify the external and internal libraries in a better way
- neogodless 3mo ago
  Yup. I love Immich, but I'm also a control freak, so my 25 years of digital photos I had before using Immich still exist in an External Library. It mostly works but I still have some issues. Like I keep getting a batch of ~70 photos that lose their "date taken" and revert to the date/time I started using Immich. (Fortunately the file names are date/times and I can manually go through and fix them, but having done it at least three times, it's getting old!) I "restarted" maybe twice when I first got into Immich to find a good set up for playing reasonably nicely with external libraries, but it does need just a bit more polish. Good to see a sibling comment that it's on their list of priorities! Hackers The coolest thing I've done with Immich is just set up Docker on a more powerful machine, run the machine learning libraries, and point my instance (on a low powered server) to use that external computing for face recognition and OCR. Very cool!
qsera 3mo ago
I have come to the realisation that I don't need 10,000 photos. I probably need < 100. I will print them and keep them in a paper album... Which I am yet to do...
- gitaarik 3mo ago
  And where is the pool you pick these 100 photos from?
  - qsera 3mo ago
    local hard drives..
- aerzen 3mo ago
  My wife only printed the 6 photo albums because I gathered all our photos from three different Google Photos accounts, a hard drive, and two laptops. And yes, we only look at physical photos or the "on this day X years ago" reels. But to get here, Immich was a valuable tool.
- pvdebbe 3mo ago
  I have realized the same. Only it is different 100 photos every year.
- darkwater 3mo ago
  Print them, absolutely, you won't regret it! But it's also good to keep a local and locally owned digital version neatly organized.
apples_oranges 3mo ago
Does it have image editing tools like rotate and crop and is it aware of basic exif metadata?
- omnimus 3mo ago
  Yes. But it's not editor. You don't have manual export, you crop/rotate thumbnails which might not be suitable for print for example.
- qxxx 3mo ago
  yes. https://docs.immich.app/features/editing/ https://docs.immich.app/features/editing/ And it is very aware of exif. It also has AI features to analyze the photos (or videos) and you can for example search for "cat" and it will find all photos with cats.
floren 3mo ago
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cromka 3mo ago
I have a different bash with them than the lack of E2EE: they do not make it easy to import from other servicesvlike Google Photos or iCloud, which should be a priority. They rely on immich-go project, which is ridden with bugs and basically abandonware by now. Their own iOS app, which can also be used for syncing iCloud gallery, has outstanding, 2 y/o or so bugs that will fail to upload the Live Motion photos. My photos exported to Immigh have some 9000 broken, half imported Live Photos and I just don't have time to fix that. The fact that THIS is not their priority, the most comprehensively A-B tested feature is beyond me. Who cares about OCR if you can't trust that they didn't butcher your imported memories? I just don't get it!
- cuu508 3mo ago
  > I just don't get it! This is open source, volunteer developers often focus on doing things that are fun to them, or that scratch their own itch. I can't imagine dealing with Google Photos semi-broken exports is fun to anybody, and you only deal with the pain of the import once, afterwards there's no itch to scratch.
  - cromka 3mo ago
    They make money on that, it's not just a hobby project
    - Valodim 3mo ago
      Their business model is basically donations, it's not a for-profit operation. Maybe if you consider yourself less of a customer and more the beneficiary of a community effort, it'll be easier to "get"
      - cromka 3mo ago
        Don't patronize me, my arguments still stand: they offer all bells and whistles while completely dropping the ball at making you feel those photos are well taken care of. The core employees live off of Immich so spare me the spiel.
slaye 3mo ago
An incredible piece of software, on par with Google Photos. I've been using it behind Tailscale for months with no problems ever since I first got into homelabbing. Actually, moving from Google Photos to Immich after I hit my 100GB storage limit was the whole reason I got into self-hosting, and what a fun ride that has been! I can't believe self-hosted products of this caliber are free. Huge shout-out to HomeAssistant, PiHole, paperless-ngx, Dawarich, and countless others for the same reason. Congrats to the team on the release and thank you for helping me catalogue my personal memories
- Valodim 3mo ago
  Please buy a license if you are happy with the project :) it's free, but you can still buy a license for a small amount of what you saved
  - slaye 3mo ago
    Done! <3
  - fnands 3mo ago
    Good point. Will do so as well. I've been using it for about a year now on my NAS. I basically set it and forget it, and it has just worked.
- rrvsh 3mo ago
  I would say at this point it's better than Google Photos!! The team is absolutely amazing, and I agree that it's astounding to see IMO the best (general purpose) photo app out there being open source
- vividfrier 3mo ago
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- Gareth321 3mo ago
  I would like to replace iCloud but it doesn't seem to sync changes/deletions with iPhone yet. I don't want to have to make changes/deletions in two places every time. v3 seems to have improved background uploads which is great as that has been a frequent complaint.
penetrarthur 3mo ago
Has anyone personally upgraded to 3.0? How is the experience?
- handity 3mo ago
  docker compose down IMMICH_VERSION=v3 docker compose pull docker compose up No issues so far. The web UI is not significantly changed, the biggest improvements are on mobile.
- neogodless 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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nonbind 3mo ago
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FabCH 3mo ago
A lot of people talking about encryption in the comment section, thought I would share my setup. I have been running Immich for family and friends on a Hetzner auction server for about 1.5 years now. Hetzner community provides official full-disk encryption documentation: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-debian-with-lvm-encrypted-nvme-software-raid https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-debian-with-... Letsencrypt gives free reliable SSL. You can easily hide Immich behind Nginx proxy that handles SSL for you. Add cron based automated backup of the entire Immich data to a local encrypted NAS and there you go. Reliable, end-to-end, encrypted at rest setup. So far, it required exactly 0 maintenance. It’s also more secure because I just drop traffic from all but 3 geographies at the IP level. And you can also add a WAP on the Nginx proxy. It is also more more secure than Google/iCloude because the „employee of the company“ attack vector is much smaller. It’s documented that Google looks at your photos and is perfectly happy to file false police reports: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-... By comparison, yes it is theoretically possible for Hetzner employees to access my server physically and extract the encryption key from RAM, or setup a fake SSH server to try to steal the key, but that is far more complicated attack and hasn’t been documented yet. And it risks detection.
- internet_points 3mo ago
  how much storage and how much do you pay Hetzner?
  - FabCH 3mo ago
    Prices have jumped considerably, but basically anything on Server Auction is good https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ I pay 60/month for 50 TB with a 10 year old intel xenon.
  - sva_ 3mo ago
    If you want a cheaper alternative, maybe look into ServaRica. That's where I run my Immich instance for my wife and me. 4TB for $11 per month. The servers (cpus) are not super fast, but fast enough for me.
palata 3mo ago
How does the mobile app sync work with Immich? My use-case is that I want to install the mobile app on the phone of my relatives (including iPhones), and it should keep syncing their pictures "forever" even though they never, ever open the app. I tried Nextcloud, but the apps/server end up failing to sync after at most a couple month, and it's painful to recover from that. So it doesn't work for me. I have been considering Immich and Ente, but I would love to know if somebody has experience with that.
- Mashimo 3mo ago
  With works for me on Android with Pixel phone, after I added Immich to the list of apps that can work in the background. But as you can see in the linked release note, they made a lot of change to background sync on Android and iOS. It should (TM) work out of the box now.
  - palata 3mo ago
    Yeah I saw that, which suggests that it was not totally working before. Not criticising of course, I know it's hard especially on iOS. > works for me on Android with Pixel phone But do you open the Immich app on Android from time to time, or never and just use it to sync transparently in the background?
master-lincoln 3mo ago
I would switch immediately if they added support for non-photo elements in albums like google photo has. E.g. texts and maps. And the option to chose the order of album elements yourself. These make my albums feel like small blogs which really adds to the experience when sharing e.g. travel albums.
p4bl0 3mo ago
I teach a free software development course to my undergrad students. It's really exciting to stumble upon one of the work they did for my class in the wild (it's the first listed bug fix — which is the last of the three pull requests this student got merged in Immich during my course). I feel so proud! :)
- ciefa 3mo ago
  Naww, that's awesome! gj :)
- FloatArtifact 3mo ago
  Thank you for supporting Open Source as a professor!
firen777 3mo ago
> Upload asset directly to album on the mobile app Does this fix this problem? https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/12748 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/12748 It's a pretty big issue for me having multiple devices and multiple people who want to pool pictures of our cats together in one album. Currently I have to do this kind of set up: 1. Syncthing sync our photos back to the homelab server hosting immich - /mnt/Syncthing/a1/cats/ - /mnt/Syncthing/a2/cats/ - /mnt/Syncthing/b/cats/ 2. cron job copying (hard-link) the photos to a folder mounted as read-only external library volume - /mnt/immich/ext-lib/cats/ 3. cron job to run a script that automatically creates albums from external library folder structure: https://github.com/Salvoxia/immich-folder-album-creator https://github.com/Salvoxia/immich-folder-album-creator 4. cron job clean up photos in the syncthing folder that are older than a year to free up space for our phones (~1TB total. Yes we have problem) -------------- That said, congrat on the 3.0 release. Although I'm slightly bumped out because I literally just discovered this program a month ago and stabilized my self-host set up just one week ago.
leastangle 3mo ago
Migrated 700GB of photos from Google to local Immich. The whole family uses it and we’re happy to be supporting the project!
yashthakker 3mo ago
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onel 3mo ago
Great app! Great to see the progress with it. The biggest complaint has always been how hard it is to self-host it, but that's not true anymore. If you have a good underlying system that handles all the boring stuff, you can actually have a pretty good experience. I'm biased because I'm building an OS for this, and it makes spinning up imich so easy.
sylens 3mo ago
My only disappointment with this release is that the beta version of workflows does not have the ability to sort photos into albums by face detected (yet). That’s what I’ve been waiting for as both Google Photos and Ente support smart albums
totetsu 3mo ago
I have a bunch of spare s3 compatable storage from a cloud provider which I would really like to use to run Immich, but everytime i look into it it seems not possible.
f_k 3mo ago
Shameless plug: I made a native iOS/Mac app that's adjacent to Immich, but narrower in scope. It focuses on local image search and photo organization. Everything is indexed and searched locally, so the photos never leave the device. https://photos.getsupercurate.com https://photos.getsupercurate.com
wookmaster 3mo ago
I've been self hosting immich for the past 6 months. It's pretty awesome. The App has some performance issues but the web is flawless. I cut down on my iCloud plan since I deleted most of my videos from it. I use restic to manage backups with my own key offsite.
tomeow 3mo ago
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simonebrunozzi 3mo ago
> Welcome to Immich v3.0.0! > After months of hard work from the team and our amazing contributors, we're thrilled to announce the next major version of Immich: v3.0.0! A quite amazing open source project, that COMPLETELY FAILS to explain to a newcomer what it is, what problem it solves, etc.

650 points by hashier 3mo ago

There's a lot of things I spent a ton of time setting up, use once, and then never again. Tons of things that are easy to set up, and provide small benefits every day for a long time. Immich has got to be the thing that I've spent ages setting up, use extremely infrequently but the one time a year I use it I'm so happy I did. Great software.

prudhvis 3mo ago
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nickthegreek 3mo ago
Man, I wish my experience was as nice. I used the proxmox lxc for it and after a 2 months of organizing I had some corruption and didn't have the fortitude to get through the debugging. It might have been related to a big version migration if I remember correctly. It turned me off the stack. The upgrading wasn't as turnkey as I wanted it to be and I dont think the case is different today. I just want to be able to organize my folders outside of some dumb library system and immich at the time fought that as well.
- altran1502 3mo ago
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- ravenstine 3mo ago
  I'm not sure I will ever upgrade Immich again. When I upgraded to the next minor version (I forget which off the top of my head), the data migration corrupted my database such that no images would be served. Fortunately I had the old database backed up, so I restored it, rolled back to the older version of Immich, and things were back to normal. I like Immich, but this is not good for software that's beyond the first major version, and also handles archiving people's personal data.
  - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
    > Fortunately I had the old database backed up You say this as if it wasn’t Immich itself that backed up the database automatically next to your image files. I think they’re one of the best self-hosted services when it comes to backup/restore — enabling it by default — and when it comes to migrations — no breaking changes in minor versions after 1.0. Did you report this issue so I could try and reproduce it?
    - stavros 3mo ago
      I had an issue where my thumbnails were borked somehow, so I deleted them all. However, I didn't delete the database entries, so they never got regenerated. I ended up doing that manually, but it's great to see that is now a first class citizen in 3.0.0. I love Immich.
- Saris 3mo ago
  In proxmox restoring a backup is really easy, I'm surprised you didn't do that!
  - senectus1 3mo ago
    if you have a PBS its just incredibly simple.
  - skottenborg 3mo ago
    Yes! Or even better, use Proxmox snapshots during upgrades for easy rollback on failure
darkwater 3mo ago
In my case I spent it not so much time setting it up, some time upgrading with some manual work required from time to time with breaking changes (but not so often) and I use it weekly, it just works and it's wonderful.

DavideNL 3mo ago

I don't want yet another self hosted service to manage (update, backups, possible hardware failures, energy costs, ups, etc.). Unfortunately Immich is not end-to-end encrypted. If that would have be the case i'd use https://pixelunion.eu/ https://pixelunion.eu/ Seems like a great app though. So... i'm still pondering what to do :-)

mcsniff 3mo ago
Okay? So don't use it, use a managed service like Google Photos, Apple Photos, Dropbox, etc where your photos and files might be arbitrarily removed or your access to them limited while they are scanned for disavowed content. You can also just use a secure transport layer (like WireGuard or a VPN) instead of relying on every project to implement end-to-end encryption.
jrm4 3mo ago
VPN (or other) Tunnel. That's the objective answer. There's no mystery here. That's exactly how you get what you want and it's not too hard. Not trying to dunk on you or anyone one but this is an easily solved problem, and I think I want to highlight it like this to make sure everyone understands. Anything web/internet/network service thing, you can add this on. This composability is important to remember in software, this even goes back to "The Unix Way" type stuff.
- ravenstine 3mo ago
  It's also a kind of funny thing how HN has the attitude of "never implement your own encrypted anything" but then demand their apps build in e2e encryption. It may be one abstraction higher, but it's still fundamentally the same problem. With the unfortunate exception of web browsers, if I'm going to use something that performs encryption, then I want encryption to be the only job it has.
- PhilipRoman 3mo ago
  How are VPNs related to end-to-end encryption?

mopsi 3mo ago

Does Immich support read-only source folders yet? I'd like to keep the original files intact, but allow Immich to index them.

zyberzero 3mo ago
Yes, at least for a year. There is a ”external library” feature, I think that does what you want.
- mopsi 3mo ago
  Thank you! That was not available the last time I checked.
  - bo0tzz 3mo ago
    It's been available for nearly three years
etnoy 3mo ago
Yes, using external libraries. It's been a feature for several years. Make it read-only by mounting docker compose read only
slipperybeluga 3mo ago
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MohamedMabrouk 3mo ago

Immich is an amazing software. I use it regularly as an alternative along side Google photos. I keep in it large videos that I wouldn't upload normally to Google photos + the snappy experience at home vs Cloud-Bades solution.

brewtide 3mo ago

Does anyone have any pointers on the best way to import roughly 14 Google takeout chunks into immich? I've downloaded all the chunks once, only to find them corrupted due to... Their 50gb size and using a browser in theory. One also cannot seem to use wget or alternatives because of the auth / session cookies required via Google takeout. I've yet to even broach the aspect of importing each giant bundle into immich because I've not had success in even grabbing the takeout files correctly, but would LOVE pointers on the best way of importing the roughly 700gb into the database without it ALL going wrong. I've had great success with immich running in docker for the past year or so, although I have yet to upgrade to the newest version. Google photos backups have been disabled on my phone for a year or so, but I yet to haul in all of the past years. Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud". Great software.

altran1502 3mo ago
You can use this tool to get them into Immich, it will parse all the metadata and recreate albums as you have in GPhotos https://github.com/simulot/immich-go https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
- exhilaration 3mo ago
  Oh wow, it recreates the Google Photos albums? That's the first time I've heard of a tool doing that. I've spent a ton of time organizing my Google Photos albums, that's a big reason I stay with it.
etnoy 3mo ago
immich-go has what you need
- mrgaro 3mo ago
  This! When you have the pictures on your disk just use immich-go to import them.
3mo ago

Cider9986 3mo ago

When I was switching to GrapheneOS from iOS, I decided to self host my photos. I considered Immich, but I settled on Ente because of the encryption. Ente Photos is extremely polished and it's comparable quality to Apple photos. It's cool they keep the server open and selfhostable instead of only open clients like many e2ee projects do. I like how you can share an album and anyone can contribute to it without an account. Another cool feature is that you can select photos to lock when you hand your phone to somebody so they can only see the ones you selected without your device unlock.

kristopolous 3mo ago
for people wondering: "Ente Photos is a paid service, but we offer 10GB of free storage. You can also >>clone this repository and choose to self-host<<." So both forms... https://github.com/ente/ente https://github.com/ente/ente
- esperent 3mo ago
  I've been bitten too many times - is Ente a commercial product that pays lip service to self hosting as form of marketing, but with friction to guide you towards the hosted version (e.g. rocketchat and many others) or does it genuinely support self hosting as a first class product?
  - sylens 3mo ago
    The latter, it works quite well
  - Cider9986 3mo ago
    I self host it and it's polished.
satvikpendem 3mo ago
Ente Auth is also the best, because it works on any device, including the one you're trying to access (maybe it defeats the purpose of 2FA but sometimes I don't care).

slipperybeluga 3mo ago

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psadauskas 3mo ago

Has the ios photo sync gotten better? I've got 20k photos on my phone, and last I tried it filled up the storage on my phone with the originals, and never completed the process, even after leaving my phone open, unlocked, and the immich app running in the foreground for several days, on the same local network as the server. I know they were working on it, but haven't kept up, I just want to know if it works better now and I should try again.

Lukas_Skywalker 3mo ago
I have synced ~9000 photos from my phone in february. That worked pretty well. I was done in about 10 hours. I don't remember whether the originals were downloaded, or whether they were deleted automatically afterwards. Felt like a smooth process though.
gunapologist99 3mo ago
Likely more of an IOS issue than Immich issue. Apple doesn't care for apps that make it easier to exit iCloud.
- azuanrb 3mo ago
  No, it’s an Immich issue. Not OP, but I was already using Synology Photos. Synology finished syncing my library in two days, while Immich was still syncing after more than a week. I decided it wasn’t worth it after that experience.
  - Larrikin 3mo ago
    Why are you syncing from your phone instead of your Synology then? Can't you sync from your NAS then just have pictures uploaded as you take them? iOS has a lot of restrictions compared to Android so two days really doesn't feel like a meaningful difference from a week.
    - Grombobulous 3mo ago
      I’m not an Immich or Synology user but essentially the mobile apps end up replicating your whole structure a little better, at least when I did the iCloud library to Ente import. I could have done a data download from Apple but essentially leaving the Ente app open and choosing my albums to back up was a “set it and forget it” process.

oliyoung 3mo ago

Immich is such a no-brainer replacement for Apple Photos or Google Photos, combined with VPN like Tailscale, it's almost a drop in replacement

ivanjermakov 3mo ago
Beware that migrating back from Immich to iCloud/Google is not something Immich cares about. There is no "download all" anywhere, best way is to go to the server and get raw files from there. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/14365 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/14365
- Panda4 3mo ago
  A download button would be great but the files are already stored on the device you can copy them with a usb or go on the device and upload it directly.
- stogot 3mo ago
  There’s no download all in apple photos either unless they added it
  - Terretta 3mo ago
    And yet, the same is true for Apple photos about ease of export: If you set the pref to keep originals locally, they're all on your drive, in original form, as well as the derived versions including caches of raw to jpeg, resolutions, and edited versions. That said, Apple Photos does let you export even if only in cloud. Open the library, select all, and File > Export ... > Export Unmodified Originals. It pauses for a second or two on my quarter million images, but is then happy to comply.
    - konart 3mo ago
      Or you can get all you data from https://privacy.apple.com/account https://privacy.apple.com/account

thenews 3mo ago

Immich is amazing, been using it as a backup since my phone is always full

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3mo ago

I got annoyed with Immich and external storage, because in order for every user to have their own facial recognition data on a large set of photos, you have to add the folder as external storage for each user, which means image previews for each user, even though the source image is the same. So if you have 3 users, you use up 3 times the space for the same thumbnail image. It got to where I had 20% of my space was just thumbnails for each user, even though it was one set of images in the external storage. Maybe that's changed recently.

Mashimo 3mo ago
I don't think that has changed, but AFAIK is on the Roadmap. Or at least they talked about it.

morgan814 3mo ago

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AussieWog93 3mo ago

So many comments here about missing end to end encryption, but seriously - why would anyone want this? Lets say burglars break in and steal your homelab. Because you don't have e2ee, they can see all the photos you saved of your dead grandmother! Oh no! Or, in the more likely scenario that something happens to your phone, the lack of e2ee means that even if you lost your keys you didn't lose the only memories that remain of your grandma - you just copy across the .jpgs to a new device.

Grombobulous 3mo ago
I think we can imagine a scenario where not all of our photos are non-sensitive. I also imagine that a true E2EE architecture means you have more flexibility with cloud storage, managed hosting, and off-site backups.
- AussieWog93 3mo ago
  I hear ya, I was being a little bit over the top. But I really do think that for every one user who would turn on e2ee and get some genuine benefit out of it, there would be a dozen that turn it on because "encryption good" and accidentally lose all their data.
  - Grombobulous 3mo ago
    True, e2ee is pretty scary as far as data loss. Still, good application design can help mitigate that. Apple does it with their e2ee recovery methods, although Ente does rely on a recovery key that you should print out and put in a safe as well as store in other safe locations. But also, what I love about the E2EE of Ente is that I can securely use a cloud hosted provider but then my home NAS backups are unencrypted. The Ente desktop app has a continuous export feature where I just leave the application on my main desktop computer and it constantly backs it up to my home NAS. It also does the local machine learning and video streaming encoding processing on the desktop. So, if I lose my Ente account, no big deal. I get another one and wipe everything and restore from my NAS backup. I feel like this is the best of all worlds. I get cloud convenience and no real self-hosting burden along with solid ownership of my data. Perhaps Immich doesn’t bother with e2ee since it’s primarily designed for self-hosting, while for Ente it’s meant to be suitable for both a paid cloud service and self-hosting.

rewgs 3mo ago

Immich is the best self-hosted app I use. Hats off to the developers!

poisonborz 3mo ago

I wish they would better support external image sources - images not uploaded/managed by Immich, just a folder of images it has access to - especially if it's read only. It mostly works, but the UI and logic breaks in a lot of little ways.

etnoy 3mo ago
We know, and it's something we're working on. The plan is to unify the external and internal libraries in a better way
neogodless 3mo ago
Yup. I love Immich, but I'm also a control freak, so my 25 years of digital photos I had before using Immich still exist in an External Library. It mostly works but I still have some issues. Like I keep getting a batch of ~70 photos that lose their "date taken" and revert to the date/time I started using Immich. (Fortunately the file names are date/times and I can manually go through and fix them, but having done it at least three times, it's getting old!) I "restarted" maybe twice when I first got into Immich to find a good set up for playing reasonably nicely with external libraries, but it does need just a bit more polish. Good to see a sibling comment that it's on their list of priorities! Hackers The coolest thing I've done with Immich is just set up Docker on a more powerful machine, run the machine learning libraries, and point my instance (on a low powered server) to use that external computing for face recognition and OCR. Very cool!

qsera 3mo ago

I have come to the realisation that I don't need 10,000 photos. I probably need < 100. I will print them and keep them in a paper album... Which I am yet to do...

gitaarik 3mo ago
And where is the pool you pick these 100 photos from?
- qsera 3mo ago
  local hard drives..
aerzen 3mo ago
My wife only printed the 6 photo albums because I gathered all our photos from three different Google Photos accounts, a hard drive, and two laptops. And yes, we only look at physical photos or the "on this day X years ago" reels. But to get here, Immich was a valuable tool.
pvdebbe 3mo ago
I have realized the same. Only it is different 100 photos every year.
darkwater 3mo ago
Print them, absolutely, you won't regret it! But it's also good to keep a local and locally owned digital version neatly organized.

apples_oranges 3mo ago

Does it have image editing tools like rotate and crop and is it aware of basic exif metadata?

omnimus 3mo ago
Yes. But it's not editor. You don't have manual export, you crop/rotate thumbnails which might not be suitable for print for example.
qxxx 3mo ago
yes. https://docs.immich.app/features/editing/ https://docs.immich.app/features/editing/ And it is very aware of exif. It also has AI features to analyze the photos (or videos) and you can for example search for "cat" and it will find all photos with cats.

floren 3mo ago

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cromka 3mo ago

I have a different bash with them than the lack of E2EE: they do not make it easy to import from other servicesvlike Google Photos or iCloud, which should be a priority. They rely on immich-go project, which is ridden with bugs and basically abandonware by now. Their own iOS app, which can also be used for syncing iCloud gallery, has outstanding, 2 y/o or so bugs that will fail to upload the Live Motion photos. My photos exported to Immigh have some 9000 broken, half imported Live Photos and I just don't have time to fix that. The fact that THIS is not their priority, the most comprehensively A-B tested feature is beyond me. Who cares about OCR if you can't trust that they didn't butcher your imported memories? I just don't get it!

cuu508 3mo ago
> I just don't get it! This is open source, volunteer developers often focus on doing things that are fun to them, or that scratch their own itch. I can't imagine dealing with Google Photos semi-broken exports is fun to anybody, and you only deal with the pain of the import once, afterwards there's no itch to scratch.
- cromka 3mo ago
  They make money on that, it's not just a hobby project
  - Valodim 3mo ago
    Their business model is basically donations, it's not a for-profit operation. Maybe if you consider yourself less of a customer and more the beneficiary of a community effort, it'll be easier to "get"
    - cromka 3mo ago
      Don't patronize me, my arguments still stand: they offer all bells and whistles while completely dropping the ball at making you feel those photos are well taken care of. The core employees live off of Immich so spare me the spiel.

slaye 3mo ago

An incredible piece of software, on par with Google Photos. I've been using it behind Tailscale for months with no problems ever since I first got into homelabbing. Actually, moving from Google Photos to Immich after I hit my 100GB storage limit was the whole reason I got into self-hosting, and what a fun ride that has been! I can't believe self-hosted products of this caliber are free. Huge shout-out to HomeAssistant, PiHole, paperless-ngx, Dawarich, and countless others for the same reason. Congrats to the team on the release and thank you for helping me catalogue my personal memories

Valodim 3mo ago
Please buy a license if you are happy with the project :) it's free, but you can still buy a license for a small amount of what you saved
- slaye 3mo ago
  Done! <3
- fnands 3mo ago
  Good point. Will do so as well. I've been using it for about a year now on my NAS. I basically set it and forget it, and it has just worked.
rrvsh 3mo ago
I would say at this point it's better than Google Photos!! The team is absolutely amazing, and I agree that it's astounding to see IMO the best (general purpose) photo app out there being open source
vividfrier 3mo ago
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Gareth321 3mo ago
I would like to replace iCloud but it doesn't seem to sync changes/deletions with iPhone yet. I don't want to have to make changes/deletions in two places every time. v3 seems to have improved background uploads which is great as that has been a frequent complaint.

penetrarthur 3mo ago

Has anyone personally upgraded to 3.0? How is the experience?

handity 3mo ago
docker compose down IMMICH_VERSION=v3 docker compose pull docker compose up No issues so far. The web UI is not significantly changed, the biggest improvements are on mobile.
neogodless 3mo ago
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nonbind 3mo ago

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FabCH 3mo ago

A lot of people talking about encryption in the comment section, thought I would share my setup. I have been running Immich for family and friends on a Hetzner auction server for about 1.5 years now. Hetzner community provides official full-disk encryption documentation: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-debian-with-lvm-encrypted-nvme-software-raid https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-debian-with-... Letsencrypt gives free reliable SSL. You can easily hide Immich behind Nginx proxy that handles SSL for you. Add cron based automated backup of the entire Immich data to a local encrypted NAS and there you go. Reliable, end-to-end, encrypted at rest setup. So far, it required exactly 0 maintenance. It’s also more secure because I just drop traffic from all but 3 geographies at the IP level. And you can also add a WAP on the Nginx proxy. It is also more more secure than Google/iCloude because the „employee of the company“ attack vector is much smaller. It’s documented that Google looks at your photos and is perfectly happy to file false police reports: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-... By comparison, yes it is theoretically possible for Hetzner employees to access my server physically and extract the encryption key from RAM, or setup a fake SSH server to try to steal the key, but that is far more complicated attack and hasn’t been documented yet. And it risks detection.

internet_points 3mo ago
how much storage and how much do you pay Hetzner?
- FabCH 3mo ago
  Prices have jumped considerably, but basically anything on Server Auction is good https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ I pay 60/month for 50 TB with a 10 year old intel xenon.
- sva_ 3mo ago
  If you want a cheaper alternative, maybe look into ServaRica. That's where I run my Immich instance for my wife and me. 4TB for $11 per month. The servers (cpus) are not super fast, but fast enough for me.

palata 3mo ago

How does the mobile app sync work with Immich? My use-case is that I want to install the mobile app on the phone of my relatives (including iPhones), and it should keep syncing their pictures "forever" even though they never, ever open the app. I tried Nextcloud, but the apps/server end up failing to sync after at most a couple month, and it's painful to recover from that. So it doesn't work for me. I have been considering Immich and Ente, but I would love to know if somebody has experience with that.

Mashimo 3mo ago
With works for me on Android with Pixel phone, after I added Immich to the list of apps that can work in the background. But as you can see in the linked release note, they made a lot of change to background sync on Android and iOS. It should (TM) work out of the box now.
- palata 3mo ago
  Yeah I saw that, which suggests that it was not totally working before. Not criticising of course, I know it's hard especially on iOS. > works for me on Android with Pixel phone But do you open the Immich app on Android from time to time, or never and just use it to sync transparently in the background?

master-lincoln 3mo ago

I would switch immediately if they added support for non-photo elements in albums like google photo has. E.g. texts and maps. And the option to chose the order of album elements yourself. These make my albums feel like small blogs which really adds to the experience when sharing e.g. travel albums.

p4bl0 3mo ago

I teach a free software development course to my undergrad students. It's really exciting to stumble upon one of the work they did for my class in the wild (it's the first listed bug fix — which is the last of the three pull requests this student got merged in Immich during my course). I feel so proud! :)

ciefa 3mo ago
Naww, that's awesome! gj :)
FloatArtifact 3mo ago
Thank you for supporting Open Source as a professor!

firen777 3mo ago

> Upload asset directly to album on the mobile app Does this fix this problem? https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/12748 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/12748 It's a pretty big issue for me having multiple devices and multiple people who want to pool pictures of our cats together in one album. Currently I have to do this kind of set up: 1. Syncthing sync our photos back to the homelab server hosting immich - /mnt/Syncthing/a1/cats/ - /mnt/Syncthing/a2/cats/ - /mnt/Syncthing/b/cats/ 2. cron job copying (hard-link) the photos to a folder mounted as read-only external library volume - /mnt/immich/ext-lib/cats/ 3. cron job to run a script that automatically creates albums from external library folder structure: https://github.com/Salvoxia/immich-folder-album-creator https://github.com/Salvoxia/immich-folder-album-creator 4. cron job clean up photos in the syncthing folder that are older than a year to free up space for our phones (~1TB total. Yes we have problem) -------------- That said, congrat on the 3.0 release. Although I'm slightly bumped out because I literally just discovered this program a month ago and stabilized my self-host set up just one week ago.

leastangle 3mo ago

Migrated 700GB of photos from Google to local Immich. The whole family uses it and we’re happy to be supporting the project!

yashthakker 3mo ago

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onel 3mo ago

Great app! Great to see the progress with it. The biggest complaint has always been how hard it is to self-host it, but that's not true anymore. If you have a good underlying system that handles all the boring stuff, you can actually have a pretty good experience. I'm biased because I'm building an OS for this, and it makes spinning up imich so easy.

sylens 3mo ago

My only disappointment with this release is that the beta version of workflows does not have the ability to sort photos into albums by face detected (yet). That’s what I’ve been waiting for as both Google Photos and Ente support smart albums

totetsu 3mo ago

I have a bunch of spare s3 compatable storage from a cloud provider which I would really like to use to run Immich, but everytime i look into it it seems not possible.

f_k 3mo ago

Shameless plug: I made a native iOS/Mac app that's adjacent to Immich, but narrower in scope. It focuses on local image search and photo organization. Everything is indexed and searched locally, so the photos never leave the device. https://photos.getsupercurate.com https://photos.getsupercurate.com

wookmaster 3mo ago

I've been self hosting immich for the past 6 months. It's pretty awesome. The App has some performance issues but the web is flawless. I cut down on my iCloud plan since I deleted most of my videos from it. I use restic to manage backups with my own key offsite.

tomeow 3mo ago

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simonebrunozzi 3mo ago

> Welcome to Immich v3.0.0! > After months of hard work from the team and our amazing contributors, we're thrilled to announce the next major version of Immich: v3.0.0! A quite amazing open source project, that COMPLETELY FAILS to explain to a newcomer what it is, what problem it solves, etc.