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Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

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Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#171

Post by mbrochh »

esperent wrote: post #27

I would love to use Immich but I'm not into running a home server - electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay. Also I just don't want to manage the hardware. I've looked into cloud hosting. But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space. Object storage is cheap but not supported by Immich. Block storage is not cheap. I did look into s3fuse but the c…

If you want cloud hosting and fully E2E encrypted by a team that deeply cares about privacy and security, try Ente. They also have Google Authenticator alternative called Ente Auth.

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#172

Post by yesnomaybe »

rlpb wrote: post #114

I would love to give this a try but its software supply chain story seems like a car crash, with dependency bumps needed every few days: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/pac... I'm keen to use it as soon as the dependency story is mature (eg. it is packaged in Debian). This doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. I'm sure many people won't care about this. But for me, it's a measure of qu…

You want to run it in docker and manage it with some tool. I use dockge and click the upgrade button every couple of days / weeks (when the app or website tells me). that's it.

Immich is an excellent piece of software, I have switch all my photo needs from over 25 years to it. It will mature and it actually already is. Don't hold yourself back with such practicalities.

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#173

Post by yesnomaybe »

jdc0589 wrote: post #43
esperent wrote: post #27

I would love to use Immich but I'm not into running a home server - electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay. Also I just don't want to manage the hardware. I've looked into cloud hosting. But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space. Object storage is cheap but not supported by Immich. Block storage is not cheap. I did look into s3fuse but the c…

this is pretty much the situation I'm in re the storage. I'm perfectly fine running a home server, I already do, but workloads with heavy storage requirements scare me away from it. I don't want to have to think about that at home, and the cost of pretty much anything other than object storage in the cloud is prohibitive, and as you mentioned obj store support is non-existent or hacky and slow with most of these prod…

it's really not that hard. I've set up backblaze which is reasonably cheap. with the help of AI I was able to setup a permanent cron job that backs up everything from local into B2 using rclone, which client side encryption. It's epic. I haven't looked at it for a while but I do DR test every once in a while a small subset and it works really well. I use postgres as DB and this is the big one to back up daily. Rest is just the increment. Can be further optimised I guess but I'm happy with it.

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#174

Post by namibj »

mlangenberg wrote: post #125
j45 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker could be run on the VPS, and the storage leg could be encrypted. I'm presuming some VPS providers allow converting your VPS disk image to something that supports encryption.

Is that something that docker can do? I presume gocryptfs can be used to wrap an SMB mounted Hetzner storage box. Haven’t tried it myself though. I would be careful storing any personal data on it unencrypted.

rclone.

Just use rclone if you need to turn object storage semantics usage into an encrypted mount.

It doesn't do well with non-object-storage access patterns but we're not putting an sqlite database on it here so that should be fine.

rclone has a `crypt` layer you can just paper over any of it's backends and still access through any of it's comfortable ways.

I'd personally likely bind mount the database folder over the rclone mount or the other way around, as needed to keep that database on a local filesystem.

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#175

Post by [deleted] »

yesnomaybe wrote: post #172
rlpb wrote: post #114

I would love to give this a try but its software supply chain story seems like a car crash, with dependency bumps needed every few days: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/pac... I'm keen to use it as soon as the dependency story is mature (eg. it is packaged in Debian). This doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. I'm sure many people won't care about this. But for me, it's a measure of qu…

You want to run it in docker and manage it with some tool. I use dockge and click the upgrade button every couple of days / weeks (when the app or website tells me). that's it. Immich is an excellent piece of software, I have switch all my photo needs from over 25 years to it. It will mature and it actually already is. Don't hold yourself back with such practicalities.

[deleted]

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#176

Post by namibj »

jdc0589 wrote: post #43
esperent wrote: post #27

I would love to use Immich but I'm not into running a home server - electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay. Also I just don't want to manage the hardware. I've looked into cloud hosting. But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space. Object storage is cheap but not supported by Immich. Block storage is not cheap. I did look into s3fuse but the c…

this is pretty much the situation I'm in re the storage. I'm perfectly fine running a home server, I already do, but workloads with heavy storage requirements scare me away from it. I don't want to have to think about that at home, and the cost of pretty much anything other than object storage in the cloud is prohibitive, and as you mentioned obj store support is non-existent or hacky and slow with most of these prod…

`rclone mount` an `rclone crypt` over a Cloudflare R3 backend of `rclone`? Or if it's sufficiently often "off/idle", take 3 USB HDDs (1~2 years ago I bought an iirc WD MyPassport 5TB for very similar workload) into a RAID-5 and have appropriate off-site backup that you actively check to have successfully gotten the latest daily backup's file contents (check a couple (3~5) random files as well as a few (3~5 ish) critical/database/metadata files) at least every 1~3 months.

Also, as opportunities arise like for example from a major upgrade to local storage capacity, try to fully test a backup restore emulated to "your home burned to the ground while you were at the office/on holiday" conditions every 1~3 years if you can afford to spend the bandwidth for it.

Consider burning in drives for a group-buy you do with local friends if necessary to at least get such a full restore trial every about 3 years. Try as best to consider a trial every about 5 years to be a "cost of doing business" that's not just nice to have but essential to the value proposition of the data archive storing home server.

Oh and yeah, I fully mean to let the drives go to sleep when you're not accessing them through "manual"/interactive means (exceptions are limited-time background queued work with a set override timer, and the daily backup runs, which will also unlock the drives from their regular sleep-doesn't-get-interrupted-for-no-good-reason enforcement; ofc this is all something you do only if you can and feel like you want to: just hunting down rouge accesses/wake-ups happening at odd times by setting up some minor logging of which programs/files/accesses (or at the very least _when exactly_) are causing the drives to wake up is something you could very well get away with). Also take care to ensure they get good airflow: stack them with gaps between and ideally just take a decent but low-cost 120mm fan that you just hook to 5V from USB (if you don't have a fan header laying around) and rig with some cardboard and tape to channel air across your drives. The drives want to be around 30~45 C, consider hooking the smart temperature readout to a kill switch in case of fan failure.

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#177

Post by N-Krause »

rustyminnow wrote: post #79
N-Krause wrote: post #9

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

How do you expose the service for your SO when away from home? Do you use tailscale/cloudflare tunnel/vpn? public port on your router? I've been trying tailscale for myself, but there's a hair more friction than my SO would accept.

As other's have already mentioned, currently I am using Tailscale. But I plan to somewhere in the future change that to something a bit more controlled by myself. Like a self hosted Wireguard VPN on some VPS.

I was also thinking about just reverse proxying my local instance to some public domain. But currently do not trust immich to be safe enough to allow for public exposure.

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#178

Post by amai »

esperent wrote: post #27

I would love to use Immich but I'm not into running a home server - electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay. Also I just don't want to manage the hardware. I've looked into cloud hosting. But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space. Object storage is cheap but not supported by Immich. Block storage is not cheap. I did look into s3fuse but the c…

Have a look at https://ente.io/.

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#179

Post by para_parolu »

lhamil64 wrote: post #143
rlpb wrote: post #114

I would love to give this a try but its software supply chain story seems like a car crash, with dependency bumps needed every few days: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/pac... I'm keen to use it as soon as the dependency story is mature (eg. it is packaged in Debian). This doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. I'm sure many people won't care about this. But for me, it's a measure of qu…

I've been keeping my eye on Immich for a while and keep waiting for a stable release to try it out, but that hasn't happened yet. I'm also dreading having to setup proper backups if I were to switch to this over Google photos. My current solution is to backup critical homelab things to Google Drive automatically but I'd want a proper off-site backup if I were going to self host all my photos.

I quite like their backup story. Immich has one folder that you need to backup. It stores file and dump of db that immich does on schedule. I don’t care that much about db dump but backuping photos os very easy

Re: Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

#180

Post by mixermachine »

greysonp wrote: post #30

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

Some performance bottlenecks seem to be still in. I added around 200 images and 10 videos of my last vacation manually via Intent to the Immich app on Android.

The startup of the Activity is VERY slow. Images are rendered one by one in the list view (potentially in full resolution?) and the scrolling in the list is quite slow. The upload button does not keep the "uploading" state but after some time jumps back to the initial "start upload" state. Going into background or turning the screen off sometimes stops the upload. This test was done on my Samsung S23 Ultra (so CPU power should not be the issue).

Nevertheless the upload works as expected if I stay in the app and keep the screen active. Seems like this is not really the intended way of uploading things to Immich (auto upload is).

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