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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kind of surprised that using object storage wasn't a first-class concern. Though I guess if running it at home was the biggest thing, that's not the top priority, but still. Using fast, cheap object stores (often with CDNs in front) has been commonplace for images, videos, and similar content for decades now. For virtually anything that uses some dynamic amount of storage based on user actions, my expectation is…

Yeah this was pretty much my reaction, and seeing that it's not supported (either by Immich or Photoprism) really made me think these projects are not for me.

Photoprism shouldn't be in consideration at all. They felt the need to post in their FAQ that not checking authorization/authentication before serving photos* if directly linked is OK because its "industry standard" and (paraphrased) "difficult/impossible to implement"

* might just be thumbnails. But lets be honest- a 1/10 scale thumbnail of 40MP shot is... still a ton of detail.

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

#202
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.

So you use Google Photos and backup to Google Drive? Sorry to say, but if Google ever decides to deactivate your account (which can and will happen for any reason, real or imagined), you lose everything.

A stable release is only a couple months out. Maybe do a Takeout until then, and put it in S3 Glacier, or similar?

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... I'm not sure that I've ever seen a complex app with multiple, separate service/database requirements (redis, pg, etc) packaged in a Linux distro repository... but I could be wrong.

controversial but docker compose is for development and demos. for prod give me a binary, a config file / systemd unit file, and tell me how to configure external dependencies and let me decide how to manage them. and if you're serious, k8s config. otherwise don't waste my time.

Waste your time? You know what would waste my time? Building out my own deployment of Redis/Postgres, all the dependencies, systemd services, ML server, and backup solutions (yes, the compose takes regular DB backups for you) and then keeping it all updated manually, just to host photos on my local network for my family of 4. Do you think making your life needlessly difficult is a feature? Then read the docs and deploy to a K8s cluster. Nothing is preventing you from doing that.

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

#204
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…

> Ironically, just after posting that I came across this, which I think proves why my concern is warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657 > Debian isn't immune to this, but it's much harder for such an attack to be successful when dependencies aren't constantly changing. Immich is more immune to this issue because they wait 5 days before raising PRs to bump dependencies, which is a good practice https…

OK, more maybe, but that is nothing next to Debian, where a huge Debian userbase settles on a single set of versions for all dependencies for a year (usually more) at a time.

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

#205
post #136
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…

Why is docker compose a red flag? That feels like a benefit to me.

It's not a problem that Docker Compose can be used and a configuration is provided. What's an indicator of a dependency problem is when it's the only way to deploy the software. If, instead, they could say "all required dependencies ship in Debian at a sufficient version to meet our requirements" then that would be ideal (Debian isn't a hard requirement for me, but I use it as an example since it sets a bar similar to the one I want software I deploy to meet). Or even just "nearly all dependencies except this one" would be much better.

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

#206
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically, just after posting that I came across this, which I think proves why my concern is warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657 > Debian isn't immune to this, but it's much harder for such an attack to be successful when dependencies aren't constantly changing. Immich is more immune to this issue because they wait 5 days before raising PRs to bump dependencies, which is a good practice https…

OK, more maybe, but that is nothing next to Debian, where a huge Debian userbase settles on a single set of versions for all dependencies for a year (usually more) at a time.

I would expect an operating system and a single application have a different approach to dependency management.

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

#207
post #186
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Immich started as a project after Photoprism changed their licensing to restrict several features, and then picked up a ton of momentum very fast. They've pledged they won't ever pay-gate features, which isn't always a positive as those features help sustain a project long term, but they have so much community support and love that I'm not worried about that in this case. Feature wise I think they are pretty co…

> Immich started as a project after Photoprism changed their licensing to restrict several features It didn't, that's just a timing coincidence. Immich was started because none of the existing projects offered the google photos-like experience.

Fair 'nuff, my memory is a bit fuzzy as that was a while ago. That was definitely part of the reason it got so much initial momentum, however, even if it was just a coincidence.

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

#208
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, more maybe, but that is nothing next to Debian, where a huge Debian userbase settles on a single set of versions for all dependencies for a year (usually more) at a time.

I would expect an operating system and a single application have a different approach to dependency management.

Debian is both an operating system and a distribution of single applications. Its (excellent) dependency management applies to both. It doesn't have a software supply chain problem because it takes dependency management seriously.

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to work very reliably for many years and I used it for pretty much everything (photos, ebooks, notes, Signal backups, …). However, last fall it simply stopped syncing (traffic at 0 B/s) in 90% of the cases, no matter the file size, even though my devices see each other and Syncthing recognizes that files are out of sync. I have already reset and reinstalled Syncthing various times – no idea what's going on. M…

I've also encountered this periodically and the way I've gotten things back to normal was to 'reset database' in Syncthing-Fork's troubleshooting settings. Is that what you meant by reset?

Not quite, I just purged the app from my phone entirely, including all settings, and then reinstalled it.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup Interesting, would you mind elaborating on how you do that? I take it you have your backup key stored on your home server then? What tool do you use to decrypt & parse the backup?

Sure! I make Signal backups on my Android device, sync them to my home server via FolderSync, and then run a nightly script that uses signalbackup-tools[1] to extract media from my family group chats and upload them to my immich server via their CLI. [1] https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools

Couldn't you simply select the Signal folder that contains the media and let Immich monitor changes
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