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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

121–130 of 384 posts

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#121
post #4

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.

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

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#122
post #6

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

I do that with DayOne and curation, but obviously this means I keep only 2/3 pictures per event, but most of the time that's enough (and even better, since I choose the ones I prefer and keep those)

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#124
> For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of my data for backup purposes and independence.

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

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#125
post #4

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.

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.

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

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#126
post #4

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.

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

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).

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#127
post #108

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

I remember that Immich has a mode to not use cryptic hashes but folders for storage. When I used it it was somehow deprecated due to some problems, but supported. I actually stopped using Immich because newer versions run the keep alive via socket.io with a Prostgres notify, which does constant empty WAL flushes, triggering empty page writes on idle.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#128
post #95

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

I'm much more worried about the Ente install getting broken for some reason and my pictures being locked and lost, than a burglar stealing a hard disk in my basement.

That's why I like how Photoprism just uses my files as they are without touching them (I think immich can do that as well now, but it wasn't so in the past). I can manage the filesystem encryption myself if I want to.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#129
post #108

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

This was why I was driven to use Photoprism. I use syncthing-fork to upload from phones, and a custom made thing to copy them to folders (this also works with Cameras that aren't phones).

https://www.photoprism.app/

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#130
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of the same for docker? Plopping a docker compose file and setting up few environment vars vs writing dockerfiles from scratch.

Not really. No. You can easily checkout repo containing the Dockerfile, add a Dockerfile override, change most of the stuff while maintaining the original Dockerfile instact and the ability to use git to update it. Then you change one line in docker-compose.yaml (or override it if it's also hosted by the repo) and build the container locally. Can't imagine easier way to modify existing docker images, I do this a lot…

I'll be honest, that does not sound "easy".

It is straightforward, but so is the NixOS module system, and I could describe writing a custom module the same way you described custom Docker images.

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