Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 384 posts

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#291

Post by black_knight »

conradev wrote: post #89
trizic wrote: post #56

There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration file. I find this really powerful and simpler than docker and docker-compose. But don't get me wrong, I am all for containerization when it comes to other OS/distros. Yes, there is a learning curve for the Nix language and creating your own packages. But anyone who can install a distro can i…

This is my favorite use of CLI AI coding tools: updating my nix config. I can just ask my computer to configure services for me!

Indeed! This morning I needed a service to port forward ssh from my server to a firewalled machine, to access stuff while I work from a mountain cabin over the next few days. ChatGPT gave me a nice nix config snippet, and it just worked! Auto reconnecting and everything.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#292

Post by wrxd »

behnamoh wrote: post #60
krick wrote: post #17

I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage…

Wouldn't recommend. When I wanted to move from Google Photos to iCloud, there was no way to simply get all my photos. I had to use a JS script that would keep scrolling the page and download photos one by one. Lesson learnt.

These days there is Data Transfer Project that supports transferring pictures from Google Photos to iCloud and the other way around. https://portmap.dtinit.org/articles/photos7.md/

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#293

Post by maccard »

Scandiravian wrote: post #256
onionisafruit wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the NixOS scenario you described, what keeps you from finding an unrelated thing stopped working three days later and having to find what changed? I’m asking because you spoke to me when you said “because I'm simply not good at documenting my changes in parallel with making them”, and I want to understand if NixOS is something I should look into. There are all kinds of things like immich that I don’t use because I…

I think the sibling answer by oasisaimlessly is really good. I'd supplement it by saying that because you can have the entire configuration in a git repo, you can see what you've changed at what point in time I'm the beginning I was doing one change, writing that change down in some log, then doing another change (this I'll mess up in about five minutes) Now I'm creating a new commit, writing a description for it to…

> because you can have the entire configuration in a git repo, you can see what you've changed at what point in time

That’s true of docker too.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#294

Post by lucb1e »

killingtime74 wrote: post #22
krick wrote: post #17

I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage…

Key features that matter to me: 1) backup from android or iOS. This helps when I have switched phones over the years. 2) shared albums with family or friends where invited people can both see and contribute photos. Think kids albums, weddings, holidays. 3) ability to re-download at full resolution

1) You don't have backups of other data on your phone (chat history, 2FA secrets and private keys, text notes, anki cards, game progress, configuration of all apps, etc.)? I had assumed everyone who cares about their data has backups of their data anyway, so that's not really a selling point to install another app for

2) that's nice!

3) "it doesn't throw my data away" is the last selling point?! Isn't that just assumed?!

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#295

Post by maccard »

oasisaimlessly wrote: post #241
onionisafruit wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the NixOS scenario you described, what keeps you from finding an unrelated thing stopped working three days later and having to find what changed? I’m asking because you spoke to me when you said “because I'm simply not good at documenting my changes in parallel with making them”, and I want to understand if NixOS is something I should look into. There are all kinds of things like immich that I don’t use because I…

Not OP, and not a very experienced with NixOS (I just use Nix for building containers), but roughly speaking: * With NixOS, you define the configuration for the entire system in one or a couple .nix files that import each other. * You can very easily put these .nix files under version control and follow a convention of never leaving the system in a state where you have uncommitted changes. * See the NixOS/infra repo…

Both of those things are true of running containers, no?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#296

Post by pavel_lishin »

> Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup.

I didn't even realize this tool existed. I tried something like it awhile back, but it didn't work to my satisfaction (I don't remember why), so my awful, awful, awful workflow is to use the Google Takeout functionality to generate something like 8 .tar.gz files (50 gigabytes each), manually download each one (being prompted for authentication each time), and then rsyncing them over to my local server, and finally uncompressing them.

It's very lovely how much Google doesn't want you to exfiltrate your own data.

I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#297

Post by HauntedDrum »

DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #162
trizic wrote: post #56

There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration file. I find this really powerful and simpler than docker and docker-compose. But don't get me wrong, I am all for containerization when it comes to other OS/distros. Yes, there is a learning curve for the Nix language and creating your own packages. But anyone who can install a distro can i…

Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user purge after their developer purge. You just never know who this group of people will come after next, especially after they started defining "Fascism" as "anyone asking for how they define Fascism". And the jump of getting rid of people you hate who contribute to your project and you can do little harm to, to getting rid of people you hate who are of no use t…

Honestly one of the funniest things I've read on HN in a while. Would you call yourself anti-anti-fascist?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#298

Post by arendtio »

vekerdyb wrote: post #110

Surprised that neither the article, nor the comments mention Photoprism from what I can see. It’s not I’ve been hosting Photoprism and syncing my photos with PhotoSync from my iPhone for a while now. I would consider switching to another solution if it had in-browser basic editing (cropping, contrast / white balance adjustment, etc). https://www.photoprism.app/

Same here. I also have an ente account, but only to check if they made relevant progress. So far, I don't understand why Ente has so much traction when PhotoPrism has the better feature set, in my opinion.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#299

Post by lucb1e »

AnonC wrote: post #11
vvpan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.

Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.

I host at home and can access the things at home just fine by having the server as DMZ in the router, or whatever it is called these days. This doesn't really answer what Tailscale does more than port forwarding. If it punches NAT, that sounds like it actually makes you rely on a third party to host your STUN, i.e. you're not self hosting the Tailscale server?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#300

Post by pavel_lishin »

yonatan8070 wrote: post #182
fsmv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It auto uploads all your photos to the cloud and you can delete them locally and still have them. The biggest feature is the AI search, you can type anything and it will find your pictures without you doing any work categorizing them. It can do objects or backgrounds or colors and it can even do faces so you can search by people's name. That and there's share links to albums and multiplayer albums. It keeps the origi…

It's annoying to export in bulk because you have to use the bulk export tool?

Yes. Google's Takeout took is pretty bad, UX-wise.
Post reply on HN