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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#311

Post by DrammBA »

embedding-shape wrote: post #242
bicepjai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.

> In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button. Flip a switch and then what, are you getting a isolated public URL to share? Or you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted?

> you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted

I think the previous commenter misunderstood your question, this is the answer (you can also put it behind something like cloudflared tunnels).

Immich is a service like any other running on your server, if you want it exposed to the internet you need to do it yourself (get a domain, expose the service to the internet via your home ip or a tunnel like cloudflared, and link that to your domain).

After that, Immich allows you to share public folders (anyone with the link can see the album, no auth), or private folders (people have to auth with your immich server, you either create an account for them since you're the admin, or set up oauth with automatic account creation).

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#312

Post by lucb1e »

https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements

> RAM: Minimum 4GB, recommended 6GB

Wow. When factoring in the OS, that's an entire system's worth of RAM dedicated to just hosting files!

What does it use all this for? Or is this just for when it occasionally (upon uploading new pictures) loads the image recognition neural net?

I'd have to stop Immich whenever I want to do some other RAM-heavy task. All my other services (including database, several web servers with a bunch of web services, a Windows VM, git server, email, redis...) + the host OS and any redundancy caused by using containers, use 4.6GB combined, peaking to 6GB on occasion

> CPU: Minimum 2 cores, recommended 4 cores

Would be good to know how fast those cores should be. My hardware is a mobile platform from 2012, and I've noticed each core is faster than a modern Pi as well as e.g. the "dedicated cores" you get from DigitalOcean. It really depends what you run it on, not how many of them you have

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#313

Post by windexh8er »

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…

I've hosted Immich since it came out and all my photos have been migrated to it at this point. I would never host Immich on NixOS (and I do use it for certain things). The reason? It's not simpler than a container option and creates a single point of issue. The container option is tested and supported by Immich, they recommend it. So everything I need is part of that. I moved servers midway through the year and the storage for my Immich implementation is NAS hosted and the mount is simply exposed to the Immich container. It took me less than 15 minutes to move Immich. And while that would have likely been the same with NixOS it's actually more of a chore to roll back with Nix. My Compose file is locked to major/minor and I choose when to do upgrades. But rollbacks are actually simpler IMO. I just stop the container, tar the operational directory, flip the bits in the Compose file and restart. I've not actually had an issue with Immich ever while doing it this way and I manage about 10TB of photos and videos currently in Immich.

I actually thought about doing this with NixOS last year, but it seemed counterproductive compared to how I self-host, I don't want to manage configurations in multiple places. If I switched everything it would likely be just as much work and then I'm reliant on Nix. Over the years I've gone from the OS being a mix of Arch and Ubuntu to mostly just Debian for my self hosting LXC or VMs. I already have the deployments templated so there's nothing for me to do other than map an IP, give it a hostname and start it.

To each their own, but I don't want to be beholden to NixOS for everything. I like the container abstraction on LXC and VMs and it's been very good to minimize the work of self-hosting over 40+ services both in my home lab and in the bare metal server I lease from Hetzner.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#314

Post by senbrow »

teekert wrote: post #173
AdrianB1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. There are many people, even in the IT industry, that don't deal with containers at all; think about the Windows apps, games, embedded stuff, etc. Containers are a niche in the grand scheme of things, not the vast majority like some people assume.

Really? I'm a biologist, just do some self hosting as a hobby, and need a lot of FOSS software for work. I have experienced containers as nothing other than pervasive. I guess my surprise is just stemming from the fact that I, a non CS person even knows containers and see them as almost unavoidable. But what you say sounds logical.

The world is too complex, and life paths too varied, to reliably assume "everyone" in a community or group knows about some fact.

You're usually deep within a social bubble of some sort if you find yourself assuming otherwise.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#315

Post by dangus »

sylens wrote: post #273
dangus wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I like about Ente. I can pay them to give me an e2e encrypted cloud service, and then the desktop app has a continuous export feature that will dump everything into a plain folder structure on my home NAS automatically. Ente could go out of business tomorrow and I’d still have all my photos, neatly organized into folders. And I don’t have to bother with self-hosting overhead. Or I could self host, too, i…

Have you had any issues with the continuous export writing to a network volume? And does it work for all users in a family plan? That was my plan as well, but I’d like to only have to run one export job

I can’t tell you about family plan since I don’t have one. I assume you’d have to set this up on a per-user basis.

I haven’t had any network volume issues. It’s an SMB volume provided by trueNAS mounted on a Windows machine.

I will say, if you mess up your volume like the time I took my NAS down for maintenance for a few days, the export failure wasn’t incredibly loud. I don’t think it notified and screamed at me that it wasn’t working. So I guess that is a significant risk.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#316

Post by DrammBA »

riedel wrote: post #127
fsh wrote: 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.

Storage template is not deprecated https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/

Also according to https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge the notify issue was fixed July 2024.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#317

Post by neurostimulant »

lucb1e wrote: post #312

https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements > RAM: Minimum 4GB, recommended 6GB Wow. When factoring in the OS, that's an entire system's worth of RAM dedicated to just hosting files! What does it use all this for? Or is this just for when it occasionally (upon uploading new pictures) loads the image recognition neural net? I'd have to stop Immich whenever I want to do some other RAM-heavy task. All my other services…

It has modern features that requires relatively heavy processing such as facial recognition, finding similar images, ocr, transcoding videos, etc. I think it only needs those computing resources when you upload new images/videos.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#318

Post by hombre_fatal »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #296

> 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…

> 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.

LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo.

After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the service to Tailscale, and then give me a todo list reminder of what I needed to do to mirror my Macbook iCloud/Photo.app gallery to it and then see it on my iPhone...

...than any of the times I've had to work around "black box says no", much like your example.

Just a couple years ago, this wasn't the case. I didn't have the energy to ssh into my server and remember how things are set up and then read a bunch of docs and risk having to go into a manual debug loop any time a service breaks. LLM does all that. I never even read Nix docs. LLM does that too.

In fact, it was fairly fun to finally get a good cross-platform setup working in general to divest from Apple thanks to LLM + Nix. I really like where things are going in this regard. I don't need any of this crap anymore that I used to use because it was the only way to get something that Just Worked.

By the time I lose my software job and have to compete with you lot, H1Bs, and teenagers to fold sweaters at Hollister, I won't need to use a single bit of proprietary software. It will be a huge consolation.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#319

Post by Groxx »

lucb1e wrote: post #306
Groxx wrote: post #23

I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed. The project as a whole feels competent . Stuff that should be fast is fast. E.g. upload a few tens of thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in the scroll bar - odds are very good that it'll have the thumbnails fully rendered in like…

> the image folder structure is very nearly your full data, with metadata files along side the images Wait, other comments were saying that one of Immich's weak points is backups. Someone else replied that the postgres structure is sane so you can run sql queries to get your data out if needed. Now you're saying it's plain old files. I'm confused

Some minor data is in postgres, but to test it I just fed it a previous install's library folder (images and metadata files). Worked fine, restored all my albums and tags, though perhaps not "people" iirc. And not e.g. ML image content search, of course, you need to re-generate that. And the metadata files were more than obvious enough to satisfy my "I can do this by hand if I really need to" bar, and recreating the accounts by hand is trivial.

The main "weak point" is probably that it doesn't have S3 integration, which is entirely fair. But for my purposes, rcloning the library folder (or e.g. rsync to a btrfs for free deduplication if you reorganize) is more than good enough, because that folder provides enough data for it to restore everything I care about.

For DB backups for keeping everything, there are configurable auto-backups, but it's only a snapshot to a local filesystem. So you'd need to mirror that out somehow, but syncthing/rclone/etc exist and there are plenty of options.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#320

Post by ohhellnawman »

senbrow wrote: post #314
teekert wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I'm a biologist, just do some self hosting as a hobby, and need a lot of FOSS software for work. I have experienced containers as nothing other than pervasive. I guess my surprise is just stemming from the fact that I, a non CS person even knows containers and see them as almost unavoidable. But what you say sounds logical.

The world is too complex, and life paths too varied, to reliably assume "everyone" in a community or group knows about some fact. You're usually deep within a social bubble of some sort if you find yourself assuming otherwise.

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