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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#351

Post by palata »

esseph wrote: post #254
palata wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my selling point for Nextcloud, and it turns out it doesn't work reliably. It works most of the time, but for backing up photos it's not enough, and when it fails it's super annoying (you have to resync EVERYTHING from scratch). People seem very happy about Immich, I'm tempted to try. But people seem very about Nextcloud as well, so it's difficult to tell.

Nextcloud is dogshit. Immich is the best end user focused app I've ever ran in a container.

I find it harsh to call it dogshit. My feeling is that they focus on other use-cases than photo syncing.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#352

Post by anon7000 »

lucb1e wrote: post #294
killingtime74 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 assum…

The backup thing is really more than just backing it up. I take a picture, and it’s nearly immediately available in the same way across all my devices and the web. I can search for “pizza” on the web app and see any picture of pizza I ever took. On a different or new device I’ll immediately have access to the whole library with no set up.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#353

Post by windexh8er »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #323
windexh8er wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

A few thoughts. > 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. I don't want to be beholden to NixOS for everything. I think there's a misunderstanding here. You aren't beholden to NixOS here. You don't have to use nixpkgs nor home-manager modules. You can make your own flakes and you can use containers, but the…

> I think there's a misunderstanding here. You aren't beholden to NixOS here. You don't have to use nixpkgs nor home-manager modules. You can make your own flakes and you can use containers, but the benefit is still that you set it up declaratively in config.

There's actually no misunderstanding and this is exactly my point. With any Nix config you are beholden to that specific platform. What I'm saying is any other Linux distro can be dropped in with almost no changes in my existing implementation. I've already experienced breaking changes pre-Flakes with Nix and so I don't actually view it as stable as other options. Beyond that there's some politics surrounding Nix that I don't care to follow. So when you say "all you have to do is write your own Flake"... Why? I already have something that's able to be reliably reinstalled in minutes if need be. I don't need a specific declarative set of tooling to get there.

I like the idea of a declarative setup, but I don't think Nix is mature enough nor does it bring enough differentiation to the plate to be worthwhile as of yet.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#354

Post by sylens »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #64
azuanrb wrote: post #29

I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow. Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future. I started looking for alternatives after Syn…

Long time synology user. Switched 3 weeks ago to ugreen. They rolled back their fiasco decision about drives (synology), but I wanted some good hardware in 2025. Everything that synology offers is outdated and slow. Got myself a 6800 pro. It chewed through 98k photos, many of which are raw, within 24h AFAIK. Then came face recognition, text recognition etc. Within 2-3 days all was done. The performance is night and d…

does the ugreen NAS reserve port 80/443 for its own reverse proxy solution? It annoys me that Synology does that

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#355

Post by lucb1e »

neurostimulant wrote: post #317
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.

Any idea how much it uses when you're not uploading new pictures?

If it just needs it on occasion (and I can control when by not uploading at times where I'm using it for other purposes), that would probably be worth it since I have the spare capacity 99% of the time

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#356

Post by lucb1e »

UltraSane wrote: post #341
lucb1e wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't open ports, how can it reach your internal services to allow you access to them?

by using a wireguard tunnel and NAT traversal https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

Ah, by using their servers:

> How do we break the deadlock? That’s where STUN comes in. [...] In Tailscale, our coordination server and fleet of DERP (Detour Encrypted Routing Protocol) servers act as our side channel

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#358

Post by kahnclusions »

rtaylorgarlock wrote: post #332
hombre_fatal wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

LLM managing a NixOS install lol

Hilarious and frightening. I don’t want LLMs anywhere near anything remotely important. We’ve already had to remove a few dependencies from our projects because of CVEs caused by careless LLM usage upstream.

We are so screwed.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#359

Post by neurostimulant »

lucb1e wrote: post #355
neurostimulant wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any idea how much it uses when you're not uploading new pictures? If it just needs it on occasion (and I can control when by not uploading at times where I'm using it for other purposes), that would probably be worth it since I have the spare capacity 99% of the time

I think you can disable machine learning stuff in the settings. And yes, you can control when the sync happen, or even have it only triggered manually and never automatically.

My instance when not running any photo/video processing job:

- immich server: cpu: 0.51% ram: 753MiB

- immich redis: cpu: 0.48 ram: 19.64MiB

- immich machine learning: cpu: 0% ram: 209.3MiB

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#360

Post by UltraSane »

lucb1e wrote: post #356
UltraSane wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by using a wireguard tunnel and NAT traversal https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

Ah, by using their servers: > How do we break the deadlock? That’s where STUN comes in. [...] In Tailscale, our coordination server and fleet of DERP (Detour Encrypted Routing Protocol) servers act as our side channel

Yes, NAT traversal is used widely. It is only needed at the start of the connection to get both firewalls to open ports. The encrypted wireguard tunnel is point to point
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