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Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

markpitblado.me

11–20 of 137 posts

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#12
I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to preserve storage space.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#13
post #5

Can this sync when you migrate onto LAN?

> By default, Immich will only upload photos and videos when connected to Wi-Fi. You can change this behavior in the backup settings page.

It can also optionally switch to connecting to a local ip/hostname when on your lan.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#14

"it’s now easier than ever" Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great... My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now. Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.

Or you can use this and pay no dollar per month for an accessible indexed search of 12+ months of photos, not used to train AI models.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#15

> The ability to upload photos from your device automatically I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.

It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#16
Great project but I believe Google Photos pricing is quite reasonable and alluring.

I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#17

"it’s now easier than ever" Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great... My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now. Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.

Neither of your proposed solutions are really similar to Immich, the first is certainly private and secure, but you don't get many of the conviniences like location-based search, automatic face/object tagging, automatic OCR, etc.

Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.

I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#18
post #12

I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to p…

Yeah, sharing is one of the big problems with Immich. You either need to expose your whole instance to make share links publicly accessible (and there's no way to secure user accounts with 2FA), or create user accounts for the people you want to share with and/or invite them and set up your VPN for them to access the shares.

There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#19
post #11

I'm using photoprism for a few years now, but the companion app on the phone is always the pain point.

I made the switch from photoprism to immich a couple years ago and the app is far better. Sad to hear it hasn't improved in the mean time.
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