Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by krupan » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account. It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.

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

#42

Post by turbocon » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

bix6 wrote: post #25

cdrnsf wrote: post #24

I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.

Any info on your public proxy setup?

Not the commenttor, however I personally am a big fan of Cloudflare tunnels.

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

#43

Post by esafak » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

Noaidi wrote: post #39

drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years. Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.

Of all my possessions, I would discard my photos last.

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

#44

Post by import » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

Very curious about how frictionless is the Immich - iPhone / iCloud Photos sync, especially offloaded photos.

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

#45

Post by tehlike » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #43

Noaidi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years. Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.

Of all my possessions, I would discard my photos last.

Same here. My family photos are a treasure to me.

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

#46

Post by exabrial » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

exabrial wrote: 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.

nice, thx!

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

#47

Post by ochronus » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

Immich is wonderful, but if you're mostly looking for a solution to take your mind off the problem and don't want to self-host, try Ente photos.

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

#48

Post by bo0tzz » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

bix6 wrote: post #25

cdrnsf wrote: post #24

I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.

Any info on your public proxy setup?

Likely https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy

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

#49

Post by Helmut10001 » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!

- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).

- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)

- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.

I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:

    ```
    NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192
    VIPS_DISC_THRESHOLD=750m
    VIPS_CONCURRENCY=1
    MAGICK_MEMORY_LIMIT=8G
    MAGICK_MAP_LIMIT=4G
    ```

Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me:

    ```yaml
        logging:
          driver: "json-file"
          options:
            max-size: "10m"
            max-file: "3"
    ```

Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)

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

#50

Post by dominotw » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

is nas + backup to amazon glacier a good solution?