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

markpitblado.me

131–137 of 137 posts

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

#131
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use LUKS, eCryptfs, or ZFS encryption. It’s not the application’s job to do encryption at rest, it’s the filesystem’s.

I personally find it nicer to unlock my phone to decrypt (Face ID) then dealing with having to auth with my headless server. Is there a way to manage this without putting the keys for LUKS or similar somewhere risky? Main threat is someone stealing the NAS during a break in.

You can store the key in the TPM. If someone steals the NAS, they can only decrypt it if they continue running the exact same software, which you harden (e.g. disable password login from the TTY).

Or you can SSH in and type the key once per reboot.

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

#132

It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index. Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.

For this exact reason, I'm using Immich by pointing it to my folder structure as an "external library" https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I already pay no dollar per month for storing my photos in a folder and it's not used to train any AI model.

Yeah, and those photos aren’t available to you in a meaningful way when you’re out and about. Finding photos of Aunt Cassie over the years takes more effort.

I do both, folders for backup, Immich for indexing and mobile access. Real simple docker compose file I wrote once to get the whole thing going years ago.

Doesn’t have to be either or, and a dumb folder only accomplishes a portion of my needs.

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

#134

I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things). I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier. I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, proces…

If a thousand people ask an AI for a generic photo app, that's not only a huge waste of time and money, a lot of them are going to experience data loss because of it. And only a couple will know how to use docker.

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

#135

I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things). I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier. I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, proces…

Everyone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most. The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N. I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI.…

You missed the core of what I was saying: not vibe code a whole thing end to end (I agree, not sustainable), embrace the idea of having devs build the storage, parsers, schema, and security and let everyone vibe code the rest.

Like, let’s use a simple photos example: a photo file has metadata standards already embedded, but doesn’t store it’s edit history, event, or who’s in it. Immich already does a lot that’s great here with parsers and ML and if they changed focus to the data storage layer they could essentially boil down to a table for edit history, a table for events, a table for people, etc, the ability to store in SQLite or sidecars, and an API layer for people to hand to their AI.

Not only would it reduce the dev load, but then we could have an ever-expanding sphere of personal data ownership as Futo adds schemas/tables for video, audio, documents, and maybe everything else most people need to build their own UIs for specific uses or even “god view” UIs.

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

#136

"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…

> Neither of your proposed solutions are really similar to Immich

Yes, I agree. It wasn't my intention to say my solution is any replacement of Immich or its features, I just wanted to contribute different way of doing things in order for the comment to have something positive also.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does becom…

Good news, my coding agents can access my proxmox and HA and immich and make having a homelab easier than it ever has been. I actually just used codex to help me find dupes across multiple user libraries in immich and quarantine them. In immich, I can only dedupe across a single user library. I used codex to find grid based images that I needed to convert into animated images from back in my iphone 4 days. It located…

Ans we're just in the first year of agents taking off. Imagine what the next 5 or 10 years will be when it comes to automation for the everyday people. What a great time to be alive
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