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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

11–20 of 384 posts

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#11
post #10
post #8

Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple

Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.

Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#12
post #2

I'm running Immich on NanoPi R6C (arm64, even lower idle power usage, still plenty fast for running Immich). I use Cloudflare tunnel to make it available outside the home network. I've set up two DNS names – one for accessing it directly in the local network, and and a second one that goes through the tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports internal/external connection settings – it uses the direct connection when con…

Are you also facing the the 100mb upload limit when using cloudflare tunnel? Sometimes I want to upload a video from my phone will away from home but I can't and need to vpn

You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#14
post #5

Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project. I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do…

just disable auto-upload and then manually upload the ones you want to. There is a setting to share your immich library with someone else. Between those two features, you should get something close to what you want.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#15
immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly, just because certain things I want to do are just not possible with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for that eventually too tho.

I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a family is way cheaper than the equivalent s3 storage assuming frequent access, even assuming a 50% discount. so that's nice.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#16
post #11
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.

Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.

Even if you are self hosting in the cloud or on a rented box, Tailscale is still really nice from a security perspective. No need to expose anything to the internet, and you can easily mix and match remotely hosted and home servers since they all are on the same Tailnet.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#17
I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just auto-managed cache, where everything you didn't access in the last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it itself, and if all the data is fully portable.

FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-maker.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#18
post #5

Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project. I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do…

just disable auto-upload and then manually upload the ones you want to. There is a setting to share your immich library with someone else. Between those two features, you should get something close to what you want.

For me one of the killer things would be to click "share" on a photo I took, and then have the immich albums show up so I can put them in that specific place as like a 3 click process. That's basically what I was building my whole app around

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#19
post #5

Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project. I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do…

I have a homegrown app too. It's too tinkery for anyone else. I throw whole iOS device backups at it so it can pluck out media from texts. Then the frontend has an efficient bulk sorting workflow with vi keys to navigate a grid of photos and tag with a few different tags or delete. I feel like this is not the same use case as immich, it's maybe a curation step before exporting a refined set of media.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#20
post #10
post #8

Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple

Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.

In my words, I use Tailscale at home but not for this (yet). Tailscale is a simple mesh network that joins my home computers and phones while on separate networks. Like a VPN, but only the phone to PC traffic flows on that virtual private network.
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