Self-hosting my photos with Immich

I also run NixOS (btw) but opted for the container. My Docker compose setup has moved from Arch to Ubuntu to NixOS now, so I like the flexibility of that setup.

I also use Tailscale, and use cloudflare as nameserver and Caddy in front of Immich to get an nice url and https. For DNS redirects I use Adguard on the tailnet, but (mostly for family) I also set some redirects in my Mikrotik hEX (E50UG). This way Immich is reachable from anywhere and not on the internet. Unfortunately it looks like the Immich app caches the IP address somewhere? Because it always reports as disconnected whenever Tailscale turns off when I'm at home or the other way around and takes some time/attempts/restarts to get going again. It's been pretty flaky that way...

Other than that: Best selfhosted app ever. It has reminded me that video > photos, for family moments. Regularly I go back through the years for that day, love that feature.

So am I seeing this right:

Immich, ente and photoprism all compete in a similar space?

Seems immich is the most polished webpage, but which solution will become the next cloud for photos is to be seen. Surely it's not next cloud anymore, considering the comments here.

> I just ended up exposing my public IP.

I considered doing that too. My main problem with it is privacy. Let's say I set up some sort of dynamic DNS to point foo.bar.example.org to my home IP. Then, after some family event, I share an album link (https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string) with friends and family. The album link gets shared on, and ends up on the public internet. Once somebody figures out foo.bar.example.org points to my home IP, they can look up my home IP at all times.

My guess would be that Synology is an expensive but weak computer, bare minimum for NAS.

Immich does require some CPU and also GPU for video transcoding and vector search embedding generation.

I had Immich (and many other containers) running successfully on AMD Ryzen 2400G for years. And recently I upgraded to 5700G since it was a cheap upgrade.

Immich struggles to act as a true unifying solution for users with large, existing archival collections (DSLRs, scanned film, etc.). Since those „Archival Assets“ are often decades old, already organized into complex, user-defined file structures (e.g., 1998/DATE_PLACE_PROJECT/PLACE_PROJECT_DATE.jpg), and frequently contain incomplete or inconsistent metadata (missing dates, no GPS, different file formats).

Immich's current integration solutions (like "External Libraries") treat the archive as a read-only view, which leads to a fragmented user experience:

- Changes, facial recognition, or tagging remain only within Immich’s database, failing to write metadata back to the archival files in their original directory structure (last time I checked, might be better now.

- My established, meaningful directory structure is ignored or flattened in the Immich view, forcing the user to rely entirely on Immich’s internal date/AI-based organization.

My goal (am I the only one?) of having one app view all photos while maintaining the integrity and organizational schema of the archival files on disk is not yet fully met.

Immich needs a robust, bi-directional import/sync layer that respects and enhances existing directory structures, rather than just importing files into its own schema.