Given how many times I've read praises about Immich here, I tried it a few weeks ago and was quite disappointed.
The fact that they don't support sub-albums make it an absolute no-go to me.
Self-hosting my photos with Immich
131–140 of 384 posts
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#132My biggest worry with Immich is how to future-proof the albums. With photos sorted into folders, it should be no problem to access them in a couple of decades. With Immich, I have to rely on the software still working or finding some kind of tool to dump the database.
This is why I still use Piwigo as I don't need to mess with file names and structure as far as I have seen.
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you update the software in the containers when new versions come out or vulnerabilities are actively being exploited? My understanding is that when using containers updating is an ordeal and you avoid the need my never exposing the services to the internet.
> How do you update the software in the containers when new versions come out or vulnerabilities are actively being exploited? You build new image with updated/patched versions of packages and then replace your vulnerable container with a new one, created from new image
Am I the only one surprised that this is a serious discussion in 2025?
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#134Anyone used https://lycheeorg.dev for a comparison? I'm curious to know which one would suit me best.
> Albums within albums
I didn't knew about Lychee previous to your comment, but given that they support what should be a basic feature of photo management software (unlike Immich), I'll give it a try
Thanks for the suggestion!
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm running NixOS on some of my hosts, but I still don't fully commit to configuring everything with nix, just the base system, and I prefer docker-compose for the actual services. I do it similarly with Debian hosts using cloud-init (nix is a lot better, though). The reason is that I want to keep the services in a portable/distro-agnostic format and decoupled from the base system, so I'm not tied too much to a singl…
How do you update the software in the containers when new versions come out or vulnerabilities are actively being exploited? My understanding is that when using containers updating is an ordeal and you avoid the need my never exposing the services to the internet.
Your understanding of containers is incorrect!
Containers decouple programs from their state. The state/data live outside the container so the container itself is disposable and can be discarded and rebuild cheaply. Of course there need to be some provisions for when the state (ie schema) needs to be updated by the containerized software. But that is the same as for non-containerized services.
I'm a bit surprised this has to be explained in 2025, what field do you work in?
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it. Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser. I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
OK. Then you concede your security, as I can't imagine any single person self-hosting can be better at keeping their public service more secure than engineers at Google can. Especially with limited time.
I mean, if you’re confident about security best practices, have a moderate amount of networking experience, and are a seasoned web developer, it’s not too scary at all. I realize that’s a lot of prerequisites though.
it’s not a fair comparison with Google because Google has a much bigger target on their back. There are millions of users of Google, so the value of hacking Google is very high. The value of hacking a random Immich instance is extremely low.
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#137My biggest worry with Immich is how to future-proof the albums. With photos sorted into folders, it should be no problem to access them in a couple of decades. With Immich, I have to rely on the software still working or finding some kind of tool to dump the database.
I use Single File PHP Gallery. Put the file in root dir of your photos and set it executable in web server. That's it. The settings are also inside the file, if you need any tweaking.
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#138Immich 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 want something with a simpler backend than immich. I don't really want to host it because it needs lots of stuff to run. I would love one that can do sqlite and is a single binary go (or rust) program.
Mine is that: https://photofield.dev/ (but has fewer features)
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it. Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser. I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
How safe is that to set up for novice it people? I have a pi with pi-hole on it and am thinking about putting immich on it but the fact that it exposes itself outside my LAN frightens me.
I have it set up in a container that I keep updated. Then it's reverse proxied by another container which runs nginx proxy manager, which keeps the HTTPS encryption online. So far, the maintenance has only been checking whether a new version has been released and docker pulling the images, then restarting the containers.
Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it. Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser. I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
OK. Then you concede your security, as I can't imagine any single person self-hosting can be better at keeping their public service more secure than engineers at Google can. Especially with limited time.
You definitely have a dull imagination. If the software itself is secure, containerized version of Immich behind a containerized version of nginx proxy manager is probably as secure as you can get. Also google security tends to be mainly leaning towards securing google and less towards securing google's (non paying) customers.