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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

211–220 of 384 posts

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#211
post #108

My 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.

Although Immich does backup from your phone, I don't see it as a viable backup solution. Git-annex, Unison, and Syncthing are much better at keeping files synchronized across devices. Immich will create its own copies of photos and transcode videos for playback on the web. That may be fine if you have enough storage space, but for me it makes the phone backup useless. I suppose you could use a git-annex special remote directory as an Immich external library.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#212
post #200
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos That is a totally reasonable view. But others have different preferences. I, for example, do not want to share all my photos with Google, govvies and anyone else they leak them to. So I self host, back up and share my files with the family. I can always dump what I want to insta, etc. but it is my choice what to share, picture by picture, wi…

>> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos pixelfed may be what the parent want then. I don't like that it is PHP, but as long as they adhere to the ActPub protocal, we can roll our own in whatever flavor.

Or perhaps Photoview? https://github.com/photoview/photoview

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#213

Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Pho…

Actually, I've setup a proxmox server last week that run a couple of self-hosted application. I've nextcloud running and it was fairly easy to setup. The next item on my list WAS Immich. I decided against trying to deploy it. The reason is simple: they are essentially forcing the use of Docker, which I won't touch at at all. Either a native proxmox container (which is just lxc) or a proper VM, but I keep those in res…

What are some arguments against using docker?

I think it's the best of every world. Self contained, with an install script. Can bring up every dependent service needed all in one command. Even your example of "a simple script" has 5 different expectations.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#214

Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Pho…

What? It is literally just start the container and forget. When upgrading it is change the version tag and restart the container. Upgrades are frequent but no hassle. I have been running this for half a year. It might have been more work earlier? My household is using this for our shared photos repository and everyone can use it. Even the kids. There is both direct web access and an iPhone app.

Idk maintaining the PG vector extensions has been kind of a pain in the ass, at least from an automation perspective

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I've setup a proxmox server last week that run a couple of self-hosted application. I've nextcloud running and it was fairly easy to setup. The next item on my list WAS Immich. I decided against trying to deploy it. The reason is simple: they are essentially forcing the use of Docker, which I won't touch at at all. Either a native proxmox container (which is just lxc) or a proper VM, but I keep those in res…

I really don't understand this take. A script that installs all required dependencies is fine if and only if you are dedicating a machine to immich. It probably requires some version of node, with possibly hidden dependencies on some python, it uses ffmpeg, so all related libraries and executables need to be there. You then have a couple separate DBs, all communicating together. Let's not talk about updates! What if…

I've never understood it either. I still deploy some things into their own respective manual deployments but for lots of things having a pre-made docker compose means I can throw it on my general app VM and it'll take 5 seconds to spin up and auto get HTTPS certs and DNS. Then I don't lose hours when I get two days into using something and realize it's not for me.

Also have you read some of the setup instructions for some of these things? I'd be churning out 1000 lines of ansible crap.

Either way since Proxmox 9.1 has added at least initial support for docker based containers the whole argument's out the window anyway.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Why? If a NixOS module doesn’t support what you need, you can just write your own module, and the module system lets you disable existing modules if you need to. Doing anything custom this way still feels easier than doing it in an imperative world.

> you can just write your own module, and the module system lets you disable existing modules if you need to That sounds about 100x more difficult to me

I can see your point that it can be daunting to have all the pain upfront. When I was using Ubuntu on my servers it was super simple to get things running

The problem was when I had to change some obscure .ini file in /etc for a dependency to something new I was setting up. Three days later I'd realise something unrelated had stopped working and then had to figure out which change in the last many days caused this

For me this is at least 100x more difficult than writing a Nix module, because I'm simply not good at documenting my changes in parallel with making them

For others this might not be a problem, so then an imperative solution might be the best choice

Having used Nix and NixOS for the past 6-7 years, I honestly can't imagine myself using anything than declarative configuration again - but again, it's just a good fit for me and how my mind works

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#217
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. No. You can easily checkout repo containing the Dockerfile, add a Dockerfile override, change most of the stuff while maintaining the original Dockerfile instact and the ability to use git to update it. Then you change one line in docker-compose.yaml (or override it if it's also hosted by the repo) and build the container locally. Can't imagine easier way to modify existing docker images, I do this a lot…

I'll be honest, that does not sound "easy". It is straightforward, but so is the NixOS module system, and I could describe writing a custom module the same way you described custom Docker images.

This is a familiarity problem. I've never used NixOS and all your posts telling me how simple it is sounds like super daunting challenges to me versus just updating a Dockerfile or a one liner in compose that I am already familiar with, I suspect its the inverse for you.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#218
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Ente uses MinIO for storage, I could see them supporting the ability to self-host in S3 at some point

Hey, you can connect any S3 compliant service to Ente. Our quickstart.sh[1] bundles Minio, but you can configure Ente to use RustFS[2] or Garage[3] instead. [1]: https://ente.io/help/self-hosting/#quickstart [2]: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs [3]: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

Thanks for the links 0 it’s been a while since I looked at the self hosting documentation.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#219
I had immich running great for a while, maybe for months. It would seamlessly sync photos from phone to local home server. I was going to setup nightly outbound sync too (1 is none, 2 is some).

I updated the container for usual appliance maintenance. Entire thing is toast. Metadata files can't be read, mounted, permission issues and more. It's been four months since.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#220

I had immich running great for a while, maybe for months. It would seamlessly sync photos from phone to local home server. I was going to setup nightly outbound sync too (1 is none, 2 is some). I updated the container for usual appliance maintenance. Entire thing is toast. Metadata files can't be read, mounted, permission issues and more. It's been four months since.

That is why you should never update stuff that works :)
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