Self-hosting my photos with Immich • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#241

Post by oasisaimlessly » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

onionisafruit wrote: post #226

Scandiravian wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fo…

In the NixOS scenario you described, what keeps you from finding an unrelated thing stopped working three days later and having to find what changed? I’m asking because you spoke to me when you said “because I'm simply not good at documenting my changes in parallel with making them”, and I want to understand if NixOS is something I should look into. There are all kinds of things like immich that I don’t use because I…

Not OP, and not a very experienced with NixOS (I just use Nix for building containers), but roughly speaking:

* With NixOS, you define the configuration for the entire system in one or a couple .nix files that import each other.

* You can very easily put these .nix files under version control and follow a convention of never leaving the system in a state where you have uncommitted changes.

* See the NixOS/infra repo for an example of managing multiple machines' configurations in a single repo: https://github.com/NixOS/infra/blob/6fecd0f4442ca78ac2e4102c...

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#242

Post by embedding-shape » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

bicepjai wrote: post #31

ptk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does sharing an album with others work on Immich?

I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.

> In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.

Flip a switch and then what, are you getting a isolated public URL to share? Or you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#243

Post by hosteur » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #214

hosteur wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Huh? What are you maintaining? The PostgreSQL db and extensions are provided in the container image. You do not have to use your own external PostgreSQL.

Of course, you may have reasons to do that. But then you also own the maintenance.

I have never had to maintain any PG extensions. Whatever they put in the image, I just run. And so far it has just worked. Upgrades are frequent and nothing has broken on upgrade - yet at least

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#244

Post by JamesSwift » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

aacid wrote: post #184

DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user purge after their developer purge. You just never know who this group of people will come after next, especially after they started defining "Fascism" as "anyone asking for how they define Fascism". And the jump of getting rid of people you hate who contribute to your project and you can do little harm to, to getting rid of people you hate who are of no use t…

NixOS is open-source, if needed it can be forked anytime and continued to work on with new maintainers.

And flakes make that viable

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#245

Post by femiagbabiaka » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

jbstack wrote: post #229

lilyball wrote: post #169

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.

"Just" write your own module? Have you seen how bad the Nix documentation is and how challenging Nix (the language) is? Not to mention that you have to learn Yet Another Language just for this corner case, which you will not use for anything else. At least Guix uses a lisp variant so that some of the skills you gain are transferable (e.g. to Emacs, or even to a GP language like Common Lisp or Racket). Don't get me wr…

The documentation is not great (especially since it tends to document nix-the-language and not the conventions actually used in Nixpkgs), but there are very few languages on earth with more examples of modules than Nix.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#246

Post by hosteur » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:33 PM UTC

ttoinou wrote: post #207

renegade-otter wrote: post #181

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…

Couldnt Immich be used by a paid service provider to provide Immich google-free photo hosting ?

I am pretty sure they already offer that service for a price.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#247

Post by fijiaarone » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:33 PM UTC

Liftyee wrote: post #237

euleriancon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still some features that a miss from Google photos. There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated. Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google Photos. It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back, but it isn't perfect yet.

Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face recognition and context/object search to be miles better than Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people. Almost all my Google P…

Don’t all non-European people look alike?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#248

Post by SlightlyLeftPad » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

Jnr wrote: post #109

halapro wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part. How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.

The offline sync was a bit problematic in the past but this year they finally got it working properly.

Can confirm, they put in a ton of effort to fix it and they delivered. Flawless on ios since many versions ago.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#249

Post by SlightlyLeftPad » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

javier2 wrote: post #144

WD-42 wrote: post #4

Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. I can honestly say Immich is better in every way than Google Photos or whatever Apple calls it. The only thing is having to set it up yourself.

For the record, I think Immich is very good, and I use it myself. But there is something about the design and performance in the mobile app that still makes it feel "not quite there yet" on iOS at least.

Are you on the latest version?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#250

Post by palata » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #240

palata wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sync really is quite good. Do you have to ever open the app though? On iOS/Android? In my case I would need it to run on the phones of my family members, and they probably will never open the app.

iOS doesn't allow that sort of pattern for non-Apple applications last time I looked, so probably doesn't work on iOS at all.

The Nextcloud iOS app does it. For some reason it requires the location permission "all the time" for that, presumably as a way to "wake" the app from time to time?

I decided to try Nextcloud exactly because of this. My problem with it is more that the whole thing is a bit unreliable. Like once in a while the app will get into a state where the only way I found to recover is to just erase everything and re-sync everything. And the app will resend ALL the pictures, even though they are already on the server.

And I can't do that with my family members' phones. It doesn't matter to me if the app takes a month to sync the photos, but it has to require zero maintenance. I can deal with the server side, but I need it to "just work" on the smartphones.