Self-hosting my photos with Immich • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#251

Post by a022311 » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

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…

> You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing.

I totally disagree. You do need a tiny bit of command line experience to install and update it (nothing more than using a text editor and running `docker compose up`), but that's really it. All administration happens from the web UI after that. I've been using Immich for at least 2 years and I've never had to manually do something other than an update.

> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Photos for others.

Honestly, I can't understand what exactly you're expecting. If Google Photos suits your needs for sharing photos with others, that's great! As for Immich, have you read how it started[0]? I think it's solved the problem amazingly well and it still stays true to its initial ambitions.

[0]: https://v1.142.1.archive.immich.app/docs/overview/welcome

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#252

Post by sanex » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

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…

I've been waiting what feels like years for immich stable to be released for this reason. Luckily it finally happened about a month ago. I'm about to go through swapping out the main OS SSD on my server. If I'm able to see the immich backups after reinstalling TrueNAS I'm going to call it resilient enough for me.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#253

Post by dsvf » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

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…

Not my experience hosting immich for close to two years now. There was only one "breaking change" a long time ago where you would have to manually change a docker image in the compose file, but since then things have been smooth for me.

Immich may not be the pinnacle of all software development, but with the alternative being Google photos:

- Uploading too many photos won't clog my email and vice versa

- I'm not afraid of getting locked out of my photo account for unclear reasons and being unable to reach anyone to regain access

- If I upload family photos from the beach, then my account won't get automatically flagged/disabled for whatever

- Backups are trivially easy compared to Google takeout

- The devs are reachable and responsive. Encounter a problem? You'll at least reach a human being instead of getting stranded with a useless non-support forum

I would instead say that my (and my family's) photos are too important to me to pass their hosting on to a company known for its arbitrary decisions and then being an impenetrable labyrinth if there is an issue.

So you do pay some price, but it is an illusion to think that the price of Google photos (be that in cash, your data or your effort) is much lower.

Things that did break during this time: - my hacky remote filesystem - network connectivity of a too cheap server but these were on me and my stinginess.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#254

Post by esseph » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #146

WD-42 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.

That was my selling point for Nextcloud, and it turns out it doesn't work reliably. It works most of the time, but for backing up photos it's not enough, and when it fails it's super annoying (you have to resync EVERYTHING from scratch). People seem very happy about Immich, I'm tempted to try. But people seem very about Nextcloud as well, so it's difficult to tell.

Nextcloud is dogshit.

Immich is the best end user focused app I've ever ran in a container.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#255

Post by esseph » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

cromka wrote: post #97

jasonjayr wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

If you're not Cloudflare averse...

Setup immich VM or docker container with a cloudflare tunnel

Front access with Cloudflare Access (ZeroTrust) for free.

Set "can only be accessed by users with email = xyz@myuser”

Done.

Now assuming this is the same user email as the one you shared photos with, there is a base level of security keeping the riffraff away.

Home IP is never exposed either, because it's proxied through the cf tunnel.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#256

Post by Scandiravian » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 2:59 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…

I think the sibling answer by oasisaimlessly is really good. I'd supplement it by saying that because you can have the entire configuration in a git repo, you can see what you've changed at what point in time

I'm the beginning I was doing one change, writing that change down in some log, then doing another change (this I'll mess up in about five minutes)

Now I'm creating a new commit, writing a description for it to help myself remember what I'm doing and then changing the Nix code. I can then review everything I've changed on the system by doing a simple diff. If something breaks I can look at my commit history and see every change I've ever made

It does still have some overhead in terms of keeping a clean commut history. I occasionally get distracted by other issues while working and I'll have to split the changes into two different commits, but I can do that after I've checked everything works, so it becomes a step at the end where I can focus fully on it instead of yet another thing I need to keep track of mentally

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#257

Post by Trasmatta » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

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…

Every time I go the self hosting route, everything goes smoothly for awhile, and then decides to break 6 months down the line, and I have to waste a Saturday figuring it all out and upgrading things. Not what I want to do with my weekend, when I'm already doing software dev and maintenance for work. This happens even for super dependable, well written self hosted software.

On the other hand, maybe AI can help remove some of that pain for me now. Just have Claude figure out what's wrong. (Until it decides to hallucinate something, and makes things worse)

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#258

Post by johannes1234321 » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #135

quag wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

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 thi…

It's not that easy.

First I need to monitor all the dependencies inside my containers, which is half a Linux distribution in many cases.

Then I have to rebuild and mess with all potential issues if software builds ...

Yes, in the happy path it is just a "docker build" which updates stuff from a Linux distro repo and then builds only what is needed, but as soon as the happy path fails this can become really tedious really quickly as all people write their Dockerfiles differently, handle build step differently, use different base Linux distributions, ...

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

#259

Post by lillecarl » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

fijiaarone wrote: post #239

conradev wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my favorite use of CLI AI coding tools: updating my nix config. I can just ask my computer to configure services for me!

I remember when people claimed to use NixOs in order to have a deterministic, repeatable setup.

AI generated Nix is equally deterministic and repeatable. The deterministic behavior makes Nix well suited for AI yolo code, either it evaluates and builds or it doesn't, and if the result isn't functional you revert back to the previous generation.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#260

Post by Trasmatta » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 3:08 PM UTC

uzername wrote: post #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.

This is why I just can't deal with self hosting... I'm already burnt out on this kind of stuff in my day job. And something like this will ALWAYS happen eventually.