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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#261

Post by fwip »

teekert wrote: post #173
AdrianB1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. There are many people, even in the IT industry, that don't deal with containers at all; think about the Windows apps, games, embedded stuff, etc. Containers are a niche in the grand scheme of things, not the vast majority like some people assume.

Really? I'm a biologist, just do some self hosting as a hobby, and need a lot of FOSS software for work. I have experienced containers as nothing other than pervasive. I guess my surprise is just stemming from the fact that I, a non CS person even knows containers and see them as almost unavoidable. But what you say sounds logical.

Self-hosting and bioinformatics are both great use cases for containers, because you want "just let me run this software somebody else wrote," without caring what language it's in, or looking for rpms, etc etc.

If you're e.g: a Java shop, your company already has a deployment strategy for everything you write, so there's not as much pressure to deploy arbitrary things into production.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#262

Post by esseph »

azuanrb wrote: post #29

I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow. Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future. I started looking for alternatives after Syn…

I think running it on Synology may be a lot of your problem there

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#263

Post by miladyincontrol »

As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer.

Its not perfect but its great to be able to just search for things in a photo and find any matches across dozens of TBs of raws, without having to have some 3rd party cloud AI nonsense do all the work.

The only thing I wish they could get integrated is support for jxl compressed raws, which requires them compile libraw with adobe's sdk.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#264

Post by rkomorn »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #258
teekert wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

It does feel like one of the side effects of containers is that now, instead of having to worry about dependencies on one host, you have to worry about dependencies for the host (because you can't just ignore security issues on the host) as well as in every container on said host.

So you go from having to worry about one image + N services to up-to-N images + N services.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#265

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

I think you are not too wrong about this.

Just that state _can_ be outside the container, and in most cases should. It doesn't have to be outside the container. A process running in a container can also write files inside the container, in a location not covered by any mount or volume. The downside or upside of this is, that once you down your container, stuff is basically gone, which is why usually the state does live outside, like you are saying.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#266

Post by Scandiravian »

Scandiravian wrote: post #256
onionisafruit wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just realised I didn't answer the first question about what keeps me from discovering the issues earlier

The quick answer is complexity and the amount of energy I have, since I'm mostly working on my homelab after a full work day

Some things also don't run that often or I don't check up on them for some time. Like hardware acceleration for my jellyfin instance stopped working at some point because I was messing around with OpenCL and I messed up something with the Mesa drivers. Didn't discover it until I noticed the fans going ham due to the added workload

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#267

Post by TacticalCoder »

miladyincontrol wrote: post #263

As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer. Its not perfect but its great to be able to just search for things in a photo and find any matches across dozens of TBs of raws, without having to have some 3rd party cloud AI nonsense do all the work. The only thing I…

> As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer.

I installed immich in a VM. And the VM is using GPU passthrough. I don't see how it's overkill: immich is a kitchen sink with hundreds if not thousands of dependencies and hardly a month goes by without yet another massive exploit affecting package managers.

I'm not saying VM escapes exploit aren't a thing but this greatly raises the bar.

When one install a kitchen sink as gigantic as immich, anything that can help contain exploits is most welcome.

So: immich in a VM and if you want a GPU, just do GPU passthrough.

I agree that the search using facial recognition is nice in immich that said.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#268

Post by Groxx »

palata wrote: post #157
Groxx wrote: post #23

I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed. The project as a whole feels competent . Stuff that should be fast is fast. E.g. upload a few tens of thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in the scroll bar - odds are very good that it'll have the thumbnails fully rendered in like…

How does the mobile syncing work? Really looking for a system where I can install the app on my parents' iPhones and it backs up their photos to my server without them having to even know about the app. They won't open it, ever. Nextcloud fails at that.

It's pretty easy to set it up to upload automatically, if that's the question. No need to launch it. I've only got my server on my home network so I can't sync while away, and I occasionally check to make sure it's working - no problems at all yet, a few months in.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#269

Post by iAMkenough »

sva_ wrote: post #145
Jnr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenVPN is far from "no fuss", especially when compared to Tailscale. I like to self host things so I also self host Headscale (private tailnet) and private derp proxy nodes (it is like TURN). Since derp uses https and can run on 443 using SNI I get access to my network also at hotels and other shady places where most of the UDP and TCP traffic is blocked. Tailscale ACL is also great and requires more work to achieve…

Why not just use wireguard directly? The configuration is fairly trivial

Even more trivial with Tailscale, so why wouldn’t I use Tailscale to configure wireguard for me?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#270

Post by embedding-shape »

palata wrote: post #250
embedding-shape wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 every…

> The Nextcloud iOS app does it.

Searching for "nextcloud ios background sync" shows a whole bunch of forum posts and bug reports about it not working well unless you have the application open.

One issue (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2225) been open since 2022, seems to still be not working properly. Another (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2497) been open since 2023.

For something that works well it seems like a ton of people have a lot of issues with it. Are you sure you're on the latest iOS version? Seems like people experience the issues when they're on a later version.

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