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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#271

Post by qskousen »

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…

It seems like you are saying the AI features don't work if you don't have a GPU, if I understood correctly, but I have my install on a server with no GPU and the object search and facial recognition features work fine. Probably slower to generate the embeddings, but I don't have any comparison to make.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#272

Post by jerf »

Ambroisie wrote: post #130
cromka wrote: 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.

It isn't the absolutely easiest process.

But it works on Ubuntu, it works on Debian, it works on Mac, it works on Windows, it works on a lot of things other than a Nix install.

And I have to know Docker for work anyhow. I don't have to know Nix for anything else.

You can't win on "it's net easier in Nix" than anywhere else, and a lot of us are pretty used to "it's just one line" and know exactly what that means when that one line isn't quite what we need or want. Maybe it easier after a rather large up-front investment into Nix, but I've got dozens of technologies asking me for large up-front investments.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#273

Post by sylens »

dangus wrote: post #223
fsh wrote: 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.

This is what I like about Ente. I can pay them to give me an e2e encrypted cloud service, and then the desktop app has a continuous export feature that will dump everything into a plain folder structure on my home NAS automatically. Ente could go out of business tomorrow and I’d still have all my photos, neatly organized into folders. And I don’t have to bother with self-hosting overhead. Or I could self host, too, i…

Have you had any issues with the continuous export writing to a network volume? And does it work for all users in a family plan? That was my plan as well, but I’d like to only have to run one export job

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#274

Post by embedding-shape »

globular-toast wrote: post #76
trizic wrote: post #56

There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration file. I find this really powerful and simpler than docker and docker-compose. But don't get me wrong, I am all for containerization when it comes to other OS/distros. Yes, there is a learning curve for the Nix language and creating your own packages. But anyone who can install a distro can i…

> There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration file. Assuming someone has added it to NixOS, yeah. There are plenty of platforms even easier than that where you can click "install" on "apps" that have already been configured.

> There are plenty of platforms even easier than that where you can click "install" on "apps" that have already been configured.

Yeah, like TrueNAS, where they've decided it was good entire to run Kubernetes on NAS hardware, with all the fun and speed that comes with. You just hit "Install", wait five minutes, and you get something half-working but integrated with the rest of their "product".

I'll stick with configuration I can put in git, patch when needed and is easy to come back to after 6 months when you've forgotten all about the previous context you had.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#275

Post by mixedCase »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #82
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.

If you're the one building the image, rebuild with newer versions of constituent software and re-create. If you're pulling the image from a public repository (or use a dynamic tag), bump the version number you're pulling and re-create. Several automations exist for both, if you're into automatic updates. To me, that workflow is no more arduous than what one would do with apt/rpm - rebuild package & install, or just i…

Now do that for 30 services and system config such as firewall, routing if you do that, DNS, and so on and so forth. Nix is a one stop shop to have everything done right, declaratively, and with an easy lock file, unlike Docker.

Doing all that with containers is a spaghetti soup of custom scripts.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#276

Post by dexterdog »

thanzex wrote: post #210
BatteryMountain wrote: post #206

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…

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=imm...

These things are a proxmox home lab user's lifeline. My only complaint is that you have to change your default host shell to bash to run them. You only have to do that for the initial container creation though.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#277

Post by darrmit »

I have been experimenting with Immich off and on for over a year, first in docker-compose and now in podman. It is slick and seamless in a lot of ways, but the portability and upgrade ability are questionable, as others have highlighted.

For example, when they moved between Postgres container versions, it required a manual edit to the compose file to adjust the image. Even if you managed to get it set up initially in docker, it’s these sorts of concepts that are way more advanced than the vast majority of people who may even be interested in self-hosting.

For a hobbyist self-hoster it’s cool and fun, but not something at this point I’d trust my photos to alone. I have considered Ente for that but today it’s still iCloud Photos.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#278

Post by 12345hn6789 »

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.

That is the use case for NixOS yes, can you clarify how it is no longer deterministic? I have been using it for a few months and was not aware of this change

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#279

Post by mijoharas »

oliyoung wrote: post #8

Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple

So, I wanted to use tailscale for a few local services in my home, but I run a few of them on the same device, and have a simple reverse proxy that switches based on hostname.

Afaict I can't use a tailnet address to talk to that (or is it magic dns I'm thinking about? it was a while since I dug in). I suppose I could have a different device be an exit node on my internal network, but at that point I figure I may as well just keep using my wireguard vpn into my home network. I'm not sure if tailscale wins me anything.

Do other people have a solution for this? (I definitely don't want to use tailscale funnel or anything. I still want all this traffic to be restricted like a vpn.)

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#280

Post by gjsman-1000 »

wobfan wrote: post #204
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just telling a nonprofit the other day, who in the name of “self hosting” was running their business on a 73 plugin WordPress site: Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Integrate the two. Stop self hosting. (They’re not large enough to do it well; and it already caused them a two week outage.)

> Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Having seen a lot of companies and startups doinge exactly that, more of less everyone regrets it. Either you end up with such a lot of traffic through these vendors that you'll regret it financially, or you want to change some specific part of your page or your purchase process, which Shopify doesn't let you change, and you'll end up needing to switch or be sad, or, as I regularly…

Let me empathize but say, to put it bluntly, they do not have qualified IT Staff. They have 1 or 2 people who understand only basic web server stuff and nothing else. Thus the two week outage.

Paying LearnWorlds + Shopify $30K a year, if it were even that extreme, is cheaper than an engineer and certainly cheaper than an outage over Giving Tuesday, as they found out the hard way. They got hacked and were down for the most high-traffic nonprofit donor day of the year in their effort to save a few bucks. It wasn’t even the plugins, but the instance underlying the shared hosting.

> It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.

You’re also locked into an ecosystem. It’s called Stripe or PayPal. Almost all of that applies anyway. Don’t forget that significant amount of customizations are restricted to streamline PCI compliance, you can do illegal things very easily. Install an analytics script that accidentally captures their credit card numbers, and suddenly you’re in hot water.

> Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging

Have you analyzed how many dependencies are in your self hosted projects? What happens to them if maintainers retire? How long did it take your self hosted projects to resolve the 10/10 CVE in NextJS? And as for price gouging, if it’s cheaper than an engineer to properly support a self-hosted solution, I’ll still make that trade as even $80K for software is cheaper than $120K to support it. If you’re at the scale where you don’t have a proper engineer to manage it, do not self host. Business downtime is always more expensive than software (in this case, 5 salaries for 2 weeks to do absolutely nothing + lost donations + reputational damage + customer damages, because “self hosting is easy and cheaper”).

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