Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 384 posts

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#321

Post by euleriancon »

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…

The main issues I see are immich identifying things like statues or paintings as people, and not dealing with people (especially kids) aging.

Google photos isn't perfect either but I never saw these kind of issues when I was still using it.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#322

Post by volemo »

palata wrote: post #202
volemo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand iOS’s behaviour, there’s no way to do what you’re asking unless you’re Apple Inc.

The Nextcloud app kind of does it, it seems. The fact that it stops working seems unrelated: starting the app doesn't make it recover, so it just seems buggy. Nextcloud uses the location permission for some reason, presumably to wake up the app in the background once in a while? At least it can be closed (and "swiped away") for 2 months and keep syncing. Until it breaks and stops working entirely.

That’s surprising to hear! I’d love to know how they managed it. (I’m not willing to familiarise myself with the codebase, of course.)

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#323

Post by hombre_fatal »

windexh8er wrote: post #313
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…

I've hosted Immich since it came out and all my photos have been migrated to it at this point. I would never host Immich on NixOS (and I do use it for certain things). The reason? It's not simpler than a container option and creates a single point of issue. The container option is tested and supported by Immich, they recommend it. So everything I need is part of that. I moved servers midway through the year and the s…

A few thoughts.

> It's not simpler than a container option and creates a single point of issue. The container option is tested and supported by Immich, they recommend it. I don't want to be beholden to NixOS for everything.

I think there's a misunderstanding here. You aren't beholden to NixOS here. You don't have to use nixpkgs nor home-manager modules. You can make your own flakes and you can use containers, but the benefit is still that you set it up declaratively in config.

It's not incompatible with anything you've said, it's just cool that it has default configurations for things if you aren't opinionated.

> I don't want to manage configurations in multiple places.

I've accumulated one big Nix config that configures across all my machines. It's kind of insane that this is possible.

Of course, it would seem complicated looking at the end result, but I iterated there over time.

Example: https://github.com/johnae/world -- fully maintained by a clanker (https://github.com/johnae/world/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed)

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#324

Post by hombre_fatal »

maccard wrote: post #195
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.

> 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've written a dozen flakes because I want some niche behavior that the home-manager impl didn't give me, and I just used an LLM and never opened Nix docs once.

It's just declarative configuration, so you also get a much better deliverable at the end than running terminal commands in Arch Linux, and it ends up being less work.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#325

Post by newsoftheday »

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.

>Self hosting used to mean conceding on something.

Of what I selfhost, I've never felt I was having to concede on anything.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#326

Post by iamtedd »

embedding-shape wrote: post #274
globular-toast wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 configur…

Nit: TrueNAS migrated away from Kubernetes in 2024.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#327

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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.

I'm a career IT guy who supports biz in my metro area. I've never used docker nor run into it with any of my customers vendors. My current clients are Windows shops across med, pharma, web retail and brick/mortar retail. Virtualization here is hyper-v.

And it this isn't a non-FOSS world. BSD powers firewalls and NAS. About a third of the VMs under my care are *nix.

And as curious as some might be at the lack of dockerism in my world, I'm equally confounded at the lack of compartmentalization in their browsing - using just one browser and that one w/o containers. Why on Earth do folks at this technical level let their internet instances constantly sniff at each other?

But we live where we live.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#328

Post by Jaxan »

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.

You should print them ;-). But yeah, I’m also old school in that I make directories for each album. I used MacOS photos before, but it’s terrible when you change systems (which eventually will happen).

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#329

Post by DrammBA »

omnimus wrote: post #98
drekipus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me one of the killer things would be to click "share" on a photo I took, and then have the immich albums show up so I can put them in that specific place as like a 3 click process. That's basically what I was building my whole app around

Just have immich app to sync only certain album? And add photos to that album. Seems like solved feature?

I don't think he's here looking for a solution.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#330

Post by maccard »

Scandiravian wrote: post #309
maccard wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because you can have the entire configuration in a git repo, you can see what you've changed at what point in time That’s true of docker too.

I'm not really sure what your point is, but I'll try to take it in good faith and read it as "why doesn't docker solve the problem for it, since you can also keep those configurations in a git repo?" If any kind of apt upgrade or similar command is run in a dockerfile, it is no longer reproducible. Because of this it's necessary to keep track of which dockerfiles do that and keep track of when a build was performed;…

That’s all my point was, yeah. Genuinely no extra snark intended.

> it is no longer reproducible

The problem I have with this is that most of the software I use isn’t reproducible, and reproducible isn’t something that is the be all and end all to me. If you want reproducible then yes nix is the only game in town, but if you want strong versioning with source controlled configuration, containers are 1000x easier and give you 95% of the benefit

> docker still needs to run on a system

This is a fair point but very little of that system impacts the app you’re running in a container, and if you’re regularly breaking running containers due to poking around in the host, you’re likely going to do it by running some similar command whether the OS wants you to do it or not.

Post reply on HN