331–340 of 384 posts
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.
Other than redundant hosting, what will I get as an Apple user by setting this up? It would be very easy to set up, just not sure what I’m gaining from it
> Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup. I didn't even realize this tool existed. I tried something like it awhile back, but it didn't work to my satisfaction (I don't remember why), so my awful, awful, awful workflow is to use the Google Takeout functionality to generate something like…
> I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it. LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo. After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the service to Tailscale,…
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Key features that matter to me: 1) backup from android or iOS. This helps when I have switched phones over the years. 2) shared albums with family or friends where invited people can both see and contribute photos. Think kids albums, weddings, holidays. 3) ability to re-download at full resolution
1) You don't have backups of other data on your phone (chat history, 2FA secrets and private keys, text notes, anki cards, game progress, configuration of all apps, etc.)? I had assumed everyone who cares about their data has backups of their data anyway, so that's not really a selling point to install another app for 2) that's nice! 3) "it doesn't throw my data away" is the last selling point?! Isn't that just assum…
3) not compared to iCloud photos which I migrated from. You can export a whole album with Google at original quality with 1 click. With Apple you can only do 1000 at a time. For apple you can ask for a whole account export, but that takes a few days and gives you all photos. (Similar to Google Takeout).
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"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…
I’ve never seen nix, but I’d rather learn “yet another language” than fight yet another yaml syntax.
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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…
For some I'm sure that's the case; it wasn't in my case.
I ran docker for several years before. First docker-compose, then docker swarm, finally Nomad.
Getting things running is pretty fast, but handling volumes, backups, upgrades of anything in the stack (OS, scheduler, containers, etc) broke something almost every time - doing an update to a new release of Ubuntu would pretty much always require backing up all the volumes and local state to external media, wiping the disk, installing the new version, and restoring from the backup
That's not to talk about getting things running after an issue. Because a lot of configuration can't be done through docker envs, it has to be done through the service. As a consequence that config is now state
I had an nvme fail on me six months ago. Recovering was as simple as swapping the drive, booting the install media, install the OS, and transfering the most recent backup before rebooting
Took about 1.5 hours and everything was back up and running without any issues
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> I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it. LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo. After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the service to Tailscale,…
LLM managing a NixOS install lol
I'd still want to go through any changes with a fine tooth comb to look for security issues and to make sure I know what it is adding and removing, but it's saner than letting an LLM run amok on a live system.
> Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup. I didn't even realize this tool existed. I tried something like it awhile back, but it didn't work to my satisfaction (I don't remember why), so my awful, awful, awful workflow is to use the Google Takeout functionality to generate something like…
> I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it. LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo. After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the service to Tailscale,…
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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.
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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.
Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with immich, but that's where digikam helps.
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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)
How safe is that to set up for novice it people? I have a pi with pi-hole on it and am thinking about putting immich on it but the fact that it exposes itself outside my LAN frightens me.
I keep that running on a VPS, but with with proper firewalling you could probably run it on the same machine.