Self-hosting my photos with Immich • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#381

Post by nickthegreek » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

Ringz wrote: post #120

Immich struggles to act as a true unifying solution for users with large, existing archival collections (DSLRs, scanned film, etc.). Since those „Archival Assets“ are often decades old, already organized into complex, user-defined file structures (e.g., 1998/DATE_PLACE_PROJECT/PLACE_PROJECT_DATE.jpg), and frequently contain incomplete or inconsistent metadata (missing dates, no GPS, different file formats). Immich's…

This is my main issue with Immich. I had 300gb of local photos organized into folders from digital cameras. Then I wanted to move google photos into it. Ran the scripts only to discover that the imported images were in a rats nest of folders in the immich internal library. I loathed this fragmentation keep hoping for a solution. It looks like I could maybe use PhotoSync to dump everything to folders and just keep everything as an 'External library' in immich, but this is not ideal,

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#382

Post by nickthegreek » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:22 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.

In a similar situation and it just drained all my excitement for immich after I spent so many hours cleaning up and deduping photos. This content is too important to me have to deal with these issues, especially with how immich chooses to store its internal library photos.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#383

Post by bicepjai » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #242

bicepjai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.

> In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button. Flip a switch and then what, are you getting a isolated public URL to share? Or you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server where the data is hosted?

I will explain my use case. We use iPhones in our family. We have a 2TB iCloud plan, but we have around 8TB of media from our phones. So I started using boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd to download iCloud photos daily and keep only the past 2 years of media on our phones for iCloud features.

I wanted a separate app to view these TBs of media on my phone, tried many services, and settled on Immich. Whenever my wife and I want to share photos, we usually have to create albums and send links or share media through messages. That is a very painful way to view each other's media. I wanted a service to just share all our photos with each other so that they would be in the same timeline. There was none available, and I had seen people complain about that on HN.

Immich has that feature, where you can select who to share the whole library with. Enabling that I can see all my photos and my wife's photos in the same timeline and same for my wife. Immich lets everyone log in with their own credentials, and it's hosted on Coolify with a Cloudflare Tunnel.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#384

Post by geekologist » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 4:49 PM UTC

cuu508 wrote: post #116

geekologist wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.

> I just ended up exposing my public IP. I considered doing that too. My main problem with it is privacy. Let's say I set up some sort of dynamic DNS to point foo.bar.example.org to my home IP. Then, after some family event, I share an album link ( https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string ) with friends and family. The album link gets shared on, and ends up on the public internet. Once somebody figures ou…

It's another cost but running a reverse proxy from a VPS would solve this right?