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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#61

Post by utopiah »

websiteapi wrote: post #15

immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly, just because certain things I want to do are just not possible with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for that eventually too tho. I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a family…

> because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365

Yes I don't recommend doing that. My experience is that people understand you are human because they know you. They don't expect 9 9s availability but if they somehow do that can be clarified from the start : "I'm hosting this free of charge for family members because (insert your reasons here, it's important to clarify WHY it's different because Apple and BigTech in general somehow still have a ton of goodwill) but as you know as also have a job and our family life. Consequently sometimes, e.g. electricity outage or me having to update the server, there will be down time. Do no panic when this happens as the files are always safe (backup details if you want) but please do be patient. Typically it might take (insert your realistic expectation, do NOT be too optimistic) a day per month for updates. If you do have better solutions please do contribute."

... or something of the kind. I've been doing that for years and people are surprisingly understanding. IMHO it stems from the why.

The "way cheaper than the equivalent" argument reminds me of, and apologies I know it's a bit rough, Russian foreign minister days ago who criticize the EU for its plan to decouple with their oil & gas saying something like "Well if they do that they will pay a lot more elsewhere" and he's right. The point isn't the money though, the point is agency and sovereignty.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#62

Post by halapro »

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.

Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part.

How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#63

Post by ahf8Aithaex7Nai »

petesergeant wrote: post #53
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.

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

I don't think it would add any value for you. For me, it adds value because I only have to turn my head to the left to see the computer that contains all my photos since I started taking pictures with a smartphone.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#64

Post by Bishonen88 »

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…

Long time synology user. Switched 3 weeks ago to ugreen. They rolled back their fiasco decision about drives (synology), but I wanted some good hardware in 2025. Everything that synology offers is outdated and slow.

Got myself a 6800 pro. It chewed through 98k photos, many of which are raw, within 24h AFAIK. Then came face recognition, text recognition etc. Within 2-3 days all was done.

The performance is night and day. Photos and movies load instantly. Finally can watch home movies on my TV without stuttering (4k footage straight from a nikon).

The photos app is similar to the synology one. Face recognition was better for me. Have compared the amount of photos tagged to a few people and ugreen found 15% more. Have seen photos of my grandma which I didn't see for years!

There's much more positive i could say. For the negatives: no native drive app (nextcloud which supposedly was an alternative doesn't sync folders on android), no native security cam app.

I am running now 10 docker containers without a sweat. My ds920+ was so slow, that I gave up on docker entirely after a few attempts.

The photos app has some nice features which synology didn't have. Conditional albums. Baby albums.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#65

Post by vachina »

halapro wrote: post #62
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.

Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part. How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.

I’d gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a fee forever for essentially… storing files on drives.

We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#66

Post by kalaksi »

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'm running NixOS on some of my hosts, but I still don't fully commit to configuring everything with nix, just the base system, and I prefer docker-compose for the actual services. I do it similarly with Debian hosts using cloud-init (nix is a lot better, though).

The reason is that I want to keep the services in a portable/distro-agnostic format and decoupled from the base system, so I'm not tied too much to a single distro and can manage them separately.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#67

Post by WD-42 »

halapro wrote: post #62
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.

Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part. How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.

Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#68

Post by Hardwired8976 »

behnamoh wrote: post #60
krick wrote: post #17

I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage…

Wouldn't recommend. When I wanted to move from Google Photos to iCloud, there was no way to simply get all my photos. I had to use a JS script that would keep scrolling the page and download photos one by one. Lesson learnt.

Google Takeout?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#69

Post by quag »

kalaksi wrote: post #66
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'm running NixOS on some of my hosts, but I still don't fully commit to configuring everything with nix, just the base system, and I prefer docker-compose for the actual services. I do it similarly with Debian hosts using cloud-init (nix is a lot better, though). The reason is that I want to keep the services in a portable/distro-agnostic format and decoupled from the base system, so I'm not tied too much to a singl…

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.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#70

Post by wwarek »

quag wrote: post #69
kalaksi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running NixOS on some of my hosts, but I still don't fully commit to configuring everything with nix, just the base system, and I prefer docker-compose for the actual services. I do it similarly with Debian hosts using cloud-init (nix is a lot better, though). The reason is that I want to keep the services in a portable/distro-agnostic format and decoupled from the base system, so I'm not tied too much to a singl…

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.

> How do you update the software in the containers when new versions come out or vulnerabilities are actively being exploited?

You build new image with updated/patched versions of packages and then replace your vulnerable container with a new one, created from new image

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