Self-hosting my photos with Immich • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#71

Post by WD-42 » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

euleriancon wrote: post #42

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.

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.

The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me, is that not what you are talking about?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#72

Post by Dedime » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:01 AM UTC

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…

My problem with NixOS is the second you try to go "outside the guardrails", the difficulty increases 100x

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#73

Post by big-and-small » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

volemo wrote: post #57

big-and-small wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For once iCloud have a terrible sync speed. Even 500GB of photos / videos take forever to sync like a week and I can't imagine what it will take for someone with multi-TB archives.

Yes, but it's a one times occurrence, isn't it?

I'd imagine if you're person who make a lot of photos / videos slow sync can be pretty annoying. Unfortunately I'm not one of them to tell, but just had to wait like a week for the first sync of my wife's iPhone to finish.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#74

Post by gbil » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:04 AM UTC

Immich is wonderful in docker setup passing the gpu for ML which works pretty good and the amazing new OCR feature does miracles, I’m able to find notes that I photographed for this purpose but then forgot, I’m able to find memories just by remembering the name of the place and searching for it and everything is running local!

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#75

Post by supersuryaansh » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:11 AM UTC

turtlebits wrote: post #27

oliyoung wrote: post #8

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

I want to love Tailscale on mobile, but it conflicts with Adguard and regularly disconnects. I keep Tailscale but switched over to Pangolin for access most of my self-hosted services.

[dead]

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#76

Post by globular-toast » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:20 AM UTC

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.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#77

Post by j_bum » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:21 AM UTC

WD-42 wrote: post #71

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.

The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me, is that not what you are talking about?

It seems like he’s saying that he could create an album and add a rule saying “add all pictures of John and Jan”

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#78

Post by globular-toast » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:22 AM UTC

fsmv wrote: post #25

drekipus wrote: post #5

Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project. I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do…

I want something with a simpler backend than immich. I don't really want to host it because it needs lots of stuff to run. I would love one that can do sqlite and is a single binary go (or rust) program.

Syncthing?

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#79

Post by sebastiennight » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:26 AM UTC

vachina wrote: post #65

halapro wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We got to this stage of having to sync ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶l̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶s̶.

"because a company that sells you Cloud storage has very few incentives to give away more local storage, or compress/optimize the files generated by its camera app." might be more accurate

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#80

Post by wakawaka28 » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 7:30 AM UTC

drekipus wrote: post #5

Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project. I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do…

You can pick which albums on your phone to upload to Immich. You and your wife could have separate users on the server too if you want that. I think you can probably share a user account, or share albums between users, but the syncing might get confusing if you both have an album with the same name. The only reason I can think of to not upload everything on your phone and try to share one or two albums is that it might get hard to search through many pictures, even with the AI.

As for not wanting most of your photos, Immich also includes AI search and facial recognition which both work really well. I can't remember if it detects near-duplicates, but I thought it did. I think you should play around with it before you leap into the giant project of making your own app.