> Ironically, just after posting that I came across this, which I think proves why my concern is warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657

> Debian isn't immune to this, but it's much harder for such an attack to be successful when dependencies aren't constantly changing.

Immich is more immune to this issue because they wait 5 days before raising PRs to bump dependencies, which is a good practice https://github.com/immich-app/.github/blob/main/renovate-con...

I've been keeping my eye on Immich for a while and keep waiting for a stable release to try it out, but that hasn't happened yet. I'm also dreading having to setup proper backups if I were to switch to this over Google photos. My current solution is to backup critical homelab things to Google Drive automatically but I'd want a proper off-site backup if I were going to self host all my photos.

To be fair, there’s a massive banner on their front page warning users it’s in beta. Until they settle on a proper release it’ll continue to be a bit chaotic. All software development is like that.

This looks like a project that’s under heavy development (it is) responsibly keeping up with dependencies. This gives me more confidence, not less.

To be honest, a decent image server that can be the root server for a CDN and do the right things with modern web formats is something that should be standard and built in by now, with nobody needing to build and install their own.

That said, this is far better than my own non-existent image server.

For me a measure of quality is the rendered HTML code, which should use all the content sectioning elements and not be bloated with gazillions of divs and classes. This software is well off the pace in this regard.

Why is docker compose a red flag? That feels like a benefit to me.

You want to run it in docker and manage it with some tool. I use dockge and click the upgrade button every couple of days / weeks (when the app or website tells me). that's it.

Immich is an excellent piece of software, I have switch all my photo needs from over 25 years to it. It will mature and it actually already is. Don't hold yourself back with such practicalities.

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Are there any/many applications that require a configured database (like PostgreSQL) and Redis/Valkey in Debian's package manager at all?

Also, Docker-compose is pretty great in terms of getting complex applications up and running.

so you find it too immichure? <jk>

[flagged]

Thank you for this, I updated some time ago but never really switched. Night and day difference !

The other thing I'm waiting for is search results ordered by date instead of relevance. When I'm searching for a picture in particular I know was taken 3 years ago, and search keywords to find it, it's impossible to find this specific photo because the ordering seem random

The only problem I've had with it so far is that the date on photos coming from icloud is when they were uploaded, not the date that the photo was created or even the date that I've marked the photo as being taken. Makes seeing photos from 90 years ago kind of strange.

I removed myself from beta. I always have iPhone and Android apps stalling on backing up unless the app is open.

Some performance bottlenecks seem to be still in. I added around 200 images and 10 videos of my last vacation manually via Intent to the Immich app on Android.

The startup of the Activity is VERY slow. Images are rendered one by one in the list view (potentially in full resolution?) and the scrolling in the list is quite slow. The upload button does not keep the "uploading" state but after some time jumps back to the initial "start upload" state. Going into background or turning the screen off sometimes stops the upload. This test was done on my Samsung S23 Ultra (so CPU power should not be the issue).

Nevertheless the upload works as expected if I stay in the app and keep the screen active. Seems like this is not really the intended way of uploading things to Immich (auto upload is).

Maybe it's because my server is still on v.1.139.4, but I have had the opposite experience with the new beta timeline on Android. I disabled it after trying it for a week because it took so long for thumbnails to load vs. the stable version. Compared to Google Photos, any version of the Immich timeline I've tried feels extremely clunky. It's a great backup alternative and I commend the team behind it, but it is far from being a product I'd recommend as an everyday photo gallery app.

> I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup

Interesting, would you mind elaborating on how you do that? I take it you have your backup key stored on your home server then? What tool do you use to decrypt & parse the backup?

CLI? Didn't even know that! A doc pointer would be awesome

Immich supports search by CLIP and I would find it highly useful to search for stuff by semantic meaning (I rely on Google Photos' ability to do that for now). How does your Pi4 handle CLIP?

How do you expose the service for your SO when away from home? Do you use tailscale/cloudflare tunnel/vpn? public port on your router? I've been trying tailscale for myself, but there's a hair more friction than my SO would accept.

One very easy and painless way is Pikapods (https://www.pikapods.com/).

Hetzner Storage Box is quite reasonable: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/#matrix

I'm kind of surprised that using object storage wasn't a first-class concern. Though I guess if running it at home was the biggest thing, that's not the top priority, but still. Using fast, cheap object stores (often with CDNs in front) has been commonplace for images, videos, and similar content for decades now. For virtually anything that uses some dynamic amount of storage based on user actions, my expectation is that I'll be able to configure it to store and fetch from S3 (or similar).

The team just announced a 1-click option on digital ocean, if you want it cloud hosted set up:

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/immich

The cheapest possible Hetzner VPS (2 vCPU 40GB SSD) and a Hetzner storage box (1TB) works alright for cheap (less than EUR 10/mo). I store my database on the SSD, and the `/uploads` folder on the storage box attached as a CIFS drive. Put it behind Tailscale and it's worked fine for the past few months.

I actually got it working with cloud storage on hetzner. Wasn't supersnappy, but it worked. I borked the build though and am planning to run it on my home-server

I wish it'd be easy to plug it to a s3 backend and thumbnails etc. ephemeral things could just be on disk.

There have been attempts to use s3fuse like layers, but:

> NOTE: I found it too expensive in S3 requests and CloudTrail data recordings to use S3 as the backend.

https://github.com/dubrowin/Immich-backed-by-S3

They used aws's own mountpoint for this. Perhaps s3fs with it's caching could do better? Ideally someone would make an object store fuse driver that caches the whole file tree & metadata, or perhaps storing on slatedb or some such. Being able to tune the local file cache would also be important: maybe maybe maybe s3fuse caching is good enough, but making sure thumbnails can cache seems super important. It would be interesting to see how immich uses the filesystem.

> electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay

A small UPS that can communicate its power state over USB isn't too expensive. So if power goes out, it sends a message to its host that it should shutdown after a certain amount of time and then when power restores, it turns the server back on. I can understand the desire to not have to manage all that though.

"But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space."

Videos take up a lot of space. Photos increasingly don't. 20 years of family photos for me takes up 150GB, and that's with me being very slovenly about cleaning up the "bad" photos, if I found a decent workflow for trimming photos I could probably cut that down by 75% pretty easily. Linode will attach 160GB of storage for $16/month, plus you'd need a $5/month VM to attach that to. https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage

I acknowledge that you may be in a position where that is too much, but on the other hand, broadly speaking, it's not going to get much cheaper than this even in the next few years. It's not like it's $500/month anymore and there's room for it to be cut by $300/month.

Immich can also survive without necessarily being up all the time. If you have a computer of any kind and any reasonable spec that spends a reasonable amount of time being on, you can use tailscale or something to hook it to your phone and run a backup process every so often to a cloud block storage. It's OK that it isn't always up and then you get to pay object storage prices, which for 150GB now is as close to negligible as you can reasonably get.

You could run a small vm in the cloud and use a storage solution like backblaze or something that stores things relatively inexpensively.

The hardware isn't that much to manage anymore these days, a small usff uses very little electricity, can stay up for a few hours on a UPS.

Tools like Proxmox make it point and click like any cloud provider within reason.

I did some half ass backup solution. Bought a LifePo4 12AH battery, hooked up a compatible charger, hooked up a dc-dc converter to power up a N100 mini pc, my mikrotik router etc. Works perfectly fine as of now...

If you want cloud hosting and fully E2E encrypted by a team that deeply cares about privacy and security, try Ente. They also have Google Authenticator alternative called Ente Auth.

this is pretty much the situation I'm in re the storage. I'm perfectly fine running a home server, I already do, but workloads with heavy storage requirements scare me away from it. I don't want to have to think about that at home, and the cost of pretty much anything other than object storage in the cloud is prohibitive, and as you mentioned obj store support is non-existent or hacky and slow with most of these products.

Have a look at https://ente.io/.

I recently created https://immich.pro to partially address this problem. I've got spare compute and storage that I'd like to turn into MRR. While the privacy angle isn't _fantastic_ maybe some people won't care. Could be better than trusting Google/Apple.

[dead]

In order to give Ente a try I self hosted it. It's working great. The initial interest was also E2E encryption.

The backing Minio store is on a VPS to keep it off-prem. The rest (front end UI etc) I host in my home and use the same VPS as a reverse proxy.

Right now I don't share with anyone else, but use it to get photos sync'd off my phone and shared with my own desktop/tablets.

I'm sticking with it and my family is interested in using as part of degoogle'ing. So I eventually will pay for it for a way to better share photo albums (i.e. too many photos to just share over Signal).

How has syncthing been unreliable for you? Curious as I was going to start using it more. Was it something about large files or many files?

I think it's better to use immich with tailscale

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Immich Progress Update [July 2024] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859102 - July 2024 (5 comments)

Immich – Self-hosted photo and video management solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 - June 2024 (5 comments)

AGPL Self-hosted photo and video management solution (Docker + iOS/Android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030151 - April 2024 (3 comments)

Immich is changing its license from MIT to AGPLv3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336890 - Feb 2024 (46 comments)

Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673224 - July 2023 (344 comments)

Immich: Self-hosted photos and videos backup for Android and iOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)

Looks nice. Does this allow the export of the organizational and meta data?

The colors of the select box text (Tags, Alternatives, Sort, Search) are the same (or very close) color as the background making them unreadable.

Don’t support their fake use of RSS

IIRC, Immich started as a project after Photoprism changed their licensing to restrict several features, and then picked up a ton of momentum very fast. They've pledged they won't ever pay-gate features, which isn't always a positive as those features help sustain a project long term, but they have so much community support and love that I'm not worried about that in this case.

Feature wise I think they are pretty comparable (vs the paid version of Photoprism), and I like the UI of Immich slightly more. Immich also supports singe sign on via OIDC easily, which I rather appreciate so my family doesn't have to remember 10 different passwords.

Regarding stability it's actually pretty reliable. I've been running it for a long time via Docker in the form of the TrueNAS plugin and have never had any issues, like ever, so I think it being marked as unstable was a bit overly cautious. I think they have also recently moved to a new phase of development that is also going to be even more stable. Even if it does break, all of your media is stored in a nicely organized directory structure on the filesystem so you're not going to lose anything.

I tried both ~1,5 years ago, Immich won the "spouse test" as I could get my partner to use the app on her phone (with her own profile) instead of the native gallery.

Photoprism didn't support profiles or have an app (back then at least, don't know about today), and I couldn't convince her of using some other gallery in the browser...

I for myself liked the Photoprism GUI, but I could never get the face recognition to work well, and manually tagging people/places (or basically doing anything) on thousands of pictures was quite painful.

Also interested in this. I've been running photoprism for several years now using their docker image and don't really have much to complain about but always open to other alternatives.

One thing Immich supports which Photoprism doesn't is multiple user accounts. That doesn't really bother me too much but it's a pretty big advantage.

Edit: Actually one thing I can complain a bit about is the object recognition accuracy. Face recognition I think works decently enough but objects are frequently not identified in my photos. How's Immich in this regard?

I was using PhotoPrism for a few years and switched over to Immich and am very glad I did.

- There was no good mobile backup story. State-of-the-art was WebDAV sync and import delays which would truncate files and other issues on back connections. It also made deletion risky.

- The UI had lots of things that felt very opinionated for a very specific workflow that seems niche. Things like auto-adding generated titles and other things.

- The face recognition is much worse, especially for non-white faces. Even detection didn't seem to have a good setting that would reliably identify what is a face without way too many false positives.

- Immich's semantic image search is way better than what was on PhotoPrism where it seemed to just find a few tags.

- PhotoPrism had lots of UI quirks like the persistent selection that almost never worked how I wanted it to.

Lots of other odds and ends as well. There isn't anything that I actually miss from PhotoPrism.

I personally use Photoprism, though I don't love either.

Both still feels like the sad-er side of open-source WRT polish - stability, reliability and ease-of-use.

I would be willing to pay for something great that I can self-host, but sadly nothing truly great exists.

Photoprism is lacking batch edit for tags/metadata https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/271

Immich isn't an editor at all, I don't think it can even rotate an image 90 degrees. It's very focused on having multiple users upload photos and create shared albums (public or just to other users). Doesn't do any encryption at all tho.

Immich uses Flutter as well, fyi

For a while I was running a windows VM with the iCloud for windows utility that syncs your photos to a folder on your windows PC, iirc it worker reasonably well as an 'automated' sync solution. (under the surface the folder was a share on my NAS, which in turn fed into a separate immich instance)

> Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries

Some would say it's deliberately made to keep the library cluttered so you have to pay more for cloud storage.

Why Are Our Photo Libraries Such a MESS? (Ben Vallack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYeVWyNxaY

Immich is extremely stable even if not labeled as such. My personal experience is zero maintenance (other than updating docker container) since deployment several years ago.

It uses pgvector extension for search (?) so it's not as easy as changing the db engine. Using the provided docker compose file it's very manageable and the default/recommended layout keeps all data files in a single directory.

The facial recognition can tell my kids apart better than I can (with just the cropped face; other context makes it obvious which kid is which).

How many and size?

I've migrated from Synology Photos. It's pretty seamless, since Immich now supports External Library. I use Docker Compose in Synology, so basically all I have to do is just mount existing Synology Photos folders to Immich. Works fine, no issue so far.

However, I'm back to Synology Photos. I'm using Immich iOS apps. The upload/syncing is noticeably a lot slower than Synology. Gave it a few months, but it's not getting any better. Moved back to Synology Photos for now.

The solution is packaging.

My Immich server performs a nightly backup to a 2tb flash drive labelled "PHOTOS" attached to the router. My partner knows where it is and what it's for, and everyone knows how to use a flash drive.

A middle ground worth considering is keeping iCloud as is, as the functional backup your family knows how to use, and Immich as a backup for that.

If you can't backup your essential local data then self hosting isn't really ever an option for you

What solution are you using now?

I feel the same, so I keep photos on hard drives and usb drives in different locations. I have a Restic backup at Backblaze but that is where the bus factor comes in. I don't know what would be best.

Does Immich have features that need a high-end GPU? I hosted it on a machine with a 1050Ti, and see others in this comment section mentioning using a RPi.

I switched from Nextcloud Photos to Nextcloud Memories to Immich. I submitted a patch [1] to Immich to make it possible to directly login via (Nextcloud) OIDC which, in combination with the Nextcloud 'External Sites' app makes it possible to integrate Immich directly into Nextcloud. I do not automatically add all photo and video material synced to Nextcloud into Immich yet, relying on a set of scripts I've been using for years to maintain all our media in a single repository. It should be possible to either use Nextcloud to sync media which is then shown in Immich through its 'External Libraries' feature (this is how I use it) as well as to use Immich to sync media and access it that way. No matter how it is used Immich can be integrated to be as easily accessible as any 'native' Nextcloud app. Performance is far better than Nextcloud Memories, this was my main reason for moving away from the latter. The search and facial recognition features in Immich do not require a server with GPU access, performance is fine on my by now rather aged DL380 G7.

[1] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18763/commits/fe7a...

Immich edges it out on people recognition and context search but otherwise similar in features. The Immich interface is much more like Google Photos and I find that to be better.

Regardless of where you're coming from I recommend migrating to Immich by "uploading" all your photos using the immich cli, and letting it manage the library.

Nextcloud was dog slow for me, Immich just flies. And the client app is far better both on iOS and Android. Nextcloud never worked for my SO, Immich just does.

ah it's not? that would be a blocker for me

There's lots of other options... I'm not sure I could recommend Synology these days as they've started to vendor lock to only their drives, etc.

You could get a NAS from TerraMaster and swap the OS for TruNAS Scale or Unraid. They're relatively reasonable for the hardware, you can also DIY the hardware but that brings in other issues. Got an F4-424 Pro for a backup NAS myself. Worth noting a few big drives will cost you more than the other hardware though. 12TB was the pricing sweet spot when I got mine.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPPD51B9?th=1

In my case, all photos are stored in Synology, then run nightly backup to Backblaze.

I'd really like to build a bolt-on to immich that makes calls to imagemagick just to do simple stuff like rotate and compress, there's a ton of forks tho there must be someone who's thrown in one of those web editor suites

Are cameras that don't support compression common?

Thanks for those details! I came along a similar trajectory, starting when we had our first kid which happened right around the time when phone cameras got good. Which means many gigabytes of video from phones filling up monthly.

I actually ended up building something like immich just a bit more halfbaked for our home use, that could take the whole /MobileSync iOS backup and pull out anything that looks like a photo or video. That way our workflow was, back up the phone in iTunes, let the app process the MobileSync backup, confirm they are visible, and hit the delete all button on the phone. Rinse, repeat. The storage was on a beige box with a couple mirrored drives.

At this point the collection is about a terabyte, which is not extreme by modern home lab standards. My main remaining concern at this point is that the file system is just plain ext4. Even though I mirror the collection on a regular schedule, more and more I am wondering if there is a chance of bitrot since as far as I know none if it is checksumed. I would love a solution that periodically scans objects on the file system. I would love to have an easy way to tell which of the copies is the corrupted one, since with two copies in my case I can't take the majority.

p.s. and I guess one question for you, do you think I would benefit from switching to immich for part of this workflow? I'm thinking I can't just throw raw iOS backups at it so maybe I need a bit of preprocessing there, but otherwise let it take over the cataloging and just keep the underlying storage backed up.

Perhaps I’m missing something. What makes the name cringe?

Download the repo, open in VS Code, and do a search + replace from "Immich", as well as the "Immich" part of file names to whatever you want.

Then, go into the design folder of the repo and replace all the images with whatever logo names you want.

macOS on arm, you can download the ios app and install it. That's what I did to import my wife's photos.