Immich is excellent. Especially the beta timeline introduced in the last few Android app releases has leveled Immich up from 'pretty decent' to a genuine replacement for Google Photos for me.
Been a user since over 1 year and it has been more than amazing. Progress was unbelievable. Features I was hoping would exist but never would have thought I would ever see them, like album sync, were added in short time.
I've replaced Apple Photos with Immich (from iCloud to self-hosted) and this was one of the important things to transfer. I'm completely de-Appled now and Immich was part of the journey.
I use Immich and it's fantastic. All other self-hosted alternatives I I've used have been lacking in one way or another, but Immich is a joy to use. Fast, featureful, easy to set up. I love it so much I gave them $100 to support them.
After stopping for years because it was hard to view them easily, I'm finally taking photos again because of Immich.
I haven't heard of this app before, so I looked around their site and docs. I was mildly interested in trying it out until I saw the requirements:
"A system with at least 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores.", but recommended 6 GB of RAM. Why does an image storage solution needs so much RAM?
I tried to use the embedding stuff a year ago but the results were lackluster, even with the larger embedding model.
With the new multimodal LLMs it seems a better approach might be to get a multimodal LLM to describe the image and list keywords, and then just use the included Meilisearch.
That said, I see they list some models I haven't tried, so perhaps time to try again.
This is the one photo manager that I have my eyes on, I'm just worried about critical bugs, I've seen some issues reported on github with losing data, like this one on the mobile app.
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/21936
Not sure what to say, could be a very very rare edge case, but it's not very reassuring.
Immich is really great, easily now my fav self-hosted app. I used the Immich CLI [0] and later Immich-go [1] to get all my photos in. That was a breeze. I set it to use the folders as albums... And now I have a lot of cleaning up to do, but other than with files and folders, I'm really enjoying the process!
A poweruser tip that has helped me a couple of times: Use ZFS (or other snapshotting facilities) to make snapshot before making any changes/updates or doing large imports. It makes the whole thing sort of bullet proof and you can retry if you're not happy with some import flag.
Immich had my old Corei3 server making a lot of noise for a couple of days btw! But, it's really good at facial recognition, not so much on finding dogs or something. But still very cool if you don't have to compromise on features as a self-hoster, I'm really grateful and will buy the "support package" (which does not add anything afaik... btw later they will come with a way to do seamless, encrypted off-site backups).
I just added an external folder and copied all my photos there. Even though Immich's own photos folder is just a directory with dates, Immich is much less picky about what goes in the external folder (and, more importantly, what disappears from it).
I've been working on a project that had a similar origin story, and gave up because it's so big.
I'm glad to see immich strive forward.
I wanted to change the "approach" of how I do photos:
* When I take a photo, it's usually in the moment.
* I want to have the option to "share" that photo directly to a certain album
* I'd want my wife / friends to be able to "share" the photo to those albums
Almost the same way that "frequent contacts" come up from WhatsApp.
Is this possible with the current app? This is what I wanted my app to do, and focus on being more "album" centric, rather than a big-black-hole of all photos I've ever taken..
I might even make my app, but use immich on the backend, and allow users to order a hardcopy / backup of their albums as part of the app.
I’ve been running Immich for about two years on Oracle’s free tier (200 GB disk / ARM VM), and it works great. Since I don’t fully trust Oracle for long-term storage, I’ve configured a daily backup to Backblaze.
My only minor complaint is that new releases are super frequent and rarely add anything meaningful.
I've only been using Immich for a little while, but it's been amazing to see how quickly its development has been going. Hard to imagine they had much technical debt to tackle.
> There are still a few items on our roadmap that we want to complete before the year ends such as auto-stacking, and achieving feature parity between the web and mobile app. We also have plans to start work on improved stack support, better sharing, group management, and ownership improvements, as well as many other enhancements.
That said, this sounds like they're not going to get the full 2025 plan done: https://immich.app/roadmap
Which is totally fine of course, I'm still a very happy user. But I'm really looking forward to Workflows! I'd love to automatically share with someone all pictures that include them.
Technical debt is really mean, they had planned for lots of these things for 2024 originally.
But I still support them, technical debt is always like a iceberg, you trip on the tip, then discover it will consume you and your team for months to fix it. Still needs to be fixed as early as possible, otherwise everything becomes “invisibly slow”.
A minor note: Nowhere in the release note do you say what the app is or what it does. Sure, I can find out by following the links, but coming in cold not knowing what immich is, I was kind of expecting to learn that in the write-up.
I've been using Mylio on my laptop which might suit you? My main requirement was that I organise photos using my file structure for maximum portability, and this works well with that.
Can Immich do search/filter based on both map (geographic area) and time parameters? Through add-ons or search text syntax?
Example 1. Show all photos from this area (draw rectangle on map) from times 22:00 to 00:00.
Example 2. Show all photos from this area (draw rectangle on map) from years 2020 to 2024 in months march to may AND september to october from times 22:00 to 00:00.
In the Immich demo the map view lets me zoom and shows bubbles with the number of photos from an area but I see no way to select an area or bubble to explore just those photos in an album or temporary view. The map view does have a time range option (last N days or date range yyyy-mm-dd to yyyy-mm-dd), but no time of day range or months range.
Search view has advanced options with place dropdowns (country state city) but no map area rectangle option. Also has date range (yyyy-mm-dd to yyyy-mm-dd), but no time of day range or non-contiguous time criteria.
I think a photo viewer could implement the exemplified kind of searches in a slim way through a map view (user draws a rectangle) with sliders (year range, months range, time of day range) that ideally let the user set multiple ranges on one slider (march to may AND september to october). Ideally such combo criteria could then also be bookmarked and searched and the filtered in items could be batch operated on (tag, rename, delete).
I want to be able to do all these same kinds of searches too. Especially layering on searches, like what you said about how the search ideally could be bookmarked and searched on. Like any search result could become a smart album maybe. I’d love to be able to search something like [all photos in the box I drew on the map] and then out of those results [photos in 2021 and 2023] and then out of those results [photos of person x] and out of those results a clip search like [people walking on the beach]. It would also be great to remove photos from the search like [photos in this geographical area] but not [clip search for “yellow lab”].
I've been eyeing Immich for an iCloud replacement for some time now, does anybody have practical experience of how it can be used with iOS as the default backup destination for the Photos app instead of iCloud?
Something I find it missing is two way sync. Meaning if you delete a photo that has already been backed up in Immich, from the standard Photos app, it will live on in Immich. So I guess the solution is to just use Immich as your default photo manager.
If anyone knows of solutions to this I'd be curious!
For me Immich has been good, but not great. I keep going back to nextcloud photos if I really want to do any work, like sharing images and file management.
I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure. Immich can look at your external libraries but it can’t really do anything with them. I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage. I’ve wanted to like Immich and what they are doing, but I am fearful that they won’t be around forever and I will have just another wandering database of my images that I can’t really move to another platform when inevitably comes along.
Kudos to the team! It looks like a really polished product.
I've been wanting to set it up at home for a while now, but I have some reservations...
This type of fully featured open source software that competes with a service by a giant corporation with infinite resources is ripe for the typical OSS rugpull, and/or enshittification, and/or being acquired, followed by rugpull/enshittification. I've been burned many times by this before, and I'm reluctant to go all in on a product that demands so much practical investment: importing all my data, categorizing/labeling, using mobile apps, relying on "AI", etc. I'm tired of the modern software churn.
Immich does have an optional commercial license, which is good, and it's part of the FUTO brand of products, which seems to have a noble vision. But it's an unproven model that doesn't guarantee none of the above will happen.
In a weird way, I would like this type of software to be less polished and have less features. Both to make it less attractive for hostile practices, and to make development/maintenance easier and more cost-effective. Give me something that I can easily sync my photos to, view them in a web browser, and securely share them with close contacts. I don't need a Google Photos replacement. I need something simple that does a few things well, and that I can trust is not going to disappear on me. Is there such a product?
I'm aware of apps like Nextcloud which probably does this, but that's even more complex than Immich. Currently I'm just using `rsync`, and a static file web server, but that's a pretty hacky solution. I would need just a bit more polish. I could probably do this myself, but already have a long list of unfinished projects I would like to get to first.
I wish there were more hosted solutions for such FOSS tools. Just like the likes of Nextcloud and say borg, restic etc. It will make it FOSS accessible to people who do not want to self-host and it can then also be more accessible in terms of cost.
What a wonderful surprise! I had been thinking about a solution like this in the last year. I am curious what led everyone to this software? Is everyone else wary of the main commercial providers, privacy issues, getting locked out of your Apple/Google account, etc?
I tried immich recently and it works great. My only gripe with it is the use of postgres which requires separate backing up. Would've preferred something like sqlite for easier backups. Even better if it could embed metadata directly in EXIF or sidecar files.
58 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 60.3 ms ] threadBeen a user since over 1 year and it has been more than amazing. Progress was unbelievable. Features I was hoping would exist but never would have thought I would ever see them, like album sync, were added in short time.
I've replaced Apple Photos with Immich (from iCloud to self-hosted) and this was one of the important things to transfer. I'm completely de-Appled now and Immich was part of the journey.
After stopping for years because it was hard to view them easily, I'm finally taking photos again because of Immich.
> Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich that we wish we never knew
With the new multimodal LLMs it seems a better approach might be to get a multimodal LLM to describe the image and list keywords, and then just use the included Meilisearch.
That said, I see they list some models I haven't tried, so perhaps time to try again.
One thing that is missing for me is integration with external tools, maybe using a bit more flexible storage structure. And also smart geotagging.
Not sure what to say, could be a very very rare edge case, but it's not very reassuring.
A poweruser tip that has helped me a couple of times: Use ZFS (or other snapshotting facilities) to make snapshot before making any changes/updates or doing large imports. It makes the whole thing sort of bullet proof and you can retry if you're not happy with some import flag.
Immich had my old Corei3 server making a lot of noise for a couple of days btw! But, it's really good at facial recognition, not so much on finding dogs or something. But still very cool if you don't have to compromise on features as a self-hoster, I'm really grateful and will buy the "support package" (which does not add anything afaik... btw later they will come with a way to do seamless, encrypted off-site backups).
[0] https://docs.immich.app/features/command-line-interface/
[1] https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
I'm glad to see immich strive forward.
I wanted to change the "approach" of how I do photos:
* When I take a photo, it's usually in the moment.
* I want to have the option to "share" that photo directly to a certain album
* I'd want my wife / friends to be able to "share" the photo to those albums
Almost the same way that "frequent contacts" come up from WhatsApp.
Is this possible with the current app? This is what I wanted my app to do, and focus on being more "album" centric, rather than a big-black-hole of all photos I've ever taken..
I might even make my app, but use immich on the backend, and allow users to order a hardcopy / backup of their albums as part of the app.
My only minor complaint is that new releases are super frequent and rarely add anything meaningful.
> There are still a few items on our roadmap that we want to complete before the year ends such as auto-stacking, and achieving feature parity between the web and mobile app. We also have plans to start work on improved stack support, better sharing, group management, and ownership improvements, as well as many other enhancements.
That said, this sounds like they're not going to get the full 2025 plan done: https://immich.app/roadmap
Which is totally fine of course, I'm still a very happy user. But I'm really looking forward to Workflows! I'd love to automatically share with someone all pictures that include them.
But I still support them, technical debt is always like a iceberg, you trip on the tip, then discover it will consume you and your team for months to fix it. Still needs to be fixed as early as possible, otherwise everything becomes “invisibly slow”.
A minor note: Nowhere in the release note do you say what the app is or what it does. Sure, I can find out by following the links, but coming in cold not knowing what immich is, I was kind of expecting to learn that in the write-up.
> High performance [desktop] photo and video management solution
Honestly all I want is
- Non destructive library management. No copying and moving files and the library is just “a file”
- Exif GPS map with search support (“Photos taken at NYC between 2 and 4pm”)
- Automated (AI?) photo tagging
Example 1. Show all photos from this area (draw rectangle on map) from times 22:00 to 00:00.
Example 2. Show all photos from this area (draw rectangle on map) from years 2020 to 2024 in months march to may AND september to october from times 22:00 to 00:00.
In the Immich demo the map view lets me zoom and shows bubbles with the number of photos from an area but I see no way to select an area or bubble to explore just those photos in an album or temporary view. The map view does have a time range option (last N days or date range yyyy-mm-dd to yyyy-mm-dd), but no time of day range or months range.
Search view has advanced options with place dropdowns (country state city) but no map area rectangle option. Also has date range (yyyy-mm-dd to yyyy-mm-dd), but no time of day range or non-contiguous time criteria.
I think a photo viewer could implement the exemplified kind of searches in a slim way through a map view (user draws a rectangle) with sliders (year range, months range, time of day range) that ideally let the user set multiple ranges on one slider (march to may AND september to october). Ideally such combo criteria could then also be bookmarked and searched and the filtered in items could be batch operated on (tag, rename, delete).
Searching does need some omph though, I will have to move it away from my poor little NAS at some point.
If anyone knows of solutions to this I'd be curious!
I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure. Immich can look at your external libraries but it can’t really do anything with them. I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage. I’ve wanted to like Immich and what they are doing, but I am fearful that they won’t be around forever and I will have just another wandering database of my images that I can’t really move to another platform when inevitably comes along.
I've been wanting to set it up at home for a while now, but I have some reservations...
This type of fully featured open source software that competes with a service by a giant corporation with infinite resources is ripe for the typical OSS rugpull, and/or enshittification, and/or being acquired, followed by rugpull/enshittification. I've been burned many times by this before, and I'm reluctant to go all in on a product that demands so much practical investment: importing all my data, categorizing/labeling, using mobile apps, relying on "AI", etc. I'm tired of the modern software churn.
Immich does have an optional commercial license, which is good, and it's part of the FUTO brand of products, which seems to have a noble vision. But it's an unproven model that doesn't guarantee none of the above will happen.
In a weird way, I would like this type of software to be less polished and have less features. Both to make it less attractive for hostile practices, and to make development/maintenance easier and more cost-effective. Give me something that I can easily sync my photos to, view them in a web browser, and securely share them with close contacts. I don't need a Google Photos replacement. I need something simple that does a few things well, and that I can trust is not going to disappear on me. Is there such a product?
I'm aware of apps like Nextcloud which probably does this, but that's even more complex than Immich. Currently I'm just using `rsync`, and a static file web server, but that's a pretty hacky solution. I would need just a bit more polish. I could probably do this myself, but already have a long list of unfinished projects I would like to get to first.
If it happens next time, will check app logs (Profile Icon > Logs) to see if it contains anything useful