> The ability to upload photos from your device automatically
I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.
Easy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..
It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.
I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free.
After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.
Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...
My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.
Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.
[self promo warning]
Setting up self hosting alternatives like immich is still the biggest adoption barrier out there. Most people are not technical.
I had the same problem even as a technical personal.
I built malmo to solve that. 1 click install for immich
malmo.network/store/immich
Underlying OS fully open source, install it on your own box or use a hosting provider
I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to preserve storage space.
Great project but I believe Google Photos pricing is quite reasonable and alluring.
I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this
Google Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium. If you count your phone as another copy/medium you still need a 3rd copy somewhere if you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy.
> not accessible to my family
My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.
Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Yes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly.
I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.
For cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future.
If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.
Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.
People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.
This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
Yes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms
This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright
Depends heavily on the software cost and how far from core competency it is.
If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY.
If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it.
Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.
yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does become a chore over time and there is always a cost. You can justify it by saying you are getting value out of it but in my experience, this is true for every activity. Everyone has limited time and spending it importantly is important to me.
> a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks
This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
Other benefits not mentioned include not signing your data or life away to whatever Google's lawyers or marketers have decided is best for them, contributing to FLOSS even if only as an end user, not being a victim of rug-pulls...the list goes on.
Obviously this isn't for everybody, because there's no denying it takes time. The point is that for many, this is a very easy tradeoff to make when factoring in all of the other benefits.
This is mostly wording. It is a commitment, it has an opportunity cost, there are tradeoffs.
> This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
So many opportunities but the day is still 24 hours long. You still have to choose your opportunities wisely, and give up something else in the process. And if you look at the big picture those who choose to take this opportunity are not so many compared to those who just pay with data so they don't have to pay with time and effort. Everyone pays money in the end.
If you have to jump through this set of hoops to come to the conclusion that you want to outsource the effort of self-admin, just save the trouble and deal with not being the target audience.
Was it a full moon or what's with the dick attitude?
> jump through this set of hoops
It's a few sentences that basically say "you can't have all the hobbies, some people choose something else, everyone pays with whatever they can afford". If that overwhelmed you, ask an LLM to summarize. If you thought it's objectively wrong you would have already said where.
So you just took the opportunity to feel like a big boy and tell me "this admin stuff is not for you". Good for you big boy, glad you got that out of the system.
> You still have to choose your opportunities wisely
It's odd that you've gone off on this as opposed to people who spend their 'opportunity time' on Netflix, Call of Duty or D&D.
Sysadmin is a hobby I enjoy and I don't consider it lost time, or wasted opportunity, when so many of my colleagues go out getting drunk or watch football.
"Gone off on this"? Wait till you see me go off on people with a lack of reading comprehension, a pathological persecution complex, and a giant chip on their shoulder.
Anyway, if you ask your parents to explain my comment to you, they'll probably immediately tell you that it's a generic comment on the inability to take up every opportunity all the time. You choose one thing, others choose another, everyone does their own math (you should probably ask someone to do your math for you). I don't care about your hobby which is why I didn't mention "sysadmin", "Netflix", "Call of Duty" or "D&D", nor did I say which one I consider "better" or "worthwhile". Just that you can't do them all.
Good new, my coding agents can access my proxmox and HA and immich and make having a homelab easier than it ever has been. I actually just used codex to help me find dupes across multiple user libraries in immich and quarantine them. In immich, I can only dedupe across a single user library. I used codex to find grid based images that I needed to convert into animated images from back in my iphone 4 days. It located the images, wrote software to convert to webp and handled it.
Codex reviewed my immich setup and recommended I change things the clip model, came up with a better backup strat and found holes in my system.
My codex will ADB into my NVIDIA Shield and proxmox and setup accounts, install packages, create Home Assistant integrations to tie it all together. As a hobbyist, these are things that I would never even think about taking on.
I bought a hdmi-cec controller for my projector last week. Firmware didnt work with the PX3-pro, but it was tied to my ESPHome. Codex diagnosed the issue, rewrote, tested and uploaded the firmware OTA. All done from my phone while I was waiting in line at a store.
Ans we're just in the first year of agents taking off. Imagine what the next 5 or 10 years will be when it comes to automation for the everyday people. What a great time to be alive
The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.
And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately
It definitely can, but Its easier than ever to fork an older version and modify with claude, or just switch to a different OSS provider. With commercial tools there's no rolling back. In fact, I would pay money to go back to the pre Allen Dye liquid ass IOS update.
I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.
The value of the homelab for me is things I can’t pay money to get any other way. I would never recommend it for just replacing cloud storage, ROI is not good.
There’s nothing as nice as Plex for consuming media IMHO, and home assistant/homebridge glue a pile of cheap IoT stuff into a single, cohesive, useable setup.
I am a reluctant admin. I resent spending time on it. It feels like work, which after 10 hours of doing similar things for much better pay grinds on you. Luckily it doesn’t take much time to keep it going after the initial setup.
Thread and Matter give me hope one day the IoT stuff might be okay. I have no hope I will ever be able to get the single media portal any other way.
> If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much.
And I used a Google pro subscription back when my data fit into that. Even when they doubled the price. Then they started actually limiting it to 5TB and it wasn't worth it.
I guarantee you I am saving boatloads compared to the $100/month tier I'd need for all my data. That pays off my entire hardware budget in under a year and the time I spent is worth a fraction of that.
In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~5-6 years to recoup the initial investment in my homelab (comparing my 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google cloud subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)
(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)
I mean it could also get dropped yea, sure. This is just a neutral discussion of the costs, I'm not making an argument for anything.
(As for data, the third hard disk isn't actually bought yet and is meant to represent an offsite backup. I might use something like AWS Glacier or Hetzner Storage Box for this anyways cuz this is mostly for experimentation.)
Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.
But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.
I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
You can use https://www.photosync-app.com/home if all you want is a local backup. It has a killer feature Immich is still missing: encryption at rest of the photos.
I personally find it nicer to unlock my phone to decrypt (Face ID) then dealing with having to auth with my headless server. Is there a way to manage this without putting the keys for LUKS or similar somewhere risky? Main threat is someone stealing the NAS during a break in.
You can store the key in the TPM. If someone steals the NAS, they can only decrypt it if they continue running the exact same software, which you harden (e.g. disable password login from the TTY).
Or you can SSH in and type the key once per reboot.
I jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...
“You _will_ lose them”, as in, somehow Immich will do something to lose them (like making a mistake in a dedupe process which deletes the wrong things), or are you just saying you also need to keep backups?
Once a year I go through my photos and select my favourites and have them printed to paper. Using Google's print service (as an example) you can spend about $80 to have 150 photos printed into a book. If you do this once a year you will soon have a lovely shelf of paper photos you can easily store, easily look at and show to other people and hand down to your kids and their kids, etc. Long term I suspect my collection of books is far more likely to survive than my google account.
We got rid of my mom’s family photo books. Nobody has space / desire for 50 pounds of photos unfortunately. We use a rotating electronic frame now to cycle photos.
Had gazillion copies of folders and iphoto libraries in various backups, but since i moved to linux as daily driver was on the hunt for a good photo archiver. Just recently started using Immich. Tried Photoprism too which would have also fit my need well, but somehow Immich won the coin toss ! (After many years was able to pull that one pic my wife was after from my archive !).
I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged).
Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i think i need a local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data).
Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !
I don't think cost is the main reason you should move. Things like photos, gmail are definitely subsided by google so it's not a fair comparison.
It's getting pretty easy to add backup for self hosting so that is becoming the smallest problem.
Agree with you, still worth it
It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index.
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.
My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.
Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.
Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.
As a retired semi-professional photographer I find it amazing how many photos some people have in their library. A mother with over 200GB of photos, 80% are junk, repeats, etc. She never looks at them either.
Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.
That's me in a nutshell. I have close to 300GiB in Google Photos, mostly photos and videos of my children. I take a lot of photographs because getting a good shot, for me, is mostly a matter of luck. I don't delete that many photos because it's active work and I don't really care to spend the time. I do curate an album of decent ones, just so the few people who care can see new photos and videos every now and then. I pay a relatively small fee for 2 TiB of space.
One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account. It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.
I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
The greatest weakness of Google Photos is that it has no real incremental, automated backup features. If it could incrementally sync over to other services, it would be much better. The closest is to manually use Google Takeout to export specific time ranges, and then copy those elsewhere.
I gave Immich a fair try, but it could not replace Apple Photos for my use case. YMMV, but my favorite Photos app features simply weren't available.
I use Apple's top-notch editing for all sorts of stuff - RAW images, videos, basic enhancements, etc. When I tested, Immich didn't have very good, if any, editing features.
I also love Apple's search functions, and it Just Works™. I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.
I also did not really care for Immich's UI, it felt overly basic and Material Design to me, but that is only personal preference.
Another gap is metadata. In Apple Photos I can tap the little "I" icon to see a lot of capture metadata, and in Immich I did not see an equivalent to how good Apple's one is.
> I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.
It’s less than you think! Consider that Apple’s image recognition happens on your phone. Also, it doesn’t matter if indexing is slow, as long as the photos are indexed before you need to search for them.
103 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] threadI don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.
After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.
Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...
My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.
Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.
I built malmo to solve that. 1 click install for immich malmo.network/store/immich
Underlying OS fully open source, install it on your own box or use a hosting provider
I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this
> not accessible to my family
My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
https://www.sam-brink.com/posts/self-host
Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Still worth it, imo.
I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.
If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.
Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.
This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY.
If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it.
Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.
I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs
> a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks
This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
Other benefits not mentioned include not signing your data or life away to whatever Google's lawyers or marketers have decided is best for them, contributing to FLOSS even if only as an end user, not being a victim of rug-pulls...the list goes on.
Obviously this isn't for everybody, because there's no denying it takes time. The point is that for many, this is a very easy tradeoff to make when factoring in all of the other benefits.
This is mostly wording. It is a commitment, it has an opportunity cost, there are tradeoffs.
> This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
So many opportunities but the day is still 24 hours long. You still have to choose your opportunities wisely, and give up something else in the process. And if you look at the big picture those who choose to take this opportunity are not so many compared to those who just pay with data so they don't have to pay with time and effort. Everyone pays money in the end.
Right, but the distinction is relevant in the context of the original claim:
> People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend
My point was that many of us do account for this time in the aforementioned ways.
Plus, once it's set up, it practically runs itself if you have a sane backup methodology and are only running upgrades every couple months.
> jump through this set of hoops
It's a few sentences that basically say "you can't have all the hobbies, some people choose something else, everyone pays with whatever they can afford". If that overwhelmed you, ask an LLM to summarize. If you thought it's objectively wrong you would have already said where.
So you just took the opportunity to feel like a big boy and tell me "this admin stuff is not for you". Good for you big boy, glad you got that out of the system.
It's odd that you've gone off on this as opposed to people who spend their 'opportunity time' on Netflix, Call of Duty or D&D.
Sysadmin is a hobby I enjoy and I don't consider it lost time, or wasted opportunity, when so many of my colleagues go out getting drunk or watch football.
"Gone off on this"? Wait till you see me go off on people with a lack of reading comprehension, a pathological persecution complex, and a giant chip on their shoulder.
Anyway, if you ask your parents to explain my comment to you, they'll probably immediately tell you that it's a generic comment on the inability to take up every opportunity all the time. You choose one thing, others choose another, everyone does their own math (you should probably ask someone to do your math for you). I don't care about your hobby which is why I didn't mention "sysadmin", "Netflix", "Call of Duty" or "D&D", nor did I say which one I consider "better" or "worthwhile". Just that you can't do them all.
Codex reviewed my immich setup and recommended I change things the clip model, came up with a better backup strat and found holes in my system.
My codex will ADB into my NVIDIA Shield and proxmox and setup accounts, install packages, create Home Assistant integrations to tie it all together. As a hobbyist, these are things that I would never even think about taking on.
I bought a hdmi-cec controller for my projector last week. Firmware didnt work with the PX3-pro, but it was tied to my ESPHome. Codex diagnosed the issue, rewrote, tested and uploaded the firmware OTA. All done from my phone while I was waiting in line at a store.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately
For example, paperless-ngx was already an absolute ball of mud, and now there’s a new major version that’s somehow even worse.
I’m just not upgrading. It’s behind a VPN, I control what files it can ingest, so it’s okay if it’s old.
I’m looking at a few alternatives and I’ll switch when they are mature and when I have the time, but there’s essentially no deadline.
There’s nothing as nice as Plex for consuming media IMHO, and home assistant/homebridge glue a pile of cheap IoT stuff into a single, cohesive, useable setup.
I am a reluctant admin. I resent spending time on it. It feels like work, which after 10 hours of doing similar things for much better pay grinds on you. Luckily it doesn’t take much time to keep it going after the initial setup.
Thread and Matter give me hope one day the IoT stuff might be okay. I have no hope I will ever be able to get the single media portal any other way.
And I used a Google pro subscription back when my data fit into that. Even when they doubled the price. Then they started actually limiting it to 5TB and it wasn't worth it.
I guarantee you I am saving boatloads compared to the $100/month tier I'd need for all my data. That pays off my entire hardware budget in under a year and the time I spent is worth a fraction of that.
(As for data, the third hard disk isn't actually bought yet and is meant to represent an offsite backup. I might use something like AWS Glacier or Hetzner Storage Box for this anyways cuz this is mostly for experimentation.)
But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
Or you can SSH in and type the key once per reboot.
unlike Photos, you don’t have a team of professionals managing it 24/7.
(that said, takeout your Google Photos too, because single point of failure, etc).
I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged).
Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i think i need a local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data).
Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !
For the nerds...https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.
My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.
Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.
Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.
Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me: Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)I just use Shotwell: https://shotwell-project.org/
I use Apple's top-notch editing for all sorts of stuff - RAW images, videos, basic enhancements, etc. When I tested, Immich didn't have very good, if any, editing features.
I also love Apple's search functions, and it Just Works™. I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.
I also did not really care for Immich's UI, it felt overly basic and Material Design to me, but that is only personal preference.
Another gap is metadata. In Apple Photos I can tap the little "I" icon to see a lot of capture metadata, and in Immich I did not see an equivalent to how good Apple's one is.
It’s less than you think! Consider that Apple’s image recognition happens on your phone. Also, it doesn’t matter if indexing is slow, as long as the photos are indexed before you need to search for them.
I used to run Immich on a 2nd gen Core i3.
I also have a zfs based fileserver setup were i do snapshots before i backup from my desktop were i manage my pictures.
I backup my zfs based filesystem online for off-side.
My images (a lot of pictures, dslr quality, raw) is around 2tb.
You don't just replicate what a company like Google does for you for 10$ and without knowing stuff about...