[HN Gopher] Immich v2.0.0 - First stable release
___________________________________________________________________
Immich v2.0.0 - First stable release
Author : Alexvb
Score : 480 points
Date : 2025-10-02 06:25 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| sagacity wrote:
| 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.
| darkwater wrote:
| Yep, with the new timeline they fixed my biggest issue with
| Immich which was the local app won't even show your local
| photos if there was no connection to the server. Now it works,
| you just don't get others photos if they are not cached already
| but that's absolutely expected.
| yesnomaybe wrote:
| Congrats and huge thanks.
|
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Out of curiosity, have you bought the "supporter" upgrade?
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| >After stopping for years
|
| Honestly, thank you for making me feel marginally better about
| the disgustingly lazy, shortsighted, stupid etc. practice of
| using Google Photos even though they are waiting with bated
| breath to report me to the cops because I took a picture of my
| son to send to his doctor[1], before banning my whole account.
|
| Migrating to Immich, 2026, hold me to it please lazy me! Oh
| how's the search? (Too lazy to label anything so rely on Google
| Spyware for text & object recognition search when iOS fails.
| Take photos every day of my life so plenty to trawl through.)
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-
| surveil...
| stavros wrote:
| Migrate today! I won't use any third-party photo service,
| that's too much data.
|
| The search is amazing, you search for "cat" and you get back
| all the cats.
| j_bum wrote:
| The search is very impressive. It uses CLIP.
|
| So you can search "black cat on blue carpet in the morning"
| and expect to see a result (if it exists)
| stavros wrote:
| Well shit, you're right!
|
| https://imgz.org/iiAgNmEJ.jpg
|
| I didn't know it was _that_ good! Wow.
| tecleandor wrote:
| OMG, I'm so sorry for that. That's terrible.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I've stopped using YouTube and run a bi-yearly Google Takeout
| (and wipe).
|
| https://takeout.google.com/
| jadbox wrote:
| Did you ever get access to Gmail/fi again after the
| incident?? The article said the two cases, at time of
| writing, still had not gained access to their account again
| even after they were cleared.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Fast, featureful, easy to set up. I love it so much..._
|
| Alex Tran (Immich lead) really took it up a notch or two when
| FUTO "acquired" the project. The FUTO model is interesting in
| showing another successful way to grow & support F _L_ OSS till
| self-sustainability.
| avtolik wrote:
| 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?
| frenkel wrote:
| Because it wants to recognize objects in you images.
| fifafu wrote:
| If you just need an image storage solution: no, but then you
| don't need Immich. If you want the feature Immich offers: yes
| tim-kt wrote:
| The last time I tried Immich (a year ago or so), my impression
| was that Immich tries to imitate Google Photos as much as
| possible. This includes features such as searching by a person
| or by "cat", which requires some machine learning
| sophistication, which is done locally (you can also disable
| these features). This would be my guess, but I'm not entirely
| sure.
| d3vnull wrote:
| Because it's not just an "image storage solution". A thumb
| drive would be an image storage solution. If you're indexing,
| making geo queries, serving over the network, categorize,
| transcode video and everything else that's needed to create a
| google photos competitor, you're going to need the hardware to
| back it up.
| darkwater wrote:
| Because it is written in Node, it uses several other softwares
| (i.e. Postgresql), it runs image/video processing on the fly
| (transcoding to various formats depending on what you upload
| and who views), it does face/object recognition running a local
| model and a few other nice features that yeah, require more
| power. It's not a static HTML of your photos.
| abdusco wrote:
| You can turn off AI features. You won't need as much RAM, then.
| diimdeep wrote:
| It is ridiculous bloat of "high level technobabble"
| npm install for web/ server/ % cloc . 81808
| text files. 51415 unique files. Language
| files blank comment code ----
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| -------------------- JavaScript
| 25050 453101 913671 4436663
| TypeScript 14997 85346
| 630503 831318 JSON
| 2238 168 0 457435 Perl
| 233 10541 34463 293957
| Markdown 1977 89859
| 1551 234399 Dart
| 1257 24152 14748 229937
| Svelte 678 5917
| 190 51223 HTML
| 128 16361 90 31719 ...
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| ------------------------ SUM:
| 51415 713200 1617503 6726009
|
| In comparison, qemu does emulation of literally every hardware
| that there is and it is only 1/3 more code, and it is without
| counting code required to run nodejs, docker, postgresql, redis
| that is dependencies of this image catalogue software.
| qemu-10.1.0 % cloc . 58961 text files. 43347
| unique files. Language
| files blank comment code ----
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| -------------------- C
| 18063 1068616 1312988 5590243
| C/C++ Header 13980 366138
| 907350 1774239 Assembly
| 1370 42839 55872 320027
| Python 1345 67483
| 89294 255732 SUM:
| 43347 1789003 2759752 9220521 ----
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| --------------------
| bo0tzz wrote:
| You're counting a lot of generated code.
| dangus wrote:
| I hope you slept well in your cryo-chamber, Austin Powers. It's
| the year 2025, 6GB of RAM is not a lot. A stick of 32GB of RAM
| costs about $50. Most simple telephones come with 8GB of RAM.
| jaredlt wrote:
| I appreciate the Cursed Knowledge section on their website
| https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge
|
| > Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich
| that we wish we never knew
| darkwater wrote:
| Reading it I see this 50 extra packages are
| cursed There is a user in the JavaScript community
| who goes around adding "backwards compatibility" to projects.
| They do this by adding 50 extra package dependencies to your
| project, which are maintained by them.
|
| which bring to this user: Jordan Harband
| https://github.com/sponsors/ljharb Does anyone know what they
| actually mean with that cursed knowledge point? And what's the
| "backwards compatibility" that Jordan also boasts in his GH
| profile?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Seems like this thread answers your question
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37604373
| slaterbug wrote:
| I don't have much to add myself, but there was a bit of
| discussion around this back in August that you might be
| interested in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44831811
| darkwater wrote:
| Wow! Didn't know Immich's Cursed page had already a
| dedicated post on HN.
|
| I love reading about opensource drama, especially if it's
| some technology I don't use directly, it's like watching a
| soap opera.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| This user makes money of off how many downloads their
| packages receive.
|
| https://github.com/A11yance/axobject-
| query/pull/354#issuecom...
| greggsy wrote:
| What a dumpster fire.
|
| Is he really being paid per download, or is he just being
| sponsored? It's not clear if either would imply some form
| of malicious intent either.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| To not just link to another thread: The specialty of ljharbs
| issues sits somewhere between "JavaScript is a very dynamic
| programming language that grew a lot and quite fast" and "we
| cannot trust developers to do the right thing".
|
| His libraries tend to build up on older runtime
| implementations and freeze every used functionality during
| runtime, so they provide "second-run safety" and "backwards
| compatibility". Developers disagree with some of its effects,
| such as a grown dependency tree and impacts in performance of
| multiple magnitudes (as measured in micro-benchmarks). ljharb
| seems to follow a rather strong ideology, but is a member of
| the TC39 group and a highly trusted person.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| ljharb is also conveniently paid per download. His actions
| border on malicious especially when viewing from a supply
| chain attack angle.
|
| https://github.com/A11yance/axobject-
| query/pull/354#issuecom...
| silverwind wrote:
| Also, I imagine cost of the globally wasted CPU cycles is
| much higher than what he profits. It's a pure abuse of
| resources.
| pxc wrote:
| It definitely feels a bit strange and potentially
| alarming, but after reading through that whole thread he
| ultimately seems like a sincere person doing work that he
| thinks matters, now getting dogpiled for it.
| Sammi wrote:
| I haven't found one person who agrees with him on what he
| thinks matters. His way is wasteful and slow and just
| indefensible.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| Agree, I wish every project would have that!
|
| I still think the conclusion on "setTimeout is cursed"[0] is
| faulty:
|
| > The setTimeout method in JavaScript is cursed when used with
| small values because the implementation may or may not actually
| wait the specified time.
|
| The issue to me seems that _performance.now()_ [1] returns the
| timestamp in milliseconds and will therefor round up/down. So
| 1ms errors are just within its tolerance.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/20655
|
| [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Performance...
| ffsm8 wrote:
| JS is not a realtime language.
|
| setTimeout() does not actually guarantee to run after the
| elapsed time. It merely gets queued for the next async
| execution window after that timer elapsed. Hence it can also
| be off by infinity and never get called - because JS is
| single threaded (unless you use a worker - which comes with
| its own challenges) and async windows only open if the main
| thread is "idle".
|
| Usually, this is very close to the time you set via
| setTimeout, but it's very frequently slightly off, too.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > JS is not a realtime language.
|
| Is there even such a thing? You're at the mercy of the
| platform you're running on. And Windows, Linux, Mac,
| Android, and iOS are not realtime to begin with.
|
| I guess if you're running on a realtime platform but in a
| VM like JS does, you can then take that property away,
| downgrading the "language" from being realtime. I wouldn't
| call that a language property still though, maybe my VM
| implementation doesn't make that downgrade after all.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| _setTimeout_ guarantees that the time provided is the time
| that has at least been elapsed, if it elapses at all - I
| think that is known to every JavaScript engineer out there.
|
| Then there are also gotchas like these[0][1]:
|
| > As specified in the HTML standard, browsers will enforce
| a minimum timeout of 4 milliseconds once a nested call to
| setTimeout has been scheduled 5 times.
|
| Still, the issue is rather how to measure the elapsed time
| reliably, for unit-tests among other things.
|
| [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Window/setT...
|
| [1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/timers-and-
| user-promp... (first Note)
| MrJohz wrote:
| This isn't quite the whole picture. If called in a nested
| context, `setTimeout` callbacks get executed in the next
| execution window, _or at least 4ms after the initial call_
| , whichever is earlier. Similarly, I believe `setInterval`
| has a minimum interval that it can't run faster than.
|
| See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Window/setT...
| tigeroil wrote:
| Indeed - I was a bit surprised by them mentioning this to
| be honest, since, as I understand it, this is kind of a
| widely accepted limitation of setTimeout - it's purely a
| 'best effort' timer. It's not intended to be something
| where "yes after _exactly_ Xms it 'll execute.
| kmarc wrote:
| I love it. Immediately added to my daily note-taking practice
| senectus1 wrote:
| the "personality" of this team is just such a joy...
| perching_aix wrote:
| Are you being sarcastic or just an ellipsis (...) abuser? If
| the former, what for?
| daemonologist wrote:
| They think Postgres is cursed with a 2^16 limit; SQL Server has
| a parameter limit of ~2,000. I guess at least it's low enough
| that you're going to fail early.
| thewisenerd wrote:
| and then you write `.chunked(list)` so you can write `.map {
| query(list) }` instead of `.map { query(it) }` :)
|
| i wish there was an unused lambda parameter warning..
| kardianos wrote:
| Sure, but SQL Server DB protocol (TD) has a dedicated Bulk
| Insert specific for that functionality. TDS isn't perfect,
| but it is much better then the postgresql wire protocol v3.
|
| Sometime I want to build a DB front-end that you send up some
| type of iceberg/parquet or similar, and return a similar file
| format over a quic protocol. Like quic, persistent
| connections could be virtualized, and bulk insert could be
| sane and normalized: eg insert these rows into a table or
| temp table, then execute this script referencing it. While
| I'm at it, I'll normalize PL/SQL so even brain-dead back-ends
| (sqlite) could use procedural statements and in-database
| logic.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| Love it! I bought the supporter package a year ago.
|
| One thing that is missing for me is integration with external
| tools, maybe using a bit more flexible storage structure. And
| also smart geotagging.
| dsego wrote:
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I've been using Immich for a year now and haven't lost a single
| image.
|
| Having said that, if you self-host something like this, you're
| responsible for making backups. The actual photos uploaded to
| Immich are stored in the file system as regular files. Any
| other data that Immich can't easily recreate is stored in
| Postgres, which it automatically dumps once a day. So if you
| back up your image files and your Postgres dumps, you can
| always recreate your library.
| teekert wrote:
| The issue you linked was close with a PR 1 hour ago :D
|
| Still not nice, I've always had all of Immich in a ZFS dataset
| with regular snapshots. Then you can always roll back. I've
| only had to use it when I wasn't happy with some large import
| though.
| teekert wrote:
| 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).
|
| [0] https://docs.immich.app/features/command-line-interface/
|
| [1] https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
| stavros wrote:
| 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).
| rootnod3 wrote:
| Really wanna try it out, but will have to see if and how I can
| build/install it manually on FreeBSD.
| drekipus wrote:
| 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.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Isn't that a simple shared album with upload permissions for
| everyone? Immich has that, yes.
| darkamaul wrote:
| 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.
| Vinnl wrote:
| 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.
| romainrbr wrote:
| > But I'm really looking forward to Workflows! I'd love to
| automatically share with someone all pictures that include
| them.
|
| There is a bunch of third party app that can do that easily, ie
| : https://github.com/romainrbr/immich-face-to-album
|
| But indeed it would be better to have it integrated into Immich
| Vinnl wrote:
| Yes, I'm actually using that right now, except I haven't gone
| through the effort to set up a cron job, so I'm just running
| it manually every now and then now. Really looking forward to
| that being less effort.
| illiac786 wrote:
| 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".
| tom2948329494 wrote:
| Love the CD design!
|
| 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.
| haunter wrote:
| What's a good desktop app with the same-ish goal?
|
| > 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
| ghgr wrote:
| Checkout https://bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2/. I've been using
| it for years and it checks all the boxes you're looking for
| haunter wrote:
| >self-hosted directory-first photo gallery website
|
| That's not a desktop app, in fact it's pretty much like
| Immich
| phlsa wrote:
| digiKam[1] might be for you. I only tried it briefly, but I
| think it covers most of the requirements out outlined.
|
| I personally landed on Peakto[2], since it has the unique
| ability to create a unified catalog across multiple CaptureOne
| sessions, but it's probably overkill for what you need.
|
| [1] https://www.digikam.org
|
| [2] https://cyme.io/en/products/peakto/
| felixthehat wrote:
| Phil Gyford just posted about "Trying out eight macOS
| alternatives to Lightroom Classic to see if I could switch to
| one of them." which covers some of those points
|
| https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2025/09/27/escaping-ligh...
| 0x000042 wrote:
| Sounds like you need digikam. I have been a happy digikam user
| for more than a decade now. It works really well.
|
| The automated AI face detection can be improved compared to
| immich. But I guess this whole area is developing rapidly these
| days so I expect it to get better soon.
| kkukshtel wrote:
| CaptureOne is the go to thing you want here. It's the best.
| toastal wrote:
| Sorry. I can't take your "open source" project seriously if _all_
| communications /collaboration options are locked behind
| proprietary services (MS GitHub, Discord, Reddit). If free
| software ethos is good enough for your project, it's good enough
| for communications; if my privacy matters enough to self-host my
| photos, my privacy also matters on how I would interact with the
| software's community.
| mafro wrote:
| This comment feels like a troll.
|
| I'm sure you are aware that:
|
| - Most open source projects on the Internet are on Github. One
| could argue Github itself has taken a significant role in the
| growth of OSS in the last decade
|
| - Using Discord is totally du jour for open source communities
| in 2025
|
| - Reddit is still the biggest discussion forum on the Internet.
| Including discussion about open source
| addend wrote:
| 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).
| mmlkrx wrote:
| 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?
| teekert wrote:
| I do that, I just enabled backups in the Immich app and there
| it goes.
| armsaw wrote:
| I've disabled iCloud and use the PhotoSync app to move photos
| and videos from my phone to a file structure on my NAS, which
| Immich reads as an external library. Stable for over a year now
| - very happy with it.
| illiac786 wrote:
| I've done just that, it works.
|
| Searching does need some omph though, I will have to move it
| away from my poor little NAS at some point.
| mckjns wrote:
| 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!
| sonar_un wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| They've been around for a 3 years, which is not a very long
| time for FOSS. However the software seems stable, fast, it has
| lots of releases, all of which are good signs in terms of
| future availability.
|
| I forgot the name, but there is a software "law" that software
| that has been around for N years will probably be around for N
| more years (so the longer it's been around, the longer it will
| continue to be around).
|
| I see about 7 big contributors: https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/graphs/contributors. I think most of them work
| for/are sponsored by FUTO: https://futo.org/about/what-is-futo/
|
| And seeing the FUTO description, I like that. We need more of
| that :-)
|
| > FUTO is an organization dedicated to developing, both through
| in-house engineering and investment, technologies that
| frustrate centralization and industry consolidation.
|
| Though this part needs more research:
|
| > From its founding, FUTO has been funded entirely by
| investment from its sole owner, Eron Wolf.
|
| I have no idea who Eron Wolf is...
|
| Edit: found some more info. Potentially promising:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35914264
|
| https://gitlab.futo.org/eron/public/-/wikis/Thoughts-on-Open...
|
| Though the question remains about FUTOs long term
| sustainability.
| alfyboy wrote:
| You're thinking about the [Lindy
| effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)
|
| I donate to Immich monthly, and I'm glad they managed to keep
| the project going and not paywalling any of their features,
| even under the influence of their new sponsor.
| sharperguy wrote:
| Funnily enough I use nextcloud to upload my photos and then
| immich with the external dir pointed to my nextcloud directory
| to actually view them. Mostly came about because I installed
| nextcloud first. But it means I get to keep both immich and
| still have a regular file structure.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Same here, I tried Nextcloud Memories first which has some of
| the same functionality but ended up being too slow in nearly
| all aspects. Immich does well in this regard so I use it just
| like you do using its external library feature.
|
| You may be interested in the change I submitted to Immich
| which makes it possible to directly log in to Immich using
| the Nextcloud OIDC app. Add Immich as an 'external site' and
| use the _autoLaunch_ parameter [1] to have the site open in
| NC as if it were a 'native' app without needing to log in
| first.
|
| [1] https://docs.immich.app/administration/oauth/#auto-launch
| poisonborz wrote:
| But for structuring, tagging, why would you need a database?
| There's the file system, and countless tools to batch edit
| images and exif. Immich is great to display images, and perhaps
| gather some bit of metadata, like face recognition.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| > I really don't get having all of your images in a a library
| and not in a file structure
|
| Immich can store your photos in a file structure you want. It
| can also reorganise your files on disk based on EXIF data, and
| so on.
|
| > 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
|
| It can absolutely do exactly this.
|
| https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/
| kevinfiol wrote:
| Does this make Immich effectively function like Photoview? My
| current Immich by default stores my uploads in an
| `uploads/<UUID>/<bunch of random two character folders>`
| structure. This was a huge disappointment after moving from
| Photoview.
| stavros wrote:
| I just had it store images in "photos/YYYY/MM/" when I set
| it up and that was it.
| sonar_un wrote:
| The storage template is nothing like managing your photos
| within the app, moving them to different, more specific,
| folders. All it does is allow a type of folder structure on
| the main drive where the upload directories are, but if you
| have a more specific file structure, it doesn't allow you to
| manage this.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| > ripe for the typical OSS rugpull
|
| Immich is AGPL-licensed and doesn't have a CLA, which makes it
| functionally impossible for us to do any kind of rugpull. We're
| already "aqcuired" by FUTO since a solid year ago[0] and it's
| only been up since then.
|
| > I don't need a Google Photos replacement.
|
| Then there are many other options in this space that might be
| better suited to you. [1] has a really good overview.
|
| [0]: https://immich.app/blog/immich-joins-futo
|
| [1]: https://meichthys.github.io/foss_photo_libraries/
| imiric wrote:
| > Immich is AGPL-licensed and doesn't have a CLA, which makes
| it functionally impossible for us to do any kind of rugpull.
|
| More difficult, perhaps, but certainly not impossible. And
| there are many other ways the software can be functionally
| crippled without involving a license change.
|
| > We're already "aqcuired" by FUTO since a solid year ago[0]
| and it's only been up since then.
|
| Like I said, FUTO seems like a fair steward of OSS so far,
| but I have no reason to trust them long-term. It is funded by
| a single investor, which doesn't inspire confidence. That
| relationship may end at any point.
|
| To be fair, I am being overly cautious of what seems like an
| excellent project by any measure, especially compared to the
| alternatives. In my defense, I've been conditioned over the
| years to be wary of software that looks too good to be true,
| because it inevitably disappoints me, and to prefer simpler
| and even jankier software that doesn't promise the world,
| because it rarely does.
|
| Commercializing free software is a difficult and unsolved
| problem. I'm not against mandatory licenses to unlock
| features that only a few large/"enterprise" users would
| generally use. Or to have some sort of a tiered licensing
| system for more advanced features. This would go against your
| current philosophy of not locking any features behind a
| paywall, which is noble, but it also has the drawback of
| making payments entirely optional. It is essentially
| donationware, which is not a stable source of income.
|
| Also, subscriptions, as much as users don't like them, are
| really a requirement for this type of software. It pays for
| continual maintenance which wouldn't be covered by a single
| lifetime purchase. There are many ways this could be
| implemented that makes it fair for both the user and the
| developer.
|
| In any case, thanks for your work, and good luck with the
| project. And thanks for the link with alternatives.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| 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?
| sylens wrote:
| Immich is fantastic. I'm just waiting on Worflows to replace
| Google Photo's smart albums before I fully cut over
| dpacmittal wrote:
| 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.
| crtasm wrote:
| It makes regular database dumps to library/backups/*.sql.gz so
| I think backing up the library directory is enough?
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| I really like Immich, although recently their android app
| randomly decided to go out of sync with my library and stop
| backing up automatically :/
| me_vinayakakv wrote:
| That happened to me yesterday and got solved on its own
| automatically.
|
| If it happens next time, will check app logs (Profile Icon >
| Logs) to see if it contains anything useful
| binaryturtle wrote:
| I read that announcement and I have zero idea what this "immich"
| app (?) is. How about adding some short introduction text
| explaining what the thing is for folks just discovering this
| thing via a HN link (w/o forcing them to click further or digging
| the information from somewhere else)?
| denysvitali wrote:
| Google Photos alternative -> https://immich.app
| vr46 wrote:
| An excellent piece of work, although needed and continues to need
| more horsepower than I have readily available. UI not super-
| useful but I am going to dig in and see if the API can be
| utilized to get what I would like - better exposure of underlying
| file structure to quickly navigate by date.
| jannesan wrote:
| Is Immich good at finding duplicates? And generally cleaning up a
| dump of photos? Or am I better off using Digikam for that before
| importing to Immich?
| fourseventy wrote:
| It has pretty good duplicate detection in my experience.
| illiac786 wrote:
| The embedded duplicate detector is not bad, and there's a third
| party one that relies on Immich api that is even better.
| stavros wrote:
| You can't say that and not link!
| derkades wrote:
| Czkwaka is another good tool for finding duplicate photos
| fourseventy wrote:
| I literally just migrated from Photoprism to Immich 4 days ago.
| Hopefully migrating to 2.0 isn't hard. Very happy with Immich
| though, its miles ahead of Photoprism and at this point the best
| choice for self hosting photos.
| honeycrispy wrote:
| > Hopefully migrating to 2.0 isn't hard.
|
| It's not. I did it in under a minute.
| stavros wrote:
| There's no migration necessary really, you just pull the new
| version and that's it.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| I've tried to use Photoprism last year, but it didn't work
| great for me, so I was planning to move to Immich. It's nice to
| hear that it's miles ahead in your experience. Do you use the
| search by context feature? I mean, searching "yellow car" and
| getting pictures with yellow cars in them as response. My
| experience with Photoprism was horrible in that aspect.
| codethief wrote:
| Is there a proper changelog somewhere? Previous releases on
| GitHub documented changes in great detail but v2.0.0 only lists a
| few bug fixes and beyond that just refers to the git history:
| https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/tag/v2.0.0
| Vinnl wrote:
| Looking at the Git history since the last release [1], that
| looks pretty accurate. Practically no changes other than now
| calling it stable.
|
| [1] https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/compare/v1.144.1...v2.0...
| codethief wrote:
| Huh. So why increase the major version? Does Immich not use
| semantic versioning?
| ratrocket wrote:
| From TFA it sounds like they didn't do semver prior to this
| release but now will: > What versioning
| strategy will Immich use? > > Starting with
| v2.0.0, we will now follow semantic versioning.
|
| (edit for formatting)
| a022311 wrote:
| Yep, I was one of the people who complained about that
| when they were making breaking changes every other
| release. It's great to see they actually kept their
| promise!
| blacklion wrote:
| Immich is good to replace google photos or even Lightroom
| Library, but it is bad to replace Flickr.
|
| Does anybody know self-hosting solution to have nice site to show
| off selected photos? No authorization and users for viewers, no
| "share" links, but photostream, albums, tags, way to see one
| photo full-screen. With minimal "chrome" like Flickr can do.
|
| It doesn't need to have photo-organization things, object
| recognition, etc, which is needed to navigate your full library.
| Only way to show photos your specifically selected to publish.
| jasonfrost wrote:
| >Does anybody know self-hosting solution to have nice site to
| show off selected photos? ... >Only way to show photos your
| specifically selected to publish.
|
| Huh? The share feature works with no auth, I wouldn't want it
| different. Sounds like you just want to build a self hosted
| website to show portfolio work which... You just make a website
| WD-42 wrote:
| Have you considered a blog? You could probably realize your
| vision with Wordpress pretty easily.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Eehm. Wordpress? Your requirements sounds like a normal
| personal portfolio website.
| blacklion wrote:
| Several people suggested Wordpress, but I have very bad
| experience with helping my friends to install & use
| Wordpress. It is complete mess of software.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Just do a static website with object storage for the photos. If
| you just have a few thousand photos you could even bundle the
| photos with the website and host it for free at cloudflare
| pages.
| blacklion wrote:
| I cannot design site :-)
|
| Also, I prefer to have some search (by tags, lens, words in
| description) and easy upload.
|
| (I have where to host site with virtually any number of
| photos)
| Philpax wrote:
| Immich alone may not be sufficient, but immich-public-proxy
| might be: https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy
|
| Check out the sample gallery: https://immich-
| demo.note.sx/share/gJfs8l4LcJJrBUpjhMnDoKXFt1...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Not the parent poster, but that looks really promising.
|
| I want to get Immich up and running for my personal workflow.
| I shoot sports stuff regularly that I want to share along
| with personal photos I do not. Right now my workflow is
| frustratingly manual for this process. Having the "share with
| the public" functionality right beside my internal workflow
| would be a dream.
| toomim wrote:
| Me too. I've been wanting this with immich.
| jadbox wrote:
| No search feature?
| stavros wrote:
| How is this different from what Immich does natively?
|
| https://immich.home.stavros.io/share/ztG3VGyrbofAw3QUXjytV2P.
| ..
|
| The GP wanted albums, for example, which this doesn't seem to
| have?
| Philpax wrote:
| You don't have to expose your Immich to the outside world,
| which may give you a degree of peace of mind. It sits in
| front of shares, so you would share your albums
| individually, as you have there. I guess you'd still need a
| directory for those, yes.
| blacklion wrote:
| I don't want to have external directory, it is my
| problem. I want all photos uploaded shown in
| chronological order as first page and ability to drop-out
| menu with albums, search, like this. It should be public
| gallery, not site where I share photos with people who
| have special links (even if these links can be published
| on, effectively, other site). I even don't need any
| access rights, private photos, etc. Only public ones. It
| is gallery. Everybody can see, it can be indexed by
| search engines, etc.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I looked at Photo Organizer[0] a few years ago as a possible
| way to share photos I shoot at events with the public. It
| didn't seem wholly unreasonable. Having said that, I'm not
| seeing the full-screen "chromeless" kind of look you're looking
| for on the maintainer's demo site[1] either.
|
| Edit: A sibling post's reference to the Immich public proxy
| looks pretty cool. I am anxious to try it out.
|
| [0] https://po.shaftnet.org/
|
| [1] https://www.peachyphotos.com/po/user/slp
| kkukshtel wrote:
| I built something mostly like this, albeit not self-hosted:
| https://mood.site
|
| The idea of it is - a simple website where, when you go to it,
| an album is auto-created for you without need for an account.
|
| You can upload images to that site through drag and drop or
| clicking upload. Once uploaded images can be rearranged and
| resized, with the grid adapting.
|
| You can share the gallery with other people to collab on it by
| sharing the URL with the edit query param attached. If you
| share the link without the edit key the gallery is view only.
|
| Here's my personal inspiration board as an example:
| https://mood.site/WvP4xd6x
|
| Main thing it's lacking based on your ask is ability to toggle
| visibility for individual photos.
|
| --
|
| I haven't considered making it something people could self-
| host, but the underlying tech is easy enough and is just backed
| by a pretty simple database that I could maybe bake into a
| single delivery html + js file that references a folder of
| images. Would that be interesting?
| mstngl wrote:
| io200[1] might be worth a look - a CMS for photos with low
| requirements for self-hosting (shared hosting is sufficient),
| nice themes, a powerful backend for managing photos and a
| proper free tier for more than testing. This CMS started its
| journey as Koken[2] which some might remember.
|
| [1] https://www.io200.com/
|
| [2] https://www.koken.me/
| Ir0nMan wrote:
| Ghost or Wordpress as your CMS and a Photography focused
| "theme".
| nhumrich wrote:
| What are people using as backup solutions for immich?
| philjohn wrote:
| Immich is running in ProxMox for me, and using an NFS mounted
| ZFS dataset (encrypted at rest as the rack is in the garage,
| unlocks on boot using clevis and tang).
|
| That ZFS dataset is backed up daily offsite using Restic +
| Rclone
|
| Immich LXC is backed up daily to Proxmox Backup Server 1, which
| syncs to Proxmox Backup Server 2, and also gets sent offsite.
|
| PostgreSQL is running in another LXC container, which also
| backs up to PBS and also offsite.
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