[HN Gopher] Self-hosting my photos with Immich
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Self-hosting my photos with Immich
Author : birdculture
Score : 604 points
Date : 2025-11-30 09:11 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (michael.stapelberg.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (michael.stapelberg.ch)
| cuu508 wrote:
| I'm running Immich on NanoPi R6C (arm64, even lower idle power
| usage, still plenty fast for running Immich).
|
| I use Cloudflare tunnel to make it available outside the home
| network. I've set up two DNS names - one for accessing it
| directly in the local network, and and a second one that goes
| through the tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports
| internal/external connection settings - it uses the direct
| connection when connected to home wifi, and the tunnel when out
| and about.
|
| For uploading photos taken with a camera I either use immich-go
| (https://github.com/simulot/immich-go) or upload them through the
| web UI. There's a "publish to Immich" plugin for Adobe Lightroom
| which was handy, but I've moved away from using Lightroom.
| CuteDepravity wrote:
| Are you also facing the the 100mb upload limit when using
| cloudflare tunnel? Sometimes I want to upload a video from my
| phone will away from home but I can't and need to vpn
| geekologist wrote:
| You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option
| with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML
| media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.
| cuu508 wrote:
| > I just ended up exposing my public IP.
|
| I considered doing that too. My main problem with it is
| privacy. Let's say I set up some sort of dynamic DNS to
| point foo.bar.example.org to my home IP. Then, after some
| family event, I share an album link
| (https://foo.bar.example.org/share/long-base64-string) with
| friends and family. The album link gets shared on, and ends
| up on the public internet. Once somebody figures out
| foo.bar.example.org points to my home IP, they can look up
| my home IP at all times.
| shadowpho wrote:
| Love Immich. Runs smoothly on an amd 4700u ($200) with minimum
| cpu/ram usage
| digitalDM wrote:
| I agree, and simple to me $200 new PC does this task just fine.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. I can honestly
| say Immich is better in every way than Google Photos or whatever
| Apple calls it. The only thing is having to set it up yourself.
| ptk wrote:
| How does sharing an album with others work on Immich?
| jasonjayr wrote:
| You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on
| it.
|
| Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser.
|
| I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of
| folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your
| Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not _open_
| to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
| cromka wrote:
| OK. Then you concede your security, as I can't imagine any
| single person self-hosting can be better at keeping their
| public service more secure than engineers at Google can.
| Especially with limited time.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| I mean, if you're confident about security best
| practices, have a moderate amount of networking
| experience, and are a seasoned web developer, it's not
| too scary at all. I realize that's a lot of prerequisites
| though.
|
| it's not a fair comparison with Google because Google has
| a much bigger target on their back. There are millions of
| users of Google, so the value of hacking Google is very
| high. The value of hacking a random Immich instance is
| extremely low.
| kristjank wrote:
| You definitely have a dull imagination. If the software
| itself is secure, containerized version of Immich behind
| a containerized version of nginx proxy manager is
| probably as secure as you can get. Also google security
| tends to be mainly leaning towards securing google and
| less towards securing google's (non paying) customers.
| esseph wrote:
| If you're not Cloudflare averse...
|
| Setup immich VM or docker container with a cloudflare
| tunnel
|
| Front access with Cloudflare Access (ZeroTrust) for free.
|
| Set "can only be accessed by users with email =
| xyz@myuser"
|
| Done.
|
| Now assuming this is the same user email as the one you
| shared photos with, there is a base level of security
| keeping the riffraff away.
|
| Home IP is never exposed either, because it's proxied
| through the cf tunnel.
| navane wrote:
| How safe is that to set up for novice it people? I have a
| pi with pi-hole on it and am thinking about putting immich
| on it but the fact that it exposes itself outside my LAN
| frightens me.
| kristjank wrote:
| I have it set up in a container that I keep updated. Then
| it's reverse proxied by another container which runs
| nginx proxy manager, which keeps the HTTPS encryption
| online. So far, the maintenance has only been checking
| whether a new version has been released and docker
| pulling the images, then restarting the containers.
| Duralias wrote:
| If you are worried about that then I can highly recommend
| https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy
|
| I keep that running on a VPS, but with with proper
| firewalling you could probably run it on the same
| machine.
| bicepjai wrote:
| I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most
| wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my
| partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos)
| had it. In Immich, it's just a flip of a button.
| Bishonen88 wrote:
| Ugreen has it. It has conditional albums in which one can
| setup rules like person, file type, location, anniversary
| and more and share a live album. Or leave all params empty
| and simply mirror the entire library.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > In Immich, it's just a flip of a button.
|
| Flip a switch and then what, are you getting a isolated
| public URL to share? Or you have your infrastructure
| exposed to the internet and the shared URL is pointing to
| your actual server where the data is hosted?
| DrammBA wrote:
| > you have your infrastructure exposed to the internet
| and the shared URL is pointing to your actual server
| where the data is hosted
|
| I think the previous commenter misunderstood your
| question, this is the answer (you can also put it behind
| something like cloudflared tunnels).
|
| Immich is a service like any other running on your
| server, if you want it exposed to the internet you need
| to do it yourself (get a domain, expose the service to
| the internet via your home ip or a tunnel like
| cloudflared, and link that to your domain).
|
| After that, Immich allows you to share public folders
| (anyone with the link can see the album, no auth), or
| private folders (people have to auth with your immich
| server, you either create an account for them since
| you're the admin, or set up oauth with automatic account
| creation).
| cyberax wrote:
| If you want to share with family, you can permanently add
| them as users to your Immich instance. Otherwise, you can
| create a link that they can use.
| euleriancon wrote:
| There are still some features that a miss from Google photos.
| There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an
| album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for
| family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated.
|
| Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google
| Photos.
|
| It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back,
| but it isn't perfect yet.
| WD-42 wrote:
| The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me,
| is that not what you are talking about?
| j_bum wrote:
| It seems like he's saying that he could create an album and
| add a rule saying "add all pictures of John and Jan"
| zeendo wrote:
| Not who you're replying to, but no - this isn't the same.
| You can't share that album with others. Or have others
| collaborate on it.
|
| You _can_ do this with a few scripts and the Immich API -
| but that 's not something the average user will do.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I'm waiting for that first point to. The good news is that
| they just started work on workflows, which should allow for
| that.
| piquadrat wrote:
| That's something that should be possible with the upcoming
| Workflow feature. Some details can be found in the November
| Recap blog post.
|
| https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap
| Liftyee wrote:
| Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face
| recognition and context/object search to be miles better than
| Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally
| bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's
| not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating
| / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos
| with a lot of different people.
|
| Almost all my Google Photos "people" are mix-and-matched
| similar looking faces, so it's borderline useless. Immich
| isn't perfect, but it gives me the control to rerun face
| recognition and reassign faces when I want, even on my
| ancient GTX 1060.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Don't all non-European people look alike?
| euleriancon wrote:
| The main issues I see are immich identifying things like
| statues or paintings as people, and not dealing with people
| (especially kids) aging.
|
| Google photos isn't perfect either but I never saw these
| kind of issues when I was still using it.
| dsvf wrote:
| Immich manages to detect my kids faces much better than
| expected. I only have two years, but it is spot on with
| kid #1 from newborn to 2yo, and it manages to not mix up
| the new baby photos of #2 with the baby photos of #1. In
| my 44k photos there are zero statues face detected, the
| only flukes are a few photos from a restaurant with a
| celebrity picture wall.
| Duralias wrote:
| My google photos doesn't even seem to support facial
| recognition, maybe I turned it off somehow at some point,
| but it doesn't seem like google photos supports manually
| selecting a face (a face that isn't detected), which is
| something I use a ton with Immich, it is very convenient,
| even if a bit tedious if going through a backlog.
|
| Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with
| immich, but that's where digikam helps.
| jredwards wrote:
| I'm actually in the process of building a home NAS server
| primarily for this purpose. Delighted to hear everyone has such
| a good experience.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Other than redundant hosting, what will I get as an Apple user
| by setting this up? It would be very easy to set up, just not
| sure what I'm gaining from it
| big-and-small wrote:
| For once iCloud have a terrible sync speed. Even 500GB of
| photos / videos take forever to sync like a week and I can't
| imagine what it will take for someone with multi-TB archives.
| volemo wrote:
| Yes, but it's a one times occurrence, isn't it?
| big-and-small wrote:
| I'd imagine if you're person who make a lot of photos /
| videos slow sync can be pretty annoying. Unfortunately
| I'm not one of them to tell, but just had to wait like a
| week for the first sync of my wife's iPhone to finish.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| I don't think it would add any value for you. For me, it adds
| value because I only have to turn my head to the left to see
| the computer that contains all my photos since I started
| taking pictures with a smartphone.
| yreg wrote:
| I plan to set up Immich so that I can have a central photo
| storage.
|
| Apple Photos play poorly when you want to put the library on
| an external drive (and even more poorly when you want to put
| it on a networked drive).
| palata wrote:
| Supporting someone who is not TooBigTech is a valid concern,
| IMO.
|
| The selling point for me is that it is NOT TooBigTech. It
| doesn't have to be as good as TooBigTech, but it has to be
| reliable enough. In my case it means that it should be able
| to sync from iOS/Android, in the background, even if the user
| never opens the app, and it should never get out of sync and
| require setting up everything again. Nextcloud fails at that.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Recall the 3-2-1 backup rule. iCloud is an offsite cloud
| copy, your phone is (arguably) a local copy, so you're
| missing one additional local copy.
| halapro wrote:
| Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to
| your server? My guess you're conceding on that part.
|
| How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is
| available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more
| concessions I'm sure.
| vachina wrote:
| I'd gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a
| fee forever for essentially... storing files on drives.
|
| We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can't
| stand putting more storage on client devices.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple
| can't stand putting more storage on client devices.
|
| "because a company that sells you Cloud storage has very
| few incentives to give away more local storage, or
| compress/optimize the files generated by its camera app."
| might be more accurate
| dontlaugh wrote:
| More device storage wouldn't help. I couldn't fit all of my
| pictures on any phone sold today.
| volemo wrote:
| > We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple
| can't stand putting more storage on client devices.
|
| It's not why _I_ use sync services. All my photos fit on my
| devices (more or less). But I want to have seamless access
| to my files from both of my devices. And most importantly
| the sync is my first line of backup, i.e. if my phone gets
| obliterated I don 't loose a day or two of files and
| photos, I only loose a couple of minutes.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my
| server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You
| even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the
| ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are
| on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no
| problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.
| palata wrote:
| That was my selling point for Nextcloud, and it turns out
| it doesn't work reliably. It works most of the time, but
| for backing up photos it's not enough, and when it fails
| it's super annoying (you have to resync EVERYTHING from
| scratch).
|
| People seem very happy about Immich, I'm tempted to try.
| But people seem very about Nextcloud as well, so it's
| difficult to tell.
| esseph wrote:
| Nextcloud is dogshit.
|
| Immich is the best end user focused app I've ever ran in
| a container.
| andrew_eu wrote:
| The sync really is quite good. On wifi it's basically
| seamless. If I had 30k new images though it would be much
| faster to use the immich-go tool mentioned in the blog post.
|
| Offline support is alright, though I haven't worried about
| this much. I think it doesn't do any local deletion, so
| whatever stays in your DCIM folder is still on device.
| palata wrote:
| > The sync really is quite good.
|
| Do you have to ever open the app though? On iOS/Android?
|
| In my case I would need it to run on the phones of my
| family members, and they probably will never open the app.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| iOS doesn't allow that sort of pattern for non-Apple
| applications last time I looked, so probably doesn't work
| on iOS at all.
| palata wrote:
| The Nextcloud iOS app does it. For some reason it
| requires the location permission "all the time" for that,
| presumably as a way to "wake" the app from time to time?
|
| I decided to try Nextcloud exactly because of this. My
| problem with it is more that the whole thing is a bit
| unreliable. Like once in a while the app will get into a
| state where the only way I found to recover is to just
| erase everything and re-sync everything. And the app will
| resend ALL the pictures, even though they are already on
| the server.
|
| And I can't do that with my family members' phones. It
| doesn't matter to me if the app takes a month to sync the
| photos, but it has to require zero maintenance. I can
| deal with the server side, but I need it to "just work"
| on the smartphones.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > The Nextcloud iOS app does it.
|
| Searching for "nextcloud ios background sync" shows a
| whole bunch of forum posts and bug reports about it _not_
| working well unless you have the application open.
|
| One issue (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2225)
| been open since 2022, seems to still be not working
| properly. Another
| (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2497) been open
| since 2023.
|
| For something that works well it seems like a ton of
| people have a lot of issues with it. Are you sure you're
| on the latest iOS version? Seems like people experience
| the issues when they're on a later version.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Background support for non-Apple apps is best-effort at
| best, and explicitly discouraged in the docs. The rate of
| silent push notifications and other background mechanisms
| are intentionally not documented and you're explicitly
| instructed you not to rely on any current behavior. They
| make some exceptions to support money makers like Uber
| and fitness tracking but generally they don't like you
| using anything in the background.
|
| Android is more relaxed but the vendors (like Samsung
| etc) will go around that and implement their own
| aggressive background killing bots. Sometimes, this
| causes alarm apps to stop and not wake you up etc.
|
| The main reason is battery life. Tragically, this makes
| sense due to the cesspool of spam apps that plague their
| "curated" app stores. If you're an app developer who want
| to use it responsibly you're in for a world of trouble. I
| know because I am one of them (well, I consider myself
| responsible at least).
| Jnr wrote:
| The offline sync was a bit problematic in the past but this
| year they finally got it working properly.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Can confirm, they put in a ton of effort to fix it and they
| delivered. Flawless on ios since many versions ago.
| armadyl wrote:
| > Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos
| to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part.
|
| That's my question. I'm sure it works fine on Android but I
| was under the impression that iOS/iPadOS restricts this
| unless the app is running in the foreground.
| realharo wrote:
| Not in every way. Seems it has issues with Ultra HDR
| (https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/23094)
| javier2 wrote:
| For the record, I think Immich is very good, and I use it
| myself. But there is something about the design and performance
| in the mobile app that still makes it feel "not quite there
| yet" on iOS at least.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Are you on the latest version?
| newsoftheday wrote:
| >Self hosting used to mean conceding on something.
|
| Of what I selfhost, I've never felt I was having to concede on
| anything.
| drekipus wrote:
| Immich started the same time and with the same
| backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project.
|
| I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a
| crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of
| the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that
| me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos
| specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we
| can do it in the moment and both have access.
|
| I would probably estimate 90% Of my photos are junk, But I want
| to isolate and share the 10% that are really special.
|
| My app failed, but I'm thinking about reviving it as an
| alternative front-end to immich, to build upon that.. But I feel
| like I'm the only one who wants this. Everyone else seems fine
| with bulk photo backup for everything.
| youainti wrote:
| just disable auto-upload and then manually upload the ones you
| want to. There is a setting to share your immich library with
| someone else. Between those two features, you should get
| something close to what you want.
| drekipus wrote:
| For me one of the killer things would be to click "share" on
| a photo I took, and then have the immich albums show up so I
| can put them in that specific place as like a 3 click
| process. That's basically what I was building my whole app
| around
| omnimus wrote:
| Just have immich app to sync only certain album? And add
| photos to that album. Seems like solved feature?
| DrammBA wrote:
| I don't think he's here looking for a solution.
| foobarian wrote:
| I have a homegrown app too. It's too tinkery for anyone else. I
| throw whole iOS device backups at it so it can pluck out media
| from texts. Then the frontend has an efficient bulk sorting
| workflow with vi keys to navigate a grid of photos and tag with
| a few different tags or delete. I feel like this is not the
| same use case as immich, it's maybe a curation step before
| exporting a refined set of media.
| fsmv wrote:
| I want something with a simpler backend than immich. I don't
| really want to host it because it needs lots of stuff to run. I
| would love one that can do sqlite and is a single binary go (or
| rust) program.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Syncthing?
| mlunar wrote:
| Mine is that: https://photofield.dev/ (but has fewer
| features)
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| You can pick which albums on your phone to upload to Immich.
| You and your wife could have separate users on the server too
| if you want that. I think you can probably share a user
| account, or share albums between users, but the syncing might
| get confusing if you both have an album with the same name. The
| only reason I can think of to not upload everything on your
| phone and try to share one or two albums is that it might get
| hard to search through many pictures, even with the AI.
|
| As for not wanting most of your photos, Immich also includes AI
| search and facial recognition which both work really well. I
| can't remember if it detects near-duplicates, but I thought it
| did. I think you should play around with it before you leap
| into the giant project of making your own app.
| stavros wrote:
| I adore Immich. I set it up a while ago, and I'm finally looking
| at my photos again. I was previously using Nextcloud for photos,
| but it was such a slog to find anything that I never took or
| looked at photos.
|
| Immich put the joy back in photography for me, it's so easy to
| find anything, even with just searching with natural language.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| Yeah I started with memories for nextcloud. But it was
| buggy/slow unfortunately.
|
| Being able to scroll to dates with immich is golden. And the
| facial recognition is on device and works great.
| esperent wrote:
| I don't have that experience with Nextcloud Memories.
|
| Everything works well and it's comparably fast with Google
| Photos for me, and scrolling to specific dates works fine.
|
| How long ago did you try it? I've only been using it for a
| few months so maybe it's improved over time.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| I do that with DayOne and curation, but obviously this means I
| keep only 2/3 pictures per event, but most of the time that's
| enough (and even better, since I choose the ones I prefer and
| keep those)
| oliyoung wrote:
| Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google &
| Apple Photos, it's simply that simple
| vvpan wrote:
| Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost
| and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's
| used.
| AnonC wrote:
| Not GP. My guess is that they're self hosting this _at home_
| (not on a server that's on the internet), and Tailscale
| easily and securely allows them to access this when they're
| elsewhere.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Even if you are self hosting in the cloud or on a rented
| box, Tailscale is still really nice from a security
| perspective. No need to expose anything to the internet,
| and you can easily mix and match remotely hosted and home
| servers since they all are on the same Tailnet.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I host at home and can access the things at home just fine
| by having the server as DMZ in the router, or whatever it
| is called these days. This doesn't really answer what
| Tailscale does more than port forwarding. If it punches
| NAT, that sounds like it actually makes you rely on a third
| party to host your STUN, i.e. you're not self hosting the
| Tailscale server?
| digitalDM wrote:
| In my words, I use Tailscale at home but not for this (yet).
| Tailscale is a simple mesh network that joins my home
| computers and phones while on separate networks. Like a VPN,
| but only the phone to PC traffic flows on that virtual
| private network.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Tailscale gives me access to my home network when I'm not at
| home. I can be on a train, in another country even, and watch
| shows streamed off the Raspberry Pi in my home office.
| lucb1e wrote:
| That's called a VPN
|
| Is this like "Band-Aid" that used to be a brand name but
| now people just use it generically?
| dawnerd wrote:
| Tailscale can give you domains + ssl for local services with
| basically no effort.
| UltraSane wrote:
| With tailscale on your server and endpoints you can access
| the server from anywhere without even having to open any
| ports. It is like magic.
| lucb1e wrote:
| If you don't open ports, how can it reach your internal
| services to allow you access to them?
| UltraSane wrote:
| by using a wireguard tunnel and NAT traversal
|
| https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Tailscale routes my mobile device dns through my pile back at
| the home. I have nginx setup with easy to remember domains
| (photos.my domain.com) that work when i'm away as well
| without exposing anything to the open internet.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Why not call it VPN if that's what it is? In your case, it
| sounds like configuring your "pile" (is that a DNS server,
| short for pihole maybe?) on your phone would do the same
| thing, but if the goal is to not expose anything to the
| open internet, a VPN would be the thing that does that
| turtlebits wrote:
| I want to love Tailscale on mobile, but it conflicts with
| Adguard and regularly disconnects.
|
| I keep Tailscale but switched over to Pangolin for access most
| of my self-hosted services.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Any reason you didn't just set tailscale DNS to ad guard? I
| have set it to controlD
| omnimus wrote:
| With pangolin you are exposing it otside your private network
| right? Its public website. That might be undesireable for
| security.
| nightski wrote:
| I don't get the appeal of Tailscale for simple homelab use. I
| have OpenVPN and it's trivial. Hit the toggle and I'm
| connected, no fuss.
| robcohen wrote:
| Tailscale uses wireguard, which is better in a lot of ways
| compared to OpenVPN. It's far more flexible, secure,
| configurable and efficient. That said, you probably won't
| notice a significant difference
| UltraSane wrote:
| Tailscale is much more reliable in my experience. OpenVPN
| isn't very reliable in my experience as a network admin. And
| IPsec is an abomination.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Tailscale (and similar services) is an abstraction on top of
| Wireguard. This gives you a few benefits:
|
| 1. You get a mesh network out of the box without having to
| keep track of Wireguard peers. It saves a bunch of work once
| you're beyond the ~5 node range.
|
| 2. You can quickly share access to your network with others -
| think family & friends.
|
| 3. You have the ability to easily define fine grained
| connectivity policies. For example, machines in the
| "untrusted" group cannot reach machines in the "trusted"
| group.
|
| 4. It "just works". No need to worry about NAT or port
| forwarding, especially when dealing with devices in your home
| network.
| andrew_eu wrote:
| Also it has a very rich ACL system. The Immich node can be
| locked out from accessing any other node in the network,
| but other nodes can be allowed to access it.
| Jnr wrote:
| OpenVPN is far from "no fuss", especially when compared to
| Tailscale.
|
| I like to self host things so I also self host Headscale
| (private tailnet) and private derp proxy nodes (it is like
| TURN). Since derp uses https and can run on 443 using SNI I
| get access to my network also at hotels and other shady
| places where most of the UDP and TCP traffic is blocked.
|
| Tailscale ACL is also great and requires more work to achieve
| the same result using OpenVPN.
|
| And Tailscale creates a wireguard mesh which is great since
| not everything goes through the central server.
|
| You should give it a try.
| sva_ wrote:
| Why not just use wireguard directly? The configuration is
| fairly trivial
| palata wrote:
| With Tailscale you don't have to learn anything, you just
| install apps and click.
|
| One value of Tailscale for a ton of simple use-cases is
| that people don't have time / don't want to learn.
| Jnr wrote:
| Wireguard is great, I have personally donated to it and
| have used Wireguard for years before it became stable.
| And I still use it on devices (routers) where Tailscale
| is not supported. But as Jason stated - it is quite basic
| and is supposed to be used in other tools and this is
| what we are seeing with solutions like Tailscale.
|
| Tailscale makes it simple for the user - no need to set
| up and maintain complex configurations, just install it,
| sign in with your SSO and it does everything for you.
| Amazing!
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Even more trivial with Tailscale, so why wouldn't I use
| Tailscale to configure wireguard for me?
| oulipo2 wrote:
| I'm using it with Dokploy, which takes care of Docker+Tailscale
| for me, it's quite convenient
| mijoharas wrote:
| So, I wanted to use tailscale for a few local services in my
| home, but I run a few of them on the same device, and have a
| simple reverse proxy that switches based on hostname.
|
| Afaict I can't use a tailnet address to talk to that (or is it
| magic dns I'm thinking about? it was a while since I dug in). I
| suppose I could have a different device be an exit node on my
| internal network, but at that point I figure I may as well just
| keep using my wireguard vpn into my home network. I'm not sure
| if tailscale wins me anything.
|
| Do other people have a solution for this? (I definitely don't
| want to use tailscale funnel or anything. I still want all this
| traffic to be restricted like a vpn.)
| hjaveed wrote:
| this is super cool.
| websiteapi wrote:
| immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more
| than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't
| want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly,
| just because certain things I want to do are just not possible
| with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for
| that eventually too tho.
|
| I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a
| family is way cheaper than the equivalent s3 storage assuming
| frequent access, even assuming a 50% discount. so that's nice.
| darknavi wrote:
| One option is use immich just to browse photos. I back my
| photos up to various places, one of which is my NAS. You can
| set up immich to browse but not modify photos so you can still
| use it as a "front end".
| utopiah wrote:
| > because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365
|
| Yes I don't recommend doing that. My experience is that people
| understand you are human because they know you. They don't
| expect 9 9s availability but if they somehow do that can be
| clarified from the start : "I'm hosting this free of charge for
| family members because (insert your reasons here, it's
| important to clarify WHY it's different because Apple and
| BigTech in general somehow still have a ton of goodwill) but as
| you know as also have a job and our family life. Consequently
| sometimes, e.g. electricity outage or me having to update the
| server, there will be down time. Do no panic when this happens
| as the files are always safe (backup details if you want) but
| please do be patient. Typically it might take (insert your
| realistic expectation, do NOT be too optimistic) a day per
| month for updates. If you do have better solutions please do
| contribute."
|
| ... or something of the kind. I've been doing that for years
| and people are surprisingly understanding. IMHO it stems from
| the why.
|
| The "way cheaper than the equivalent" argument reminds me of,
| and apologies I know it's a bit rough, Russian foreign minister
| days ago who criticize the EU for its plan to decouple with
| their oil & gas saying something like "Well if they do that
| they will pay a lot more elsewhere" and he's right. The point
| isn't the money though, the point is agency and sovereignty.
| krick wrote:
| I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if
| somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it
| actually a _backup_ app (and if so, is it really much different
| from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does
| it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and
| search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are
| somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just
| auto-managed cache, where everything you didn 't access in the
| last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional
| data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before
| photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because
| I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it
| itself, and if all the data is fully portable.
|
| FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely
| understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe
| I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of
| files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into
| subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-
| maker.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Key features that matter to me: 1) backup from android or iOS.
| This helps when I have switched phones over the years. 2)
| shared albums with family or friends where invited people can
| both see and contribute photos. Think kids albums, weddings,
| holidays. 3) ability to re-download at full resolution
| lucb1e wrote:
| 1) You don't have backups of other data on your phone (chat
| history, 2FA secrets and private keys, text notes, anki
| cards, game progress, configuration of all apps, etc.)? I had
| assumed everyone who cares about their data has backups of
| their data anyway, so that's not really a selling point to
| install another app for
|
| 2) that's nice!
|
| 3) "it doesn't throw my data away" is the last selling
| point?! Isn't that just assumed?!
| killingtime74 wrote:
| 1) I do have separate backups, as well as this, which runs
| more frequently (after picture is taken) vs daily for
| device backup
|
| 3) not compared to iCloud photos which I migrated from. You
| can export a whole album with Google at original quality
| with 1 click. With Apple you can only do 1000 at a time.
| For apple you can ask for a whole account export, but that
| takes a few days and gives you all photos. (Similar to
| Google Takeout).
| fsmv wrote:
| It auto uploads all your photos to the cloud and you can delete
| them locally and still have them. The biggest feature is the AI
| search, you can type anything and it will find your pictures
| without you doing any work categorizing them. It can do objects
| or backgrounds or colors and it can even do faces so you can
| search by people's name. That and there's share links to albums
| and multiplayer albums.
|
| It keeps the originals locally when it uploads forever unless
| you delete them. There's a one click "free up space on this
| device" button to delete the local files. It's actually
| somewhat annoying to export in bulk, you pretty much have to
| use takeout.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| It's annoying to export in bulk because you have to use the
| bulk export tool?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Yes. Google's Takeout took is pretty bad, UX-wise.
| cyberax wrote:
| You can back up to Immich using various methods, including dumb
| file copy into a dropbox folder. For a while, I was using
| PhotoSync that uploaded photos to my NAS with Immich using
| WebDAV.
|
| Immich also has an app that can upload photos to your server
| automatically. You can store them there indefinitely. There are
| galleries, timelines, maps for geotagged photos, etc.
|
| The app also allows you to browse your galleries from your
| phone, without downloading full-resolution pictures. It's
| wickedly fast, especially in your home network.
|
| > Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras
| add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle
| photospheres well, etc?
|
| It preserves the information from sidecar files and the
| original RAW files. The RAW processing is a bit limited right
| now, and it doesn't support HDR properly. However, the
| information is not lost and once they polish the HDR support,
| you'll just need to regenerate the miniatures.
| fy20 wrote:
| For nearly a decade I've been using Google Photos with a love-
| hate relationship. I've tried a few alternative photo apps,
| even tried building one myself as a side side side side
| project, but nothing really felt like it could replace how I
| use Google Photos (haven't tried in the past couple of years
| mind).
|
| I have a daughter, and my family lives in another country, so I
| want to be able to share photos with them. These are the
| feaures I need:
|
| - Sharing albums with people (read only). It sounds pretty
| simply, but even Google fucked it up somehow. I added family
| members by their Google account to the album, and somehow later
| I saw someone I didn't know was part of the album. Apparently
| adding people gives (or did?) them permission to share the
| album with other people which is weird. I want to be able to
| control exactly who sees the photos, and not allow them to
| share or download them with others. On the topic of features, I
| should note that zero of the other social features (comments /
| reactions) have ever been used.
|
| - Shared album with my spouse (write). I take photos of the
| kid, she takes photos of the kid. We want to be able to both
| add our photos to the shared album.
|
| - Automatic albums or grouping by faces. Being able to quickly
| see all the photos of our kid is really great, especially if it
| works with the other sharing features. On Google you could
| setup Live Albums that did this... (automatic add and share
| between multiple people) but I can't see the option anymore on
| Android. I feel it could be a bit simpler though, just tagging
| a specific face, so that all photos should be shared within my
| Google One Family.
|
| - The way we use it is we have a shared album between us or all
| the photos, and then a curared album shared with family members
| of the best photos.
|
| Other than that I just use it as a place to dump photos
| (automatically backed up from my phone) and search if needed.
| Ironically the search is not very good, but usually I can
| remember when the photo I need was taken roughly so can scroll
| through the timeline. In total my spouse and I have ~200GB of
| media on Google Photos, some of it is backed up elsewhere.
| palata wrote:
| What about automatic background sync without ever having to
| open the app on mobile? Does that work or do you have to open
| the app regularly for it to sync properly?
|
| This doesn't work properly on Nextcloud (it sometimes gets
| out of sync and then I'm screwed because I have to reset the
| app on my family member's phone and have them resync for
| hours).
| behnamoh wrote:
| Wouldn't recommend. When I wanted to move from Google Photos to
| iCloud, there was no way to simply get all my photos. I had to
| use a JS script that would keep scrolling the page and download
| photos one by one.
|
| Lesson learnt.
| Hardwired8976 wrote:
| Google Takeout?
| anon7000 wrote:
| It technically gives you the data, but it's not in a format
| that's very easy to use
| wrxd wrote:
| These days there is Data Transfer Project that supports
| transferring pictures from Google Photos to iCloud and the
| other way around.
| https://portmap.dtinit.org/articles/photos7.md/
| Groxx wrote:
| I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment,
| because I'm honestly that impressed.
|
| The project as a whole feels _competent_.
|
| Stuff that should be fast _is_ fast. E.g. upload a few tens of
| thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for
| indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in
| the scroll bar - odds are very good that it 'll have the
| thumbnails fully rendered in like a quarter of a second, and
| fuzzy ones practically instantly. It's _transparently_ fast.
|
| And the image folder structure is very nearly your full data,
| with metadata files along side the images, so 99% backups and
| "immich is gone, now what" failure modes are quite easy. And if
| you change the organization, _it 'll restructure the whole folder
| for you_ to match the new setup, quietly and correctly.
|
| Image content searching is not perfect (is it ever?), but I can
| turn it on in a couple clicks, search for _the breed of my dog_ ,
| and get _hundreds_ of correct matches before the first mistake.
| That 's _more_ than good enough to be useful, and dramatically
| better than anything self-hosted that I 've tried before, and
| didn't take an hour of reading to enable.
|
| It's "this is like actually decent" levels that I haven't seen
| much in self-hosted stuff. Usually it's kinda janky but still
| technically functional in some core areas, or abysmally slow and
| weird like nextcloud, but nope. Just solid all around. Highly
| recommended.
| ku1ik wrote:
| This 100x.
| palata wrote:
| How does the mobile syncing work?
|
| Really looking for a system where I can install the app on my
| parents' iPhones and it backs up their photos to my server
| without them having to even know about the app. They won't open
| it, ever.
|
| Nextcloud fails at that.
| Groxx wrote:
| It's pretty easy to set it up to upload automatically, if
| that's the question. No need to launch it. I've only got my
| server on my home network so I can't sync while away, and I
| occasionally check to make sure it's working - no problems at
| all yet, a few months in.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > the image folder structure is very nearly your full data,
| with metadata files along side the images
|
| Wait, other comments were saying that one of Immich's weak
| points is backups. Someone else replied that the postgres
| structure is sane so you can run sql queries to get your data
| out if needed. Now you're saying it's plain old files. I'm
| confused
| Groxx wrote:
| Some minor data is in postgres, but to test it I just fed it
| a previous install's library folder (images and metadata
| files). Worked fine, restored all my albums and tags, though
| perhaps not "people" iirc. And not e.g. ML image content
| search, of course, you need to re-generate that. And the
| metadata files were more than obvious enough to satisfy my "I
| can do this by hand if I really need to" bar, and recreating
| the accounts by hand is trivial.
|
| The main "weak point" is probably that it doesn't have S3
| integration, which is entirely fair. But for my purposes,
| rcloning the library folder (or e.g. rsync to a btrfs for
| free deduplication if you reorganize) is more than good
| enough, _because_ that folder provides enough data for it to
| restore everything I care about.
|
| For DB backups for keeping _everything_ , there are
| configurable auto-backups, but it's only a snapshot to a
| local filesystem. So you'd need to mirror that out somehow,
| but syncthing/rclone/etc exist and there are plenty of
| options.
| azuanrb wrote:
| I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience
| was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker
| and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow.
| Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while
| Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to
| Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future.
|
| I started looking for alternatives after Synology became more
| restrictive with their hardware. I'm curious if anyone else has
| had a similar experience.
| Bishonen88 wrote:
| Long time synology user. Switched 3 weeks ago to ugreen. They
| rolled back their fiasco decision about drives (synology), but
| I wanted some good hardware in 2025. Everything that synology
| offers is outdated and slow.
|
| Got myself a 6800 pro. It chewed through 98k photos, many of
| which are raw, within 24h AFAIK. Then came face recognition,
| text recognition etc. Within 2-3 days all was done.
|
| The performance is night and day. Photos and movies load
| instantly. Finally can watch home movies on my TV without
| stuttering (4k footage straight from a nikon).
|
| The photos app is similar to the synology one. Face recognition
| was better for me. Have compared the amount of photos tagged to
| a few people and ugreen found 15% more. Have seen photos of my
| grandma which I didn't see for years!
|
| There's much more positive i could say. For the negatives: no
| native drive app (nextcloud which supposedly was an alternative
| doesn't sync folders on android), no native security cam app.
|
| I am running now 10 docker containers without a sweat. My
| ds920+ was so slow, that I gave up on docker entirely after a
| few attempts.
|
| The photos app has some nice features which synology didn't
| have. Conditional albums. Baby albums.
| Jnr wrote:
| My guess would be that Synology is an expensive but weak
| computer, bare minimum for NAS.
|
| Immich does require some CPU and also GPU for video transcoding
| and vector search embedding generation.
|
| I had Immich (and many other containers) running successfully
| on AMD Ryzen 2400G for years. And recently I upgraded to 5700G
| since it was a cheap upgrade.
| esseph wrote:
| I think running it on Synology may be a lot of your problem
| there
| prh8 wrote:
| This is great timing, I'm just setting up a homelab and planning
| to run Immich on a mini PC server connected to a NAS. I did find
| icloudpd, which seems like a pretty reliable syncing tool for
| people in Apple ecosystem. https://github.com/icloud-photos-
| downloader/icloud_photos_do...
| para_parolu wrote:
| I just sync from my mac and iphone to immich. Works well
| palata wrote:
| On iOS, does it keep syncing if you "swipe away" the app and
| never open it for e.g. a couple months?
|
| I really would like something like this.
| volemo wrote:
| As far as I understand iOS's behaviour, there's no way to
| do what you're asking unless you're Apple Inc.
| palata wrote:
| The Nextcloud app kind of does it, it seems. The fact
| that it stops working seems unrelated: starting the app
| doesn't make it recover, so it just seems buggy.
|
| Nextcloud uses the location permission for some reason,
| presumably to wake up the app in the background once in a
| while? At least it can be closed (and "swiped away") for
| 2 months and keep syncing. Until it breaks and stops
| working entirely.
| volemo wrote:
| That's surprising to hear! I'd love to know how they
| managed it. (I'm not willing to familiarise myself with
| the codebase, of course.)
| skittleson wrote:
| One thing I really like is the performance... its smooth and
| fluid. The api is really useful as well: I wrote a small job to
| auto add descriptions and tags to the images.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Anyone used https://lycheeorg.dev for a comparison?
|
| I'm curious to know which one would suit me best.
| rbren wrote:
| I use lychee. It's been great. Uploads could be a bit rough a
| few versions back but they've been seamless for a while
| wiether wrote:
| > Albums within albums
|
| I didn't knew about Lychee previous to your comment, but given
| that they support what should be a basic feature of photo
| management software (unlike Immich), I'll give it a try
|
| Thanks for the suggestion!
| subhajeet2107 wrote:
| I use ente which is also the same, a bit tricky to setup but the
| app looks great
| prism56 wrote:
| Not self hosted. But I pay for ente for me and my family.
| Covers 5 of us for PS10 a month. Not the cheapest but ente
| works amazing.
| sylens wrote:
| You can self host it. It used to be a fairly complicated
| procedure but I think they simplified it recently, but I
| haven't tried it again since then
| prism56 wrote:
| Yeah i'm not fully opposed to the self host option, I self
| host quite a few services. However in this case i'm a bit
| nervous being in charge of families photos and their
| backups. This way, even if they don't backup. Ente has a
| pretty robust duplication strategy.
| tuxtimo wrote:
| The only thing that's really missing is a feature on the mobile
| app to delete local copies of uploaded assets ... Something like
| Google Photos "Free up space" feature.
| CountGeek wrote:
| It has that. Select the media you want to delete, tap & hold,
| then scroll to the right in the menu and select Delete from
| device. At least on Android this is the way.
| trizic wrote:
| There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter
| of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration
| file. I find this really powerful and simpler than docker and
| docker-compose. But don't get me wrong, I am all for
| containerization when it comes to other OS/distros. Yes, there is
| a learning curve for the Nix language and creating your own
| packages. But anyone who can install a distro can install NixOS.
| Instead of running your apt/dnf/pacman commands, you edit a file
| with your package names and services you want to enable, and run
| `nixos-rebuild switch`. Though, you might find standalone
| binaries such as uv and its portable Python bundles don't work
| out the box, there is a a few lines configuration to get it
| working. Having a single language for configuring all
| services/applications (neovim,nginx,syncthing,systemd, etc) is
| refreshing. And of course combined with generative AI, you can
| set up a lot quickly.
|
| Immich is one of the only apps on iOS that properly does
| background sync. There is also PhotoSync which is notable for
| working properly with background sync. I'll take a wild guess
| that Ente may have got this working right too (at least I'd
| hope). This works around the limitation that iOS apps can't
| really run as background apps (appears to me that the app can
| wake up on some interval, run/sync for a little and try again on
| the next interval). This is much more usable then for example,
| the Synology apps for photo sync, which is, the last time I
| tried, for some reason insanely slow and the phone needs to have
| the app open and screen on for it fully sync.
|
| Some issues I ran into is the Immich iOS app updating and then
| being incompatible with the older version of the server installed
| on my machine. You'd have to disable app updates for all apps, as
| iOS doesn't support disabling updates for individual apps.
|
| In my specific scenario, the latest version of Immich for NixOS
| didn't perform a certain migration for my older version of
| Immich. I had to track down the specific commit that contained
| the version of Immich which had the migration, apply that, then I
| was able to get back to the latest version. Luckily, even though
| I probably applied a few versions before getting the right one,
| it didn't corrupt the Immich install.
| behnamoh wrote:
| But what's the performance of NixOS compared to other distros?
| Also, I imagine CUDA installation is not as simple as changing
| a few lines of config file?
| edoloughlin wrote:
| https://nixos.wiki/wiki/CUDA
|
| It's not too bad. As others have said, AI makes it easy to
| get right.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| It's confusing, but bear in mind that nixos.wiki is an
| unofficial wiki, the official one is at:
| https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/CUDA
| kalaksi wrote:
| I'm running NixOS on some of my hosts, but I still don't fully
| commit to configuring everything with nix, just the base
| system, and I prefer docker-compose for the actual services. I
| do it similarly with Debian hosts using cloud-init (nix is a
| lot better, though).
|
| The reason is that I want to keep the services in a
| portable/distro-agnostic format and decoupled from the base
| system, so I'm not tied too much to a single distro and can
| manage them separately.
| quag wrote:
| How do you update the software in the containers when new
| versions come out or vulnerabilities are actively being
| exploited?
|
| My understanding is that when using containers updating is an
| ordeal and you avoid the need my never exposing the services
| to the internet.
| wwarek wrote:
| > How do you update the software in the containers when new
| versions come out or vulnerabilities are actively being
| exploited?
|
| You build new image with updated/patched versions of
| packages and then replace your vulnerable container with a
| new one, created from new image
| teekert wrote:
| Am I the only one surprised that this is a serious
| discussion in 2025?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Perhaps. There are many people, even in the IT industry,
| that don't deal with containers at all; think about the
| Windows apps, games, embedded stuff, etc. Containers are
| a niche in the grand scheme of things, not the vast
| majority like some people assume.
| teekert wrote:
| Really? I'm a biologist, just do some self hosting as a
| hobby, and need a lot of FOSS software for work. I have
| experienced containers as nothing other than pervasive. I
| guess my surprise is just stemming from the fact that I,
| a non CS person even knows containers and see them as
| almost unavoidable. But what you say sounds logical.
| fwip wrote:
| Self-hosting and bioinformatics are both great use cases
| for containers, because you want "just let me run this
| software somebody else wrote," without caring what
| language it's in, or looking for rpms, etc etc.
|
| If you're e.g: a Java shop, your company already has a
| deployment strategy for everything you write, so there's
| not as much pressure to deploy arbitrary things into
| production.
| senbrow wrote:
| The world is too complex, and life paths too varied, to
| reliably assume "everyone" in a community or group knows
| about some fact.
|
| You're usually deep within a social bubble of some sort
| if you find yourself assuming otherwise.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I'm a career IT guy who supports biz in my metro area.
| I've never used docker nor run into it with any of my
| customers vendors. My current clients are Windows shops
| across med, pharma, web retail and brick/mortar retail.
| Virtualization here is hyper-v.
|
| And it this isn't a non-FOSS world. BSD powers firewalls
| and NAS. About a third of the VMs under my care are *nix.
|
| And as curious as some might be at the lack of dockerism
| in my world, I'm equally confounded at the lack of
| compartmentalization in their browsing - using just one
| browser and that one w/o containers. Why on Earth do
| folks at this technical level let their internet
| instances constantly sniff at each other?
|
| But we live where we live.
| jbstack wrote:
| I refer you to:
|
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| If you're the one building the image, rebuild with newer
| versions of constituent software and re-create. If you're
| pulling the image from a public repository (or use a
| dynamic tag), bump the version number you're pulling and
| re-create. Several automations exist for both, if you're
| into automatic updates.
|
| To me, that workflow is no more arduous than what one would
| do with apt/rpm - rebuild package & install, or just
| install.
|
| How does one do it on nix? Bump version in a config and
| install? Seems similar
| mixedCase wrote:
| Now do that for 30 services and system config such as
| firewall, routing if you do that, DNS, and so on and so
| forth. Nix is a one stop shop to have everything done
| right, declaratively, and with an easy lock file, unlike
| Docker.
|
| Doing all that with containers is a spaghetti soup of
| custom scripts.
| teekert wrote:
| Your understanding of containers is incorrect!
|
| Containers decouple programs from their state. The
| state/data live outside the container so the container
| itself is disposable and can be discarded and rebuild
| cheaply. Of course there need to be some provisions for
| when the state (ie schema) needs to be updated by the
| containerized software. But that is the same as for non-
| containerized services.
|
| I'm a bit surprised this has to be explained in 2025, what
| field do you work in?
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Your understanding of not-containers is incorrect.
|
| In non-containerized applications, the data & state live
| outside the application, store in files, database, cache,
| s3, etc.
|
| In fact, this is the only way containers can decouple
| programs from state -- if it's already done so by the
| application. But with containers you have the extra steps
| of setting up volumes, virtual networks, and port
| translation.
|
| But I'm not surprised this has to be explained to some
| people in 2025, considering you probably think that a CPU
| is something transmitted by a series of tubes from AWS to
| Vercel that is made obsolete by NVidia NFTs.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It's not that easy.
|
| First I need to monitor all the dependencies inside my
| containers, which is half a Linux distribution in many
| cases.
|
| Then I have to rebuild and mess with all potential issues
| if software builds ...
|
| Yes, in the happy path it is just a "docker build" which
| updates stuff from a Linux distro repo and then builds
| only what is needed, but as soon as the happy path fails
| this can become really tedious really quickly as all
| people write their Dockerfiles differently, handle build
| step differently, use different base Linux distributions,
| ...
|
| I'm a bit surprised this has to be explained in 2025,
| what field do you work in?
| rkomorn wrote:
| It does feel like one of the side effects of containers
| is that now, instead of having to worry about
| dependencies on one host, you have to worry about
| dependencies for the host (because you can't just ignore
| security issues on the host) as well as in every
| container on said host.
|
| So you go from having to worry about one image + N
| services to up-to-N images + N services.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I think you are not too wrong about this.
|
| Just that state _can_ be outside the container, and in
| most cases should. It doesn't have to be outside the
| container. A process running in a container can also
| write files inside the container, in a location not
| covered by any mount or volume. The downside or upside of
| this is, that once you down your container, stuff is
| basically gone, which is why usually the state does live
| outside, like you are saying.
| corn13read2 wrote:
| pull new container, stop old and start new. can also make
| immutable containers.
| halz wrote:
| Ditto on having services expressed in more portable/cross
| distro containers. With NixOS in particular, I've found the
| best of both worlds by using podman quadlets via this flake
| in particular https://github.com/SEIAROTg/quadlet-nix
| Dedime wrote:
| My problem with NixOS is the second you try to go "outside the
| guardrails", the difficulty increases 100x
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Kind of the same for docker? Plopping a docker compose file
| and setting up few environment vars vs writing dockerfiles
| from scratch.
| cromka wrote:
| Not really. No. You can easily checkout repo containing the
| Dockerfile, add a Dockerfile override, change most of the
| stuff while maintaining the original Dockerfile instact and
| the ability to use git to update it. Then you change one
| line in docker-compose.yaml (or override it if it's also
| hosted by the repo) and build the container locally. Can't
| imagine easier way to modify existing docker images, I do
| this a lot with my self-hosted services.
| Ambroisie wrote:
| I'll be honest, that does not sound "easy".
|
| It is straightforward, but so is the NixOS module system,
| and I could describe writing a custom module the same way
| you described custom Docker images.
| maccard wrote:
| If that's not easy I don't know what is.
| Xraider72 wrote:
| This is a familiarity problem. I've never used NixOS and
| all your posts telling me how simple it is sounds like
| super daunting challenges to me versus just updating a
| Dockerfile or a one liner in compose that I am already
| familiar with, I suspect its the inverse for you.
| jerf wrote:
| It isn't the absolutely easiest process.
|
| But it works on Ubuntu, it works on Debian, it works on
| Mac, it works on Windows, it works on a lot of things
| other than a Nix install.
|
| And I have to know Docker for work anyhow. I don't have
| to know Nix for anything else.
|
| You can't win on "it's net easier in Nix" than anywhere
| else, and a lot of us are pretty used to "it's just one
| line" and know _exactly_ what that means when that one
| line isn 't quite what we need or want. Maybe it easier
| after a rather large up-front investment into Nix, but
| I've got dozens of technologies asking me for large up-
| front investments.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| If it wasn't easy, I wouldn't be using it. I'm the
| laziest of programmers or users.
| lilyball wrote:
| Is it? Why? If a NixOS module doesn't support what you need,
| you can just write your own module, and the module system
| lets you disable existing modules if you need to. Doing
| anything custom this way still feels easier than doing it in
| an imperative world.
| maccard wrote:
| > you can just write your own module, and the module system
| lets you disable existing modules if you need to
|
| That sounds about 100x more difficult to me
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I can see your point that it can be daunting to have all
| the pain upfront. When I was using Ubuntu on my servers
| it was super simple to get things running
|
| The problem was when I had to change some obscure .ini
| file in /etc for a dependency to something new I was
| setting up. Three days later I'd realise something
| unrelated had stopped working and then had to figure out
| which change in the last many days caused this
|
| For me this is at least 100x more difficult than writing
| a Nix module, because I'm simply not good at documenting
| my changes in parallel with making them
|
| For others this might not be a problem, so then an
| imperative solution might be the best choice
|
| Having used Nix and NixOS for the past 6-7 years, I
| honestly can't imagine myself using anything than
| declarative configuration again - but again, it's just a
| good fit for me and how my mind works
| onionisafruit wrote:
| In the NixOS scenario you described, what keeps you from
| finding an unrelated thing stopped working three days
| later and having to find what changed?
|
| I'm asking because you spoke to me when you said "because
| I'm simply not good at documenting my changes in parallel
| with making them", and I want to understand if NixOS is
| something I should look into. There are all kinds of
| things like immich that I don't use because I don't want
| the personal tech debt of maintaining them.
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| Not OP, and not a very experienced with NixOS (I just use
| Nix for building containers), but roughly speaking:
|
| * With NixOS, you define the configuration for the entire
| system in one or a couple .nix files that import each
| other.
|
| * You can very easily put these .nix files under version
| control and follow a convention of never leaving the
| system in a state where you have uncommitted changes.
|
| * See the NixOS/infra repo for an example of managing
| multiple machines' configurations in a single repo: https
| ://github.com/NixOS/infra/blob/6fecd0f4442ca78ac2e4102c..
| .
| maccard wrote:
| Both of those things are true of running containers, no?
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I think the sibling answer by oasisaimlessly is really
| good. I'd supplement it by saying that because you can
| have the entire configuration in a git repo, you can see
| what you've changed at what point in time
|
| I'm the beginning I was doing one change, writing that
| change down in some log, then doing another change (this
| I'll mess up in about five minutes)
|
| Now I'm creating a new commit, writing a description for
| it to help myself remember what I'm doing and then
| changing the Nix code. I can then review everything I've
| changed on the system by doing a simple diff. If
| something breaks I can look at my commit history and see
| every change I've ever made
|
| It does still have some overhead in terms of keeping a
| clean commut history. I occasionally get distracted by
| other issues while working and I'll have to split the
| changes into two different commits, but I can do that
| after I've checked everything works, so it becomes a step
| at the end where I can focus fully on it instead of yet
| another thing I need to keep track of mentally
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I just realised I didn't answer the first question about
| what keeps me from discovering the issues earlier
|
| The quick answer is complexity and the amount of energy I
| have, since I'm mostly working on my homelab after a full
| work day
|
| Some things also don't run that often or I don't check up
| on them for some time. Like hardware acceleration for my
| jellyfin instance stopped working at some point because I
| was messing around with OpenCL and I messed up something
| with the Mesa drivers. Didn't discover it until I noticed
| the fans going ham due to the added workload
| maccard wrote:
| > because you can have the entire configuration in a git
| repo, you can see what you've changed at what point in
| time
|
| That's true of docker too.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I'm not really sure what your point is, but I'll try to
| take it in good faith and read it as "why doesn't docker
| solve the problem for it, since you can also keep those
| configurations in a git repo?"
|
| If any kind of apt upgrade or similar command is run in a
| dockerfile, it is no longer reproducible. Because of this
| it's necessary to keep track of which dockerfiles do that
| and keep track of when a build was performed; that's more
| out-of-band logging. With NixOS I will get the exact same
| system configuration if I build the same commit (barring
| some very exotic edge cases)
|
| Besides that, docker still needs to run on a system,
| which must also be maintained, so Docker only partly
| addresses a subset of the issue
|
| If Docker works for you and you're not facing any issues
| with such a setup, then that's great. NixOS is the best
| solution for me
| maccard wrote:
| That's all my point was, yeah. Genuinely no extra snark
| intended.
|
| > it is no longer reproducible
|
| The problem I have with this is that most of the software
| I use isn't reproducible, and reproducible isn't
| something that is the be all and end all to me. If you
| want reproducible then yes nix is the only game in town,
| but if you want strong versioning with source controlled
| configuration, containers are 1000x easier and give you
| 95% of the benefit
|
| > docker still needs to run on a system
|
| This is a fair point but very little of that system
| impacts the app you're running in a container, and if
| you're regularly breaking running containers due to
| poking around in the host, you're likely going to do it
| by running some similar command whether the OS wants you
| to do it or not.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| > if you want strong versioning with source controlled
| configuration, containers are 1000x easier and give you
| 95% of the benefit
|
| For some I'm sure that's the case; it wasn't in my case.
|
| I ran docker for several years before. First docker-
| compose, then docker swarm, finally Nomad.
|
| Getting things running is pretty fast, but handling
| volumes, backups, upgrades of anything in the stack (OS,
| scheduler, containers, etc) broke something almost every
| time - doing an update to a new release of Ubuntu would
| pretty much always require backing up all the volumes and
| local state to external media, wiping the disk,
| installing the new version, and restoring from the backup
|
| That's not to talk about getting things running after an
| issue. Because a lot of configuration can't be done
| through docker envs, it has to be done through the
| service. As a consequence that config is now state
|
| I had an nvme fail on me six months ago. Recovering was
| as simple as swapping the drive, booting the install
| media, install the OS, and transfering the most recent
| backup before rebooting
|
| Took about 1.5 hours and everything was back up and
| running without any issues
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I've written a dozen flakes because I want some niche
| behavior that the home-manager impl didn't give me, and I
| just used an LLM and never opened Nix docs once.
|
| It's just declarative configuration, so you also get a
| much better deliverable at the end than running terminal
| commands in Arch Linux, and it ends up being less work.
| jbstack wrote:
| "Just" write your own module?
|
| Have you seen how bad the Nix documentation is and how
| challenging Nix (the language) is? Not to mention that you
| have to learn Yet Another Language just for this corner
| case, which you will not use for anything else. At least
| Guix uses a lisp variant so that some of the skills you
| gain are transferable (e.g. to Emacs, or even to a GP
| language like Common Lisp or Racket).
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of Nix and the way
| it handles dependency management and declarative
| configuration. But I don't think we can pretend that it's
| easy.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| I've never seen nix, but I'd rather learn "yet another
| language" than fight yet another yaml syntax.
| pirates wrote:
| That time would be better spent just learning YAML, since
| you'll encounter it in a hell of a lot more places than
| Nix
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| The documentation is not great (especially since it tends
| to document nix-the-language and not the conventions
| actually used in Nixpkgs), but there are very few
| languages on earth with more examples of modules than
| Nix.
| jbstack wrote:
| Examples don't help if you can't understand them.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a
| matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a
| configuration file.
|
| Assuming someone has added it to NixOS, yeah. There are plenty
| of platforms even easier than that where you can click
| "install" on "apps" that have already been configured.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > There are plenty of platforms even easier than that where
| you can click "install" on "apps" that have already been
| configured.
|
| Yeah, like TrueNAS, where they've decided it was good entire
| to run Kubernetes on NAS hardware, with all the fun and speed
| that comes with. You just hit "Install", wait five minutes,
| and you get something half-working but integrated with the
| rest of their "product".
|
| I'll stick with configuration I can put in git, patch when
| needed and is easy to come back to after 6 months when you've
| forgotten all about the previous context you had.
| iamtedd wrote:
| Nit: TrueNAS migrated away from Kubernetes in 2024.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Immich was my gateway into NixOS. It did a really good job of
| showing how well it _can_ work. I 'm only a couple of months
| in, so we'll see if it sticks, but I'm also running it on my
| laptop now.
| conradev wrote:
| This is my favorite use of CLI AI coding tools: updating my nix
| config. I can just ask my computer to configure services for
| me!
| fijiaarone wrote:
| I remember when people claimed to use NixOs in order to have
| a deterministic, repeatable setup.
| lillecarl wrote:
| AI generated Nix is equally deterministic and repeatable.
| The deterministic behavior makes Nix well suited for AI
| yolo code, either it evaluates and builds or it doesn't,
| and if the result isn't functional you revert back to the
| previous generation.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| That is the use case for NixOS yes, can you clarify how it
| is no longer deterministic? I have been using it for a few
| months and was not aware of this change
| black_knight wrote:
| Indeed! This morning I needed a service to port forward ssh
| from my server to a firewalled machine, to access stuff while
| I work from a mountain cabin over the next few days. ChatGPT
| gave me a nice nix config snippet, and it just worked! Auto
| reconnecting and everything.
| black_knight wrote:
| I would of course have thrown up a port forward manually
| today, and maybe even spent the time to add a service
| later, but now it was fixed once and "forever" in two
| minutes!
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user
| purge after their developer purge. You just never know who this
| group of people will come after next, especially after they
| started defining "Fascism" as "anyone asking for how they
| define Fascism".
|
| And the jump of getting rid of people you hate who contribute
| to your project and you can do little harm to, to getting rid
| of people you hate who are of no use to you and you can do
| genuine damage to (e.g. by installing a tor exit node) is a
| step down if you think you could get away with it.
| aacid wrote:
| NixOS is open-source, if needed it can be forked anytime and
| continued to work on with new maintainers.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| And flakes make that viable
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user
| purge after their developer purge
|
| ... Why? I don't know what developer purge you're talking
| about, but getting rid of people running a project almost
| never means suddenly they'll start to get rid of users, I'm
| not sure why that assumption is there. Not to mention that
| they couldn't even "purge users" if they wanted to, unless
| they make the download URLs private and start including some
| licensing schema which, come on, hardly is realistic to be
| worried about...
| HauntedDrum wrote:
| Honestly one of the funniest things I've read on HN in a
| while. Would you call yourself anti-anti-fascist?
| slater wrote:
| They're likely just doing the ol' "what opinions, mfer"
| goose meme.
| HNisCIS wrote:
| To provide some opinionated context for this unhinged rant:
|
| The community developing nix had a falling out with a couple
| highly unsavory groups that basically consisted of the Palmer
| Lucky Slaughter Bot Co. and a couple guys who keep trying to
| monetize the project in extremely sleazy ways. This wasn't
| some sort of Stalinistic purge, it was people rejecting
| having their name attached to actual murder and sleazy
| profiteering.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Nix can be easy,but it's not simple.
|
| Obligatory link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
| prmoustache wrote:
| > But anyone who can install a distro can install NixOS.
| Instead of running your apt/dnf/pacman commands, you edit a
| file with your package names and services you want to enable,
| and run `nixos-rebuild switch`.
|
| You can do the same with any configuration manager such as
| puppet, salt or chief.
| mk12 wrote:
| I hope someone will create a Debian package for Immich. I'm
| running a bunch of services and they are all nicely organized
| with user foo, /var/lib/foo, journalctl -u foo, systemctl start
| foo, except for Immich which is the odd one out needing docker
| compose. The nix package shows it can be done but it would
| probably be a fair amount of work to translate to a Debian
| package.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'll try to install in a short-ish while, and look into its
| installation in a detailed manner.
|
| I may try to package it, and if it proves to be easy to
| maintain, I might file an ITP.
| stryan wrote:
| You could try setting it up as a Podman Quadlets, those hook
| into systemd so you can treat them like a normal service.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > There is something to be said about NixOS
|
| OK, I'll stick with Ubuntu + KDE (so Kubuntu really) on all my
| machines.
| windexh8er wrote:
| I've hosted Immich since it came out and all my photos have
| been migrated to it at this point. I would never host Immich on
| NixOS (and I do use it for certain things). The reason? It's
| not simpler than a container option and creates a single point
| of issue. The container option is tested and supported by
| Immich, they recommend it. So everything I need is part of
| that. I moved servers midway through the year and the storage
| for my Immich implementation is NAS hosted and the mount is
| simply exposed to the Immich container. It took me less than 15
| minutes to move Immich. And while that would have likely been
| the same with NixOS it's actually more of a chore to roll back
| with Nix. My Compose file is locked to major/minor and I choose
| when to do upgrades. But rollbacks are actually simpler IMO. I
| just stop the container, tar the operational directory, flip
| the bits in the Compose file and restart. I've not actually had
| an issue with Immich ever while doing it this way and I manage
| about 10TB of photos and videos currently in Immich.
|
| I actually thought about doing this with NixOS last year, but
| it seemed counterproductive compared to how I self-host, I
| don't want to manage configurations in multiple places. If I
| switched everything it would likely be just as much work and
| then I'm reliant on Nix. Over the years I've gone from the OS
| being a mix of Arch and Ubuntu to mostly just Debian for my
| self hosting LXC or VMs. I already have the deployments
| templated so there's nothing for me to do other than map an IP,
| give it a hostname and start it.
|
| To each their own, but I don't want to be beholden to NixOS for
| everything. I like the container abstraction on LXC and VMs and
| it's been very good to minimize the work of self-hosting over
| 40+ services both in my home lab and in the bare metal server I
| lease from Hetzner.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| A few thoughts.
|
| > It's not simpler than a container option and creates a
| single point of issue. The container option is tested and
| supported by Immich, they recommend it. I don't want to be
| beholden to NixOS for everything.
|
| I think there's a misunderstanding here. You aren't beholden
| to NixOS here. You don't have to use nixpkgs nor home-manager
| modules. You can make your own flakes and you can use
| containers, but the benefit is still that you set it up
| declaratively in config.
|
| It's not incompatible with anything you've said, it's just
| cool that it has default configurations for things if you
| aren't opinionated.
|
| > I don't want to manage configurations in multiple places.
|
| I've accumulated one big Nix config that configures across
| all my machines. It's kind of insane that this is possible.
|
| Of course, it would seem complicated looking at the end
| result, but I iterated there over time.
|
| Example: https://github.com/johnae/world -- fully maintained
| by a clanker
| (https://github.com/johnae/world/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed)
| gbil wrote:
| Immich is wonderful in docker setup passing the gpu for ML which
| works pretty good and the amazing new OCR feature does miracles,
| I'm able to find notes that I photographed for this purpose but
| then forgot, I'm able to find memories just by remembering the
| name of the place and searching for it and everything is running
| local!
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've been running Immich on my Kubernetes cluster for a few
| months now. It was one of the harder things to install. I didn't
| use the "official" Helm chart because I didn't like it, instead
| just set it up myself. I use Cloud Native Postgres for DBs so I
| have backups already configured. I had to use a special image
| with vectorchord in it. It auto updates with flux and has been
| fine. The only time it wasn't fine was when I needed to manually
| upgrade vectorchord in the db.
|
| The Android app is good but does quite often fail to open, just
| getting stuck on the splash screen indefinitely. Means I have to
| have another app for viewing photos on my phone.
|
| One of the main reasons I wanted to install it is because my
| partner runs out of space on her iPhone and I don't want to pay
| Apple exorbitant amounts for piffling storage. Unfortunately it
| doesn't quite work for that; I can't find an option to delete
| local copies after upload.
| WilcoKruijer wrote:
| How do people handle backups with Immich? Ideally I'd like all my
| images to be uploaded to object storage if I'm self-hosting.
| andrew_eu wrote:
| I have the main volume for images in a zpool with two SSDs in a
| raid-1 configuration. I also have a daily cronjob that makes an
| encrypted off-site backup with Borg. I've also got
| healthchecks.io jobs setup so that if the zpool becomes
| unhealthy, the backups fail, or anything stops, then both me
| and my partner get alerted.
|
| My partner isn't very technical, but having an Immich server we
| are both invested in has gotten her much more interested in
| self hosting and the skills to do it.
| ProfDreamer wrote:
| I'm using restic to backup the Immich photo directories as well
| as automatically generated Immich database dumps to an external
| drive and a Hetzner Storage Box.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Personally I do a daily sync from the underlying gocryptfs to
| Backblaze B2. It's also on btrfs so I can do snapshots, etc.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Unfortunately Immich doesn't (yet) support object storage
| natively, which IMHO would make things way easier in a lot of
| ways.
|
| You can still mount an object storage bucket to the filesystem,
| but it's not supported officially by Immich and you anyways
| have additional delay caused by the fact that your device
| reaches out to your server, and your server reaches out to the
| bucket.
|
| It would be amazing (and I've been working on that) to have an
| Immich that supports natively S3 and does everything with S3.
|
| This, together with the performance issues of Immich, is what
| pushed me to create immich-go-backend
| (https://github.com/denysvitali/immich-go-backend) - a complete
| rewrite of Immich's backend in Go.
|
| The project is not mature enough yet, but the goal is to reach
| feature parity + native S3 integration.
| sylens wrote:
| I think Ente uses MinIO for storage, I could see them
| supporting the ability to self-host in S3 at some point
| vishnukvmd wrote:
| Hey, you can connect any S3 compliant service to Ente.
|
| Our quickstart.sh[1] bundles Minio, but you can configure
| Ente to use RustFS[2] or Garage[3] instead.
|
| [1]: https://ente.io/help/self-hosting/#quickstart
|
| [2]: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs
|
| [3]: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
| sylens wrote:
| Thanks for the links 0 it's been a while since I looked
| at the self hosting documentation.
| Jnr wrote:
| I create local and remote restic backups (using Backrest). I
| just point to the docker mount points and run database export
| as a pre-hook.
| rraghur wrote:
| Incremental borg backups uploaded to cloud storage... Have a
| cron job and get notified about every backup
| Eikon wrote:
| Shameless plug: https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| My setup has Immich in a Docker container, which is itself in a
| Proxmox LXC container.
|
| I then have Proxmox back it up to Proxmox Backup Server running
| in a VM, and it has a cron job that uploads the whole backup of
| everything to Backblaze B2.
|
| The backup script to B2 is a bit awful at the moment because it
| re-uploads the whole thing every night... I plan on switching
| to something better like Kopia at some point when I'll get the
| time
| konart wrote:
| Something like https://github.com/yandex-cloud/geesefs I'd
| guess.
| cromka wrote:
| Immich is great, but I like Ente more because of the E2E
| encryption. I don't trust that someday my hardware wouldn't get
| stolen and all photos get in possession of someone else.
| andrew_eu wrote:
| Ente looks interesting and worth looking into, thanks for
| mentioning it.
|
| In the context of having a phone stolen, it's possible to at
| least limit the damage and revoke accesses via the Tailscale
| control server. Then the files on device are still vulnerable,
| but not everything in Immich (or whatever other service is
| running).
| lucb1e wrote:
| Why would you need Tailscale for revoking an access token in
| an unrelated service? Just kick the device out of the
| sessions list in Immich, or change your password if that's
| stored directly on the device
| JamesAdir wrote:
| Why not encrypt your server? Or store the photos on an
| encrypted partition?
| volemo wrote:
| I have this dilemma.
|
| > Why not encrypt your server?
|
| I'd like to provide the service to my semi-extended family --
| not just me and my partner, but also my parents and siblings.
| And I respect their privacy, so I want to eliminate even the
| possibility of me, system administrator, accessing their
| photos.
| cromka wrote:
| I specifically care about my server getting stolen. You need
| Luks encryption in place for that, but also some clever
| password automation so you don't type it in each time
| seszett wrote:
| I'm much more worried about the Ente install getting broken for
| some reason and my pictures being locked and lost, than a
| burglar stealing a hard disk in my basement.
|
| That's why I like how Photoprism just uses my files as they are
| without touching them (I think immich can do that as well now,
| but it wasn't so in the past). I can manage the filesystem
| encryption myself if I want to.
| palata wrote:
| I like Ente's E2EE for hosting on a remote server.
|
| In my case I want to host on my personal server at home, so it
| feels actually nicer to not have E2EE. I basically would like
| to have the photos of all my family members on a hard disk that
| they could all access if needed (by plugging it into their
| computer).
| andrew_eu wrote:
| Very nice the author uses tailscale serve! It's an underrated,
| and unfortunately under documented, way to host a web service
| directly to Tailscale. With that you can run a docker compose
| stack with one extra tailscale container, and then it's
| immediately a self contained and reasonably portable web server
| in your tailnet.
|
| Immich really is fantastic software, and their roadmap is
| promising. I hope they have enough funding to keep going.
| jatsakthi wrote:
| learnt a lot from this! Thanks.
| fsh wrote:
| My biggest worry with Immich is how to future-proof the albums.
| With photos sorted into folders, it should be no problem to
| access them in a couple of decades. With Immich, I have to rely
| on the software still working or finding some kind of tool to
| dump the database.
| andrew_eu wrote:
| I share this worry.
|
| You can configure the storage template for the photos and
| include an "album" part, so if a photo is in some album it'll
| get sorted into that folder. Then the file tree on disk is as
| you wish.
|
| I haven't tested what it does when a photo is in multiple
| albums, but it does handle the no album case fine as well.
| anotherpaul wrote:
| Thank you, well put. thats why I am using next cloud and manual
| curation. Folders is the ultimate future proof structure. But I
| do see the value of a nice UI. But immich hides the files from
| me too much for my taste.
|
| Although I am sure I can back them up to my PC somehow. But
| having them just on the server is not my favourite solution.
| riedel wrote:
| I remember that Immich has a mode to not use cryptic hashes but
| folders for storage. When I used it it was somehow deprecated
| due to some problems, but supported. I actually stopped using
| Immich because newer versions run the keep alive via socket.io
| with a Prostgres notify, which does constant empty WAL flushes,
| triggering empty page writes on idle.
| DrammBA wrote:
| Storage template is not deprecated
| https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/
|
| Also according to https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge the
| notify issue was fixed July 2024.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| This was why I was driven to use Photoprism. I use syncthing-
| fork to upload from phones, and a custom made thing to copy
| them to folders (this also works with Cameras that aren't
| phones).
|
| https://www.photoprism.app/
| rpcope1 wrote:
| This is why I still use Piwigo as I don't need to mess with
| file names and structure as far as I have seen.
| M95D wrote:
| I use Single File PHP Gallery. Put the file in root dir of your
| photos and set it executable in web server. That's it. The
| settings are also inside the file, if you need any tweaking.
|
| https://sye.dk/sfpg/
| xiconfjs wrote:
| I have the same concerns and that's why I only use software
| which accept my directory structure as input and isn't messing
| with it. I, for example, added my top directories of my image
| directory structure hand by hand each bit itself as a shared
| directory (read-only) to immich.
|
| The main reason: I don't trust software NOT deleting my photos.
| (Yes, I have an off-site) backup, but the restore would take
| time.
| socksy wrote:
| The database is Postgres, and the schema is quite sensible. You
| can (and I have) write normal SQL queries in psql to modify the
| data.
|
| It might not be as easy as rsync to transfer data out, but I
| would trust it way more than some of the folder based systems
| I've had with local apps that somehow get corrupted/modified
| between their database and the local filesystem. And I don't
| think ext4 is somehow magically more futureproof than Postgres.
| And if no-one else writes an export tool, and you feel unable
| to, your local friendly LLM will happily read the schema and
| write the SQL for you.
| HunOL wrote:
| In the same boat. It seems there is API to export photos, so
| was thinking about some script that will export photos into
| separate folder and use hard links in order not to take more
| space.
| wongarsu wrote:
| At this point you could just point Claude code at the database
| and the image folder and ask it to write a migration script
| warangal wrote:
| I work on an image search engine[0], main idea has been to
| preserve all the original meta-data and directory structure
| while allowing semantic and meta-data search from a single
| interface. All meta-data is stored in a single json file, with
| original Path and filenames, in case ever to create backups.
| Instead of uploading photos to a server, you could host it on a
| cheap VPS with enough space, and instead Index there. (by
| default it a local app). It is an engine though and don't
| provide any Auth or specific features like sharing albums!
|
| [0] https://github.com/eagledot/hachi
| timwis wrote:
| Don't storage templates handle this out of the box? I haven't
| actually checked my instance but that was my impression from
| reading the docs!
| prmoustache wrote:
| As long as it is running on an open source database engine, I
| don't understand the difficulty.
|
| You'll have plenty of time to write your exportation script
| before postgres ever disappear completely of all the bytes
| stored on our planet.
|
| Also, are you saying you don't do backups?
| terminalgravity wrote:
| I use photosync to upload to a folder that is an external
| library for immich. Immich then periodically scans that folder
| to load new assests. I usually use digikam to manipulate that
| folder. Immich is there just for easy remote browsing of those
| files.
| reedlaw wrote:
| Although Immich does backup from your phone, I don't see it as
| a viable backup solution. Git-annex, Unison, and Syncthing are
| much better at keeping files synchronized across devices.
| Immich will create its own copies of photos and transcode
| videos for playback on the web. That may be fine if you have
| enough storage space, but for me it makes the phone backup
| useless. I suppose you could use a git-annex special remote
| directory as an Immich external library.
| dangus wrote:
| This is what I like about Ente. I can pay them to give me an
| e2e encrypted cloud service, and then the desktop app has a
| continuous export feature that will dump everything into a
| plain folder structure on my home NAS automatically.
|
| Ente could go out of business tomorrow and I'd still have all
| my photos, neatly organized into folders.
|
| And I don't have to bother with self-hosting overhead. Or I
| could self host, too, if I wanted. But I still need an off-site
| backup so I might as well pay for the cloud service.
| sylens wrote:
| Have you had any issues with the continuous export writing to
| a network volume? And does it work for all users in a family
| plan? That was my plan as well, but I'd like to only have to
| run one export job
| dangus wrote:
| I can't tell you about family plan since I don't have one.
| I assume you'd have to set this up on a per-user basis.
|
| I haven't had any network volume issues. It's an SMB volume
| provided by trueNAS mounted on a Windows machine.
|
| I will say, if you mess up your volume like the time I took
| my NAS down for maintenance for a few days, the export
| failure wasn't incredibly loud. I don't think it notified
| and screamed at me that it wasn't working. So I guess that
| is a significant risk.
| Jaxan wrote:
| You should print them ;-). But yeah, I'm also old school in
| that I make directories for each album. I used MacOS photos
| before, but it's terrible when you change systems (which
| eventually will happen).
| vekerdyb wrote:
| Surprised that neither the article, nor the comments mention
| Photoprism from what I can see. It's not I've been hosting
| Photoprism and syncing my photos with PhotoSync from my iPhone
| for a while now. I would consider switching to another solution
| if it had in-browser basic editing (cropping, contrast / white
| balance adjustment, etc).
|
| https://www.photoprism.app/
| anotherpaul wrote:
| So am I seeing this right:
|
| Immich, ente and photoprism all compete in a similar space?
|
| Seems immich is the most polished webpage, but which solution
| will become the next cloud for photos is to be seen. Surely
| it's not next cloud anymore, considering the comments here.
| palata wrote:
| > Surely it's not next cloud anymore, considering the
| comments here.
|
| I have been testing Nextcloud for backing up photos from my
| family members' phones. Wouldn't recommend.
|
| The sync on iOS works well for a while, then it stops
| working, then some files are "locked" and error messages
| appear, or it just stops syncing, and the only way I find to
| recover is to essentially restart the sync from scratch. It
| will then reupload EVERYTHING for hours, even though 95%
| images are already on the server.
|
| Note that in my use-case, the user never opens the app. It
| has to work in the background, always, and the user should
| not have to know about it.
| andrejserafim wrote:
| I've switched from photoprism to immich. Immich is a much more
| active project, bugs are fixed, face recognition is an order of
| magnitude better, just an overall more solid experience. If you
| are choosing, I wouldn't doubt for a second to go with immich.
| arendtio wrote:
| Same here. I also have an ente account, but only to check if
| they made relevant progress. So far, I don't understand why
| Ente has so much traction when PhotoPrism has the better
| feature set, in my opinion.
| teekert wrote:
| I also run NixOS (btw) but opted for the container. My Docker
| compose setup has moved from Arch to Ubuntu to NixOS now, so I
| like the flexibility of that setup.
|
| I also use Tailscale, and use cloudflare as nameserver and Caddy
| in front of Immich to get an nice url and https. For DNS
| redirects I use Adguard on the tailnet, but (mostly for family) I
| also set some redirects in my Mikrotik hEX (E50UG). This way
| Immich is reachable from anywhere and not on the internet.
| Unfortunately it looks like the Immich app caches the IP address
| somewhere? Because it always reports as disconnected whenever
| Tailscale turns off when I'm at home or the other way around and
| takes some time/attempts/restarts to get going again. It's been
| pretty flaky that way...
|
| Other than that: Best selfhosted app ever. It has reminded me
| that video > photos, for family moments. Regularly I go back
| through the years for that day, love that feature.
| Ringz wrote:
| Immich struggles to act as a true unifying solution for users
| with large, existing archival collections (DSLRs, scanned film,
| etc.). Since those ,,Archival Assets" are often decades old,
| already organized into complex, user-defined file structures
| (e.g., 1998/DATE_PLACE_PROJECT/PLACE_PROJECT_DATE.jpg), and
| frequently contain incomplete or inconsistent metadata (missing
| dates, no GPS, different file formats).
|
| Immich's current integration solutions (like "External
| Libraries") treat the archive as a read-only view, which leads to
| a fragmented user experience:
|
| - Changes, facial recognition, or tagging remain only within
| Immich's database, failing to write metadata back to the archival
| files in their original directory structure (last time I checked,
| might be better now.
|
| - My established, meaningful directory structure is ignored or
| flattened in the Immich view, forcing the user to rely entirely
| on Immich's internal date/AI-based organization.
|
| My goal (am I the only one?) of having one app view all photos
| while maintaining the integrity and organizational schema of the
| archival files on disk is not yet fully met.
|
| Immich needs a robust, bi-directional import/sync layer that
| respects and enhances existing directory structures, rather than
| just importing files into its own schema.
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is where I'm at, really. I have my own filing hierarchy
| and storage templates can't really deal with it (and I don't
| get why they would be needed when all I want is for it to
| handle an "uploads" directory and re-scan the file tree after I
| file things)
| camillomiller wrote:
| > For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of
| my data for backup purposes and independence.
|
| I know how much Adobe is hated around any creative circle, but
| tbf I find that Lightroom CC does this pretty well. Adobe has a
| well done simple helper app that does just that: downloads the
| entire of your library locally, with all pictures, all edits,
| everything. For backup purposes is perfect. Lightroom might be
| expensive for amateurs, but if you even just do a couple of photo
| jobs per year, it's worth every cent.
| wiether wrote:
| Given how many times I've read praises about Immich here, I tried
| it a few weeks ago and was quite disappointed.
|
| The fact that they don't support sub-albums make it an absolute
| no-go to me.
| flymaipie wrote:
| I prefer Photoview's simplicity over Immich. Immich leans too
| much toward mimicking Google Photos for my taste.
| esperent wrote:
| I would disagree there. I've tried lots of photo managers, and
| for organizing thousands of photos, I think Google Photos has
| it pretty much nailed. When choosing a photo/video manager,
| "works pretty much exactly like Google Photos but without all
| the AI bullshit and privacy issues" is a major selling point
| for me. Ideally it would even have the same shortcuts so that
| my muscle memory still works.
| rodwyersoftware wrote:
| I found the sync clients for iOS to stuck unfortunately, meaning
| I cannot use this.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've had nothing but trouble with Immich. It's a CPU hog if you
| enable any kind of AI/ML (face detection is a notable culprit) or
| when preprocessing even small phone videos, I can't get it to
| import an existing photo tree from a filesystem, and the iOS app
| can't seem to sync reliably...
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-
| hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a
| sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades,
| tons of weird bugs related to syncing.
|
| If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache",
| this is when I am done.
|
| Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to
| share photos - I don't want to host a Google Photos for others.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I was just telling a nonprofit the other day, who in the name
| of "self hosting" was running their business on a 73 plugin
| WordPress site:
|
| Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Integrate the two. Stop self
| hosting. (They're not large enough to do it well; and it
| already caused them a _two week_ outage.)
| skydhash wrote:
| If you need 73 plugins for wordpress, then Wordpress is a
| poor technology choice for your usecase.
| em-bee wrote:
| disagree. as the sister comment mentions, wordpress may have
| been the wrong choice, but self hosting is never wrong,
| especially for a non profit who may not have the resources to
| deal with a situation if a hosting service decides to shut
| them out.
| crote wrote:
| If they don't have the resources to switch to a different
| hosting provider, why do you assume they _will_ have the
| resources to fix things when their self-host solution shits
| the bed?
| wobfan wrote:
| You're comparing apples to oranges.
|
| Switching the ecosystem from something like Shopify to
| some other shop software requires a lot of manual work,
| and some of the stuff won't even be transferable 1:1.
|
| Fixing some issue with your WordPress installation will
| require a person who can _google_ and knows a little
| stuff about webservers, and maybe containers, and will
| usually go pretty fast, as WordPress is open source and
| runs almost half the internet, and almost every problem
| that will come up will have been solved in some
| StackOverflow thread or GitHub issue.
|
| Usually though, if you run WordPress and you're not doing
| a lot of hacky stuff, you will not encounter problems.
| Vendors shutting you down, increasing their pricing, or
| shutting down vital features in their software, happens
| regularly though. And if it happens, shit hits the fan.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Of course it's sometimes the wrong choice. Not everyone
| should self-host their own DNS and other things if their
| needs are already meet.
| wobfan wrote:
| > Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds.
|
| Having seen a lot of companies and startups doinge exactly
| that, more of less everyone regrets it. Either you end up
| with such a lot of traffic through these vendors that you'll
| regret it financially, or you want to change some specific
| part of your page or your purchase process, which Shopify
| doesn't let you change, and you'll end up needing to switch
| or be sad, or, as I regularly have to (because we don't get
| the resources and time to switch): try to manipulate the site
| through some weird hacky Javascript snippets that manipulate
| the DOM after it loaded.
|
| It's literally always the same. They get you running in no
| time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No
| customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and
| just randomly changes without any justification; if you do
| something they don't like they'll just shut you down.
|
| > Stop self hosting.
|
| Worst mantra of the century. Leading to huge dependencies,
| vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging. This is only a
| good idea for a prototype, and only as long as you'll not
| gonna run the prototype indefinitely but will eventually
| replace it. And maybe for one-person-companies who just want
| to get going and don't have resources for this.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Let me empathize but say, to put it bluntly, they do not
| have qualified IT Staff. They have 1 or 2 people who
| understand only basic web server stuff and nothing else.
| Thus the two week outage.
|
| Paying LearnWorlds + Shopify $30K a year, if it were even
| that extreme, is cheaper than an engineer _and certainly
| cheaper_ than an outage over Giving Tuesday, as they found
| out the hard way. They got hacked and were down for the
| most high-traffic nonprofit donor day of the year in their
| effort to save a few bucks. It wasn't even the plugins, but
| the instance underlying the shared hosting.
|
| > It's literally always the same. They get you running in
| no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem:
| No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale
| and just randomly changes without any justification; if you
| do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.
|
| You're also locked into an ecosystem. It's called Stripe or
| PayPal. Almost all of that applies anyway. Don't forget
| that significant amount of customizations are restricted to
| streamline PCI compliance, you can do illegal things very
| easily. Install an analytics script that accidentally
| captures their credit card numbers, and suddenly you're in
| hot water.
|
| > Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins,
| monopolies, price gauging
|
| Have you analyzed how many dependencies are in your self
| hosted projects? What happens to them if maintainers
| retire? How long did it take your self hosted projects to
| resolve the 10/10 CVE in NextJS? And as for price gouging,
| if it's cheaper than an engineer to properly support a
| self-hosted solution, I'll still make that trade as even
| $80K for software is cheaper than $120K to support it. If
| you're at the scale where you don't have a proper engineer
| to manage it, _do not self host_. Business downtime is
| _always_ more expensive than software (in this case, 5
| salaries for 2 weeks to do absolutely nothing + lost
| donations + reputational damage + customer damages, because
| "self hosting is easy and cheaper").
| ptero wrote:
| > Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to
| share photos
|
| That is a totally reasonable view. But others have different
| preferences. I, for example, do not want to share all my photos
| with Google, govvies and anyone else they leak them to.
|
| So I self host, back up and share my files with the family. I
| can always dump what I want to insta, etc. but it is my choice
| what to share, picture by picture, with default "off". And have
| no dark patterns trying to catch a finger accidentally hitting
| a "back up to cloud" for the full album.
|
| That, to me, is a big deal, worth dealing with occasional IT
| hassles for. Which is just a personal preference.
| zenmac wrote:
| >> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household
| to share photos
|
| pixelfed may be what the parent want then. I don't like that
| it is PHP, but as long as they adhere to the ActPub protocal,
| we can roll our own in whatever flavor.
| TurboSkyline wrote:
| Or perhaps Photoview?
| https://github.com/photoview/photoview
| cassiogo wrote:
| Such a weird take. Of course "self hosting" means "self
| hosting".
|
| Sure it could be easier/safer to manage, everything can be
| better.
|
| Over the last couple of years hosting it I had a single issue
| with an upgrade but that was because I simply ignore the
| upgrade instructions and YOLOed the docker compose update.
|
| Again, is it perfect? No. Would I expect a non tech savy user
| to manage their own instance? Again no.
| palata wrote:
| Because it doesn't solve your problem does not mean it solves
| the wrong problem.
| hosteur wrote:
| What? It is literally just start the container and forget. When
| upgrading it is change the version tag and restart the
| container.
|
| Upgrades are frequent but no hassle.
|
| I have been running this for half a year. It might have been
| more work earlier?
|
| My household is using this for our shared photos repository and
| everyone can use it. Even the kids.
|
| There is both direct web access and an iPhone app.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| There is an Android app, too.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Idk maintaining the PG vector extensions has been kind of a
| pain in the ass, at least from an automation perspective
| sva_ wrote:
| I never had to meddle with that
| hosteur wrote:
| Huh? What are you maintaining? The PostgreSQL db and
| extensions are provided in the container image. You do not
| have to use your own external PostgreSQL.
|
| Of course, you may have reasons to do that. But then you
| also own the maintenance.
|
| I have never had to maintain any PG extensions. Whatever
| they put in the image, I just run. And so far it has just
| worked. Upgrades are frequent and nothing has broken on
| upgrade - yet at least
| phito wrote:
| these are all cases of PEBCAK
| mynegation wrote:
| I run Immich for more than two years and there was an upgrade
| to 1.33 I think around spring 2024 that required special
| instructions on editing docker compose file because they
| changed the vector database. I think there was also a
| database migration same year when - if you did not update the
| version regularly - would need to run two step upgrade. They
| provided plenty of documentation always. A while ago sync was
| quite wonky but they improved that a lot lately.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Actually, I've setup a proxmox server last week that run a
| couple of self-hosted application. I've nextcloud running and
| it was fairly easy to setup. The next item on my list WAS
| Immich. I decided against trying to deploy it. The reason is
| simple: they are essentially forcing the use of Docker, which I
| won't touch at at all. Either a native proxmox container (which
| is just lxc) or a proper VM, but I keep those in reserve as
| they can be heavy. I'm not asking of them to create a native
| package for debian or a container image; a simple install
| script that bootstraps the application (checks & install itself
| and dependencies), bootstrap the database and basic config
| (data directory, url & ports, admin password) is more than
| enough. The same script should be use to update the application
| if possible, or provide an updater on the admin panel to update
| the application without manual steps or data migrations.
| Adguard Home does all of this perfectly in my opinion. I know
| Immich thinks they are making things "easier" to just dump
| everything into a docker container, but some of us wont touch
| it at all. Same reason I avoid any projects that heavily relies
| on nodejs/npm ecosystem.
| thanzex wrote:
| I really don't understand this take. A script that installs
| all required dependencies is fine if and only if you are
| dedicating a machine to immich. It probably requires some
| version of node, with possibly hidden dependencies on some
| python, it uses ffmpeg, so all related libraries and
| executables need to be there. You then have a couple separate
| DBs, all communicating together. Let's not talk about
| updates! What if you're skipping versions? Now your "simple
| install script" becomes a fragile behemoth. I would NOT
| consider this if it was non docker-native. Plus, I don't have
| a server with enough resources for a lot of VMs, with all of
| their overhead and complications, just to have one per
| service. Nowadays there are many ways to run a container not
| just the original docker.com software, and you can do that on
| pretty much any platform. Even Android now!
| nullwarp wrote:
| I've never understood it either. I still deploy some things
| into their own respective manual deployments but for lots
| of things having a pre-made docker compose means I can
| throw it on my general app VM and it'll take 5 seconds to
| spin up and auto get HTTPS certs and DNS. Then I don't lose
| hours when I get two days into using something and realize
| it's not for me.
|
| Also have you read some of the setup instructions for some
| of these things? I'd be churning out 1000 lines of ansible
| crap.
|
| Either way since Proxmox 9.1 has added at least initial
| support for docker based containers the whole argument's
| out the window anyway.
| Xraider72 wrote:
| Me neither. Docker is the platform agnostic way to deploy
| stuff and if I maintained software, it is ideal - i can
| ship my environment to your environment. Reproducing that
| yourself will take ages, or alternatively I also need to
| maintain a lot of complex scripts long-term that may
| break in weird ways.
| dexterdog wrote:
| https://community-
| scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=imm...
|
| These things are a proxmox home lab user's lifeline. My
| only complaint is that you have to change your default host
| shell to bash to run them. You only have to do that for the
| initial container creation though.
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| What are some arguments against using docker?
|
| I think it's the best of every world. Self contained, with an
| install script. Can bring up every dependent service needed
| all in one command. Even your example of "a simple script"
| has 5 different expectations.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Couldnt Immich be used by a paid service provider to provide
| Immich google-free photo hosting ?
| hosteur wrote:
| I am pretty sure they already offer that service for a price.
| a022311 wrote:
| > You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle
| that thing.
|
| I totally disagree. You do need a tiny bit of command line
| experience to install and update it (nothing more than using a
| text editor and running `docker compose up`), but that's really
| it. All administration happens from the web UI after that. I've
| been using Immich for at least 2 years and I've never had to
| manually do something other than an update.
|
| > Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to
| share photos - I don't want to host a Google Photos for others.
|
| Honestly, I can't understand what exactly you're expecting. If
| Google Photos suits your needs for sharing photos with others,
| that's great! As for Immich, have you read how it started[0]? I
| think it's solved the problem amazingly well and it still stays
| true to its initial ambitions.
|
| [0]: https://v1.142.1.archive.immich.app/docs/overview/welcome
| sanex wrote:
| I've been waiting what feels like years for immich stable to be
| released for this reason. Luckily it finally happened about a
| month ago. I'm about to go through swapping out the main OS SSD
| on my server. If I'm able to see the immich backups after
| reinstalling TrueNAS I'm going to call it resilient enough for
| me.
| dsvf wrote:
| Not my experience hosting immich for close to two years now.
| There was only one "breaking change" a long time ago where you
| would have to manually change a docker image in the compose
| file, but since then things have been smooth for me.
|
| Immich may not be the pinnacle of all software development, but
| with the alternative being Google photos:
|
| - Uploading too many photos won't clog my email and vice versa
|
| - I'm not afraid of getting locked out of my photo account for
| unclear reasons and being unable to reach anyone to regain
| access
|
| - If I upload family photos from the beach, then my account
| won't get automatically flagged/disabled for whatever
|
| - Backups are trivially easy compared to Google takeout
|
| - The devs are reachable and responsive. Encounter a problem?
| You'll at least reach a human being instead of getting stranded
| with a useless non-support forum
|
| I would instead say that my (and my family's) photos are too
| important to me to pass their hosting on to a company known for
| its arbitrary decisions and then being an impenetrable
| labyrinth if there is an issue.
|
| So you do pay some price, but it is an illusion to think that
| the price of Google photos (be that in cash, your data or your
| effort) is much lower.
|
| Things that did break during this time: - my hacky remote
| filesystem - network connectivity of a too cheap server but
| these were on me and my stinginess.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Every time I go the self hosting route, everything goes
| smoothly for awhile, and then decides to break 6 months down
| the line, and I have to waste a Saturday figuring it all out
| and upgrading things. Not what I want to do with my weekend,
| when I'm already doing software dev and maintenance for work.
| This happens even for super dependable, well written self
| hosted software.
|
| On the other hand, maybe AI can help remove some of that pain
| for me now. Just have Claude figure out what's wrong. (Until it
| decides to hallucinate something, and makes things worse)
| hughes wrote:
| I have to agree. I tried using it for a few months and it left
| me convinced I'll be paying for iCloud photos for the rest of
| my life.
| sylens wrote:
| I've experimented with both Immich and Ente over the last year
| and run Immich in parallel with Google Photos right now for my
| family. Once they add a few more features to support things like
| smart albums, I'll be able to drop Google Photos entirely.
|
| I love that the consumer space is getting this kind of attention.
| It's one of the biggest opportunities for big tech to lock people
| into their ecosystem, as photos are something everyone cherishes.
| You can extort people with ever increasing subscription fees
| because over time they reach a scale with their own photos that
| makes it inconvenient to manage themselves. It's nice to have
| multiple options that are not Google or Apple.
| tgiba wrote:
| I use my Immich instance locally as photos and videos storage for
| 7-8 months now. It's really amazing. Reading comments here I'd
| say it's medium-difficulty tier to set up. I have it on my
| Elitedesk 800 G3 mini, in Docker Compose, with hardware encoding
| and it's more than sufficient to handle this work. Never had a
| bug.
| wobfan wrote:
| I fail to get the problems with self hosting Immich. I mean,
| obviously you gotta have a server ready, and at least some
| knowledge about self hosting and docker. But apart from that,
| installing Immich was like a breeze. It was actually not more
| than pasting some lines into a docker-compose, and running it.
|
| Have been using it for about 1.5 years, and I have not a single
| problem, which is quite incredible for a software that
| basically has all features that Google Photos has.
| Groxx wrote:
| As a counter-anecdote: literally just `docker compose up` on a
| spare laptop for me, and it's working great (though it's only
| available on the local network). There might be stuff to tune
| (e.g. I'm pretty sure it's not using my GPU), but it's almost
| totally unnecessary for just one household of people's use -
| the initial huge google-photos-takeout took an hour or three to
| finish indexing with all the features enabled, but all new
| stuff is done within seconds. The most I've done is to swap the
| actual photo storage to an external drive, which is just a
| "move that folder, custom mapping in the docker command"
| change.
|
| On hardware that doesn't have docker, or is significantly more
| resource constrained somehow: yea, I completely believe it. I
| haven't tried that, but given the features it makes total sense
| that it'd be harder.
| uzername wrote:
| I had immich running great for a while, maybe for months. It
| would seamlessly sync photos from phone to local home server. I
| was going to setup nightly outbound sync too (1 is none, 2 is
| some).
|
| I updated the container for usual appliance maintenance. Entire
| thing is toast. Metadata files can't be read, mounted, permission
| issues and more. It's been four months since.
| majkinetor wrote:
| That is why you should never update stuff that works :)
| Trasmatta wrote:
| This is why I just can't deal with self hosting... I'm already
| burnt out on this kind of stuff in my day job. And something
| like this will ALWAYS happen eventually.
| Groxx wrote:
| > permission issues
|
| as an un-solicited drive-by suggestion: see if they're owned by
| root? you may have sudo'd the original run.
|
| since you're at least a few months behind though, do check for
| breaking changes: https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/discussions?discussions... they've pretty
| consistently had instructions, but you unfortunately mostly
| have to know to look for it. not sure why the upgrade
| notification doesn't make it super incredibly painfully
| obvious.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I honestly thought there was some app - even one from Google -
| that let you just run on your Windows or Mac and downloaded all
| of your Google Photos to your computer.
|
| That's all the author is trying to do. He isn't trying to avoid
| or replace Google Photos - just have a local backup.
|
| Even Apple has a Windows app that does that for iCloud Photos
| konart wrote:
| I personally prefer Photoprism more.
|
| Much more responsive and clear UI, golang backend are two main
| subjective advantages.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| This will be my Christmas project. Thanks, author.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without
| vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best
| features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos
| offer.
|
| Its not perfect but its great to be able to just search for
| things in a photo and find any matches across dozens of TBs of
| raws, without having to have some 3rd party cloud AI nonsense do
| all the work.
|
| The only thing I wish they could get integrated is support for
| jxl compressed raws, which requires them compile libraw with
| adobe's sdk.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also
| without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to
| some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google
| and apple photos offer.
|
| I installed immich in a VM. And the VM is using GPU
| passthrough. I don't see how it's overkill: immich is a kitchen
| sink with hundreds if not thousands of dependencies and hardly
| a month goes by without yet another massive exploit affecting
| package managers.
|
| I'm not saying VM escapes exploit aren't a thing but this
| greatly raises the bar.
|
| When one install a kitchen sink as gigantic as immich, anything
| that can help contain exploits is most welcome.
|
| So: immich in a VM and if you want a GPU, just do GPU
| passthrough.
|
| I agree that the search using facial recognition is nice in
| immich that said.
| qskousen wrote:
| It seems like you are saying the AI features don't work if you
| don't have a GPU, if I understood correctly, but I have my
| install on a server with no GPU and the object search and
| facial recognition features work fine. Probably slower to
| generate the embeddings, but I don't have any comparison to
| make.
| darrmit wrote:
| I have been experimenting with Immich off and on for over a year,
| first in docker-compose and now in podman. It is slick and
| seamless in a lot of ways, but the portability and upgrade
| ability are questionable, as others have highlighted.
|
| For example, when they moved between Postgres container versions,
| it required a manual edit to the compose file to adjust the
| image. Even if you managed to get it set up initially in docker,
| it's these sorts of concepts that are way more advanced than the
| vast majority of people who may even be interested in self-
| hosting.
|
| For a hobbyist self-hoster it's cool and fun, but not something
| at this point I'd trust my photos to alone. I have considered
| Ente for that but today it's still iCloud Photos.
| guluarte wrote:
| that PC is overkill for that
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March
| 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an
| alternative for my existing Google Photos setup._
|
| I didn't even realize this tool existed. I tried something like
| it awhile back, but it didn't work to my satisfaction (I don't
| remember why), so my awful, awful, awful workflow is to use the
| Google Takeout functionality to generate something like 8 .tar.gz
| files (50 gigabytes each), manually download each one (being
| prompted for authentication each time), and then rsyncing them
| over to my local server, and finally uncompressing them.
|
| It's very lovely how much Google doesn't want you to exfiltrate
| your own data.
|
| I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the
| effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably
| involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair
| grows faster than I can shave it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through
| the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will
| probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The
| yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it.
|
| LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo.
|
| After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude
| Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the
| service to Tailscale, and then give me a todo list reminder of
| what I needed to do to mirror my Macbook iCloud/Photo.app
| gallery to it and then see it on my iPhone...
|
| ...than any of the times I've had to work around "black box
| says no", much like your example.
|
| Just a couple years ago, this wasn't the case. I didn't have
| the energy to ssh into my server and remember how things are
| set up and then read a bunch of docs and risk having to go into
| a manual debug loop any time a service breaks. LLM does all
| that. I never even read Nix docs. LLM does that too.
|
| In fact, it was fairly fun to finally get a good cross-platform
| setup working in general to divest from Apple thanks to LLM +
| Nix. I really like where things are going in this regard. I
| don't need any of this crap anymore that I used to use because
| it was the only way to get something that Just Worked.
|
| By the time I lose my software job and have to compete with you
| lot, H1Bs, and teenagers to fold sweaters at Hollister, I won't
| need to use a single bit of proprietary software. It will be a
| huge consolation.
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| LLM managing a NixOS install lol
| zdragnar wrote:
| As critical as I am of LLM use, the nice thing about it
| here is your configs can be version controlled, and rolling
| back changes is pretty painless.
|
| I'd still want to go through any changes with a fine tooth
| comb to look for security issues and to make sure I know
| what it is adding and removing, but it's saner than letting
| an LLM run amok on a live system.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| I would say, Claude is a proprietary software after all, No?
| x0x0 wrote:
| It's extra special awesome how downloading the files regularly
| breaks too.
|
| And how your albums, instead of being metadata, are folders,
| into which files are duplicated. It's literally shittily coded
| malicious compliance so they can pretend to let you have your
| data.
|
| (Oh, you view your folders as important metadata that should be
| attached to a single copy of the image? Cool cool, write a
| bunch of code.)
| lucb1e wrote:
| https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements
|
| > RAM: Minimum 4GB, recommended 6GB
|
| Wow. When factoring in the OS, that's an entire system's worth of
| RAM dedicated to just hosting files!
|
| What does it use all this for? Or is this just for when it
| occasionally (upon uploading new pictures) loads the image
| recognition neural net?
|
| I'd have to stop Immich whenever I want to do some other RAM-
| heavy task. All my other services (including database, several
| web servers with a bunch of web services, a Windows VM, git
| server, email, redis...) + the host OS and any redundancy caused
| by using containers, use 4.6GB combined, peaking to 6GB on
| occasion
|
| > CPU: Minimum 2 cores, recommended 4 cores
|
| Would be good to know how fast those cores should be. My hardware
| is a mobile platform from 2012, and I've noticed each core is
| faster than a modern Pi as well as e.g. the "dedicated cores" you
| get from DigitalOcean. It really depends what you run it on, not
| how many of them you have
| neurostimulant wrote:
| It has modern features that requires relatively heavy
| processing such as facial recognition, finding similar images,
| ocr, transcoding videos, etc. I think it only needs those
| computing resources when you upload new images/videos.
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