Is Immich right for me? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kowabunga_Dude · 2023-09-30 16:29 So I have a server running unraid for media automation. I have a separate share for photos that is excluded from that automation. It has about 3 tb of data which is all of my personal photos/videos for the last decade or more (which includes includes my kids entire lives). Obviously this is very important to me. I have this data backed up on an external HD that I keep at my moms house. Since I built my server a couple years ago, I mostly have been using my phone for photos and not a camera. I use google photos to back this up, my wife uses icloud. I want to implement immich and have us both move away from our respective back up solutions. I also want to pay for one 'cloud' back up solution to back up all of my configs plus our personal photos/videos (no interest in backing up my media, I don't have anything rare/hard to replace). Is immich a good choice? Can it take and organize my existing 3 tb of data? Is there a better option than Immich plus Duplicacy for my use case? I will add that I am pretty much a noob and can't problem solve too much on my own, my server was built almost solely by following ibracorp and spaceinvader tutorials. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Marki002 · 2023-09-30 16:49 Immich is a no-brainer. It aims to be a Google photos clone and in my opinion it's even better. There is a machine learning engine that automatically scans for objects and faces, but that can be turned off. You can search for dates, locations, etc. There's even the option to create seperate users for you and your partner and you can share certain albums together. The UI is fluent and there's a app that syncs photos from your phone to your server. For the migration process, it's as simple as dragging and dropping. I've moved from Google photos to Immich and I can't be happier. There are alternatives but I can't recommend Immich enough, great software. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kowabunga_Dude · 2023-09-30 17:13 Will it handle automatically categorizing my existing data ok? If just move the data from its current share into the mnt/user/pictures share that immich creates will it change the file structure automatically, or do I need to move the files from each folder into immich? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Marki002 · 2023-09-30 17:26 There is the option to create albums where you can import media from specific events like in Google photos. Those albums need to be managed manually tho. Immich does not just access a file share, it has its own file structure. It's something in the lines of: 'yourshare\user\images\2023\30092023\image.png'. For your migration process, I would strongly suggest you to create an empty share and you don't put any files in it. Once you got immich running, just drag and drop all of your files into the web gui and let it do the sorting automatically. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- makanimike · 2023-09-30 17:26 Since the last version you can just mount your photo folder directly. I had been waiting for this feature because I didn't want to duplicate my photos, and just installed immich two weeks ago. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Marki002 · 2023-09-30 17:30 I didn't know that, but that's perfect for OPs use case. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AutobahnRaser · 2023-09-30 18:18 Fellow google photos migrater. I downloaded all my google photos, but the meta data (time and location of the photo taken) was written to a json and put next to the photo. Do you know any method to include the specific meta data to the photos? Did this happen to you as well? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Marki002 · 2023-09-30 18:25 Yeah I did the export and there were seperate json files but all the images and videos still kept their exif data so I just got rid of the json files. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- usa_commie · 2023-09-30 18:48 Lack of metadata import is a bummer ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TheMonDon · 2023-09-30 18:51 This will upload them with metadata: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TheMonDon · 2023-09-30 18:51 This will upload them with metadata: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kuzared · 2023-09-30 18:51 Can it leave the original data untouched? So folder structure, file metadata, etc? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- grtgbln · 2023-09-30 18:57 Absolutely. Can't speak highly enough of this project (a native Android app, not a web app!). Perfect for Google Photos users. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sowhatidoit · 2023-09-30 19:14 So essentially I can have my raw albums sitting on multiple drives in and Immich can just point to them? Also, when you suggest creating a empty share - why not put anything in there? Will Immich use that to move photo to that share? I'm sorry I'm having a hard time understanding how immich actually handles data. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Marki002 · 2023-09-30 19:21 If you import it, immich will create a local copy on its desired share and organizes the files. I don't think it works with multiple drives unless it's some sort of RAID. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mrpink57 · 2023-09-30 19:21 There is also a cli import tool from Immich. Depending on how many photos I would look at doing that instead of gui drag drop. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Marki002 · 2023-09-30 19:40 If you import it, immich will create a local copy on its desired share and organizes the files. I don't think it works with multiple drives unless it's some sort of RAID. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- makanimike · 2023-09-30 19:43 yes. that is exactly why I had waited for almost a year. https://immich.app/docs/features/libraries see External Libraries ---------------------------------------------------------------------- serenitisoon · 2023-09-30 20:39 This is exactly my set up. Duplicacy doesn't get much love here, but I like it. I bought the Web ui to make life easier, and I'm happy with it. It just works. Immich is new for me but I'm fairly impressed. It's incredibly fast for photo viewing. Photo ingestion took a whole, but I hope to do that only once. Love the map view, face gallery and prior years. I do worry about it's dev. It's under active dev and I fear a change will one day force me to reimport or recategorise my photos. Hasn't happened yet, so I guess we'll see how she goes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8layer8 · 2023-09-30 20:48 I love it! I had about a terabyte of photos in a directory structure that was effectively photos/sort/sorted/duplicates/sort etc. Etc. I gave up long ago on notes and went with Joplin because I can just save a note and search will find it. Immich does that for photos. It builds a structure of the "when" and the ml handles the face recognition and objects and the exif handles the where (where it can, obviously, scans and old ones have no location). It imported that tb/130k photos and identified everything in a few hours. I downloaded my Google account (that took a while...) and pulled all those in too. The last straw is duplicate finding and then it will be perfect! I can find dupes from the backend but I don't want to break what immich has so wonderfully fixed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EndlessHiway · 2023-09-30 21:08 I dont know. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1h8fulkat · 2023-09-30 22:48 I like immich, but I really like Google photos ability to be able to show relating photos on a Google Home hub. So how can I recreate that experience? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hely0n · 2023-10-01 01:14 I have actually contributed a PR to add {album} as a storage template, but don't ask why the hell the maintainers are not reviewing it for months. 😮‍💨 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CountZilch · 2023-10-01 03:49 Ah I've been waiting for something like that. How well does the dedupe feature work? I have heaps of duplicates thanks to Google Photos. )Also having a camera that captures JPGs as well as RAW.) Since Google photos sometimes recompresses with lossy compression turned up and I kept some originals, ideally I'm looking for a utility that will do so e sort of smart (AI?) compare and recommend keeping the best quality versions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TheMonDon · 2023-10-01 03:54 I'm afraid I don't have experience with that, I didn't have any duplicates ---------------------------------------------------------------------- falcorns_balls · 2023-10-01 04:25 unfortunately I think we're locked to google photos. But I'm interested in hearing if anyone has any suggestions here. Any apps or home assistant/node-red ideas. But I think any option would involve something like casting which would hide the time, and notifications. I'm tired of google photos nagging me about no free space and trying to convince me to subscribe. I'm debating on leaving a limited set of photos and removing everything else. Or just lose the photos all together and just use the stock photos they provide. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- falcorns_balls · 2023-10-01 04:30 The only I miss from Immich is the ability to edit photos within the app. But that's not a huge deal for now. Also when i upgrade a device it wants to upload all the photos again. After they're uploaded, they're hashed, compared to existing hashes, and ultimately ignored. so that's nice. but until they're all determined to be duplicates, I have a bunch of blanks in my library. On iOS the background upload happens so slowly for me. I enjoy it and will continue using it. It's actively developed and the devs are responsive. This is an app I'm going to continue self hosting because I enjoy watching it grow. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HazelCuate · 2023-10-01 06:53 I'm waiting for them to remove the warning message about immich not being safe to use it. But it looks like they will never remove that warning no matter how many improvements they do to the code. I just want to use it in my RPI 4. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MarviinSt · 2023-10-01 07:37 That’s a perfect addition ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nik_h_75 · 2023-10-01 10:12 Would this work for external storage to create albums based on folder structure? I have 15 years of photos organised in folders and would love immich to "pick them up" and create albums based on sub folder structure. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hely0n · 2023-10-01 12:56 Yeah the joke is that if you mass import your library, it can already create albums automatically by the source folder name. Then it will throw everything in a mess, only sortable by date on the filesystem. If you think this feature is mandatory, give an upvote or comment, so the maintainers can see it https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/2973 It was a very little code change, but now there are merge conflicts because the code base changed so much in that time ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hely0n · 2023-10-01 13:01 Oh I just checked, and they have added a new feature recently https://documentation.immich.app/docs/features/libraries This deprecates the read-only gallery, which was too limited and experimental. After coarse reading, I think that would solve our problems with our album folders 😄 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lilolalu · 2023-10-01 16:34 Nice, photoprism does this since day one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PaulEngineer-89 · 2023-10-01 18:57 There are issues with Immich. It took me some effort to get dcs running (in Docker container). The default Resnet50 Ai is garbage…you need to pick a better one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Spuxilet · 2023-10-02 10:56 If your photos are important to you then no immich is not for you. Developers of immich warn you right away about it. https://github.com/immich-app/immich ⚠️ The project is under very active development. ⚠️ Expect bugs and breaking changes. ⚠️ Do not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Veloxy · 2023-10-02 20:00 That change would mean the same image could end up in multiple places as an image can be in multiple albums, something that doesn't seem possible with existing variables. So that little change seems to have a bunch of side effects? Maybe that's why it's not merged yet? Or am I mistaken? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hely0n · 2023-10-03 12:46 No, as I stated in the description, only the first album will be used if the album is inside multiple albums 😁 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Veloxy · 2023-10-03 13:55 Oooh, I read over that! Sorry!