Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution

Thank you for this, I updated some time ago but never really switched. Night and day difference !

The other thing I'm waiting for is search results ordered by date instead of relevance. When I'm searching for a picture in particular I know was taken 3 years ago, and search keywords to find it, it's impossible to find this specific photo because the ordering seem random

The only problem I've had with it so far is that the date on photos coming from icloud is when they were uploaded, not the date that the photo was created or even the date that I've marked the photo as being taken. Makes seeing photos from 90 years ago kind of strange.

I removed myself from beta. I always have iPhone and Android apps stalling on backing up unless the app is open.

CLI? Didn't even know that! A doc pointer would be awesome

How do you expose the service for your SO when away from home? Do you use tailscale/cloudflare tunnel/vpn? public port on your router? I've been trying tailscale for myself, but there's a hair more friction than my SO would accept.

In order to give Ente a try I self hosted it. It's working great. The initial interest was also E2E encryption.

The backing Minio store is on a VPS to keep it off-prem. The rest (front end UI etc) I host in my home and use the same VPS as a reverse proxy.

Right now I don't share with anyone else, but use it to get photos sync'd off my phone and shared with my own desktop/tablets.

I'm sticking with it and my family is interested in using as part of degoogle'ing. So I eventually will pay for it for a way to better share photo albums (i.e. too many photos to just share over Signal).

How has syncthing been unreliable for you? Curious as I was going to start using it more. Was it something about large files or many files?

One very easy and painless way is Pikapods (https://www.pikapods.com/).

The cheapest possible Hetzner VPS (2 vCPU 40GB SSD) and a Hetzner storage box (1TB) works alright for cheap (less than EUR 10/mo). I store my database on the SSD, and the `/uploads` folder on the storage box attached as a CIFS drive. Put it behind Tailscale and it's worked fine for the past few months.

The team just announced a 1-click option on digital ocean, if you want it cloud hosted set up:

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/immich

Hetzner Storage Box is quite reasonable: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/#matrix

I actually got it working with cloud storage on hetzner. Wasn't supersnappy, but it worked. I borked the build though and am planning to run it on my home-server

this is pretty much the situation I'm in re the storage. I'm perfectly fine running a home server, I already do, but workloads with heavy storage requirements scare me away from it. I don't want to have to think about that at home, and the cost of pretty much anything other than object storage in the cloud is prohibitive, and as you mentioned obj store support is non-existent or hacky and slow with most of these products.

I wish it'd be easy to plug it to a s3 backend and thumbnails etc. ephemeral things could just be on disk.

There have been attempts to use s3fuse like layers, but:

> NOTE: I found it too expensive in S3 requests and CloudTrail data recordings to use S3 as the backend.

https://github.com/dubrowin/Immich-backed-by-S3

They used aws's own mountpoint for this. Perhaps s3fs with it's caching could do better? Ideally someone would make an object store fuse driver that caches the whole file tree & metadata, or perhaps storing on slatedb or some such. Being able to tune the local file cache would also be important: maybe maybe maybe s3fuse caching is good enough, but making sure thumbnails can cache seems super important. It would be interesting to see how immich uses the filesystem.

IIRC, Immich started as a project after Photoprism changed their licensing to restrict several features, and then picked up a ton of momentum very fast. They've pledged they won't ever pay-gate features, which isn't always a positive as those features help sustain a project long term, but they have so much community support and love that I'm not worried about that in this case.

Feature wise I think they are pretty comparable (vs the paid version of Photoprism), and I like the UI of Immich slightly more. Immich also supports singe sign on via OIDC easily, which I rather appreciate so my family doesn't have to remember 10 different passwords.

Regarding stability it's actually pretty reliable. I've been running it for a long time via Docker in the form of the TrueNAS plugin and have never had any issues, like ever, so I think it being marked as unstable was a bit overly cautious. I think they have also recently moved to a new phase of development that is also going to be even more stable. Even if it does break, all of your media is stored in a nicely organized directory structure on the filesystem so you're not going to lose anything.

I tried both ~1,5 years ago, Immich won the "spouse test" as I could get my partner to use the app on her phone (with her own profile) instead of the native gallery.

Photoprism didn't support profiles or have an app (back then at least, don't know about today), and I couldn't convince her of using some other gallery in the browser...

I for myself liked the Photoprism GUI, but I could never get the face recognition to work well, and manually tagging people/places (or basically doing anything) on thousands of pictures was quite painful.

Also interested in this. I've been running photoprism for several years now using their docker image and don't really have much to complain about but always open to other alternatives.

One thing Immich supports which Photoprism doesn't is multiple user accounts. That doesn't really bother me too much but it's a pretty big advantage.

Edit: Actually one thing I can complain a bit about is the object recognition accuracy. Face recognition I think works decently enough but objects are frequently not identified in my photos. How's Immich in this regard?

Photoprism is lacking batch edit for tags/metadata https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/271

It uses pgvector extension for search (?) so it's not as easy as changing the db engine. Using the provided docker compose file it's very manageable and the default/recommended layout keeps all data files in a single directory.

The facial recognition can tell my kids apart better than I can (with just the cropped face; other context makes it obvious which kid is which).

How many and size?