One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don’t know.
Hmm. While I applaud Immich for existing at all, it kind of feels developed with not me as a user in mind. I have Terabytes of pictures I have taken over the couple of decades of my adult life. They are all neatly organized in folders on my NAS. There is no easy way to just tell Immich “oy, that folder structure? Turn it into albums” I am never going to manually put my 400k+ images into albums. And the folder view in the Android app is behind too many clicks to make it any fun using it.
I guess I have to wrangle with the CLI or something to turn my folders into albums.
But… why??? People use existing file structures. Make it easy for those to integrate into your app.
Nothing of the sort on the roadmap either. Unless integrating folder structures into Immich albums gets more user friendly, I am reluctant to support the devs.
I’ll probably do it anyway because as I said, I’m glad the project exists.
Thanks.
Sounds exactly like what I need. I’ll give it a try. Thanks a lot!
Yeah, ideally something like Immich is just some metadata pointing at existing files. An album should be some combination of synced directories (i.e. new files added outside Immich should be detected and added, if selected) and individual files.
That doesn’t sound that complex. Maybe I’ll look into Immich and see about adding that. I don’t currently use it, but I don’t have an image solution, so I’ll give it a shot.
Did you see the external libraries options?
I dont get the “server” vs “individual” support levels? Im an individual and I have a server…but presumably everyone buying immich has a server? Otherwise it’s pointless? Or is it expected that I buy a server package, plus an individual package for each and every user?
I know it’s OSS and so any and all donations are voluntary - just the naming here confuses me.
Server is meant for all users of a single server.
So, you could buy 1-3 individual licenses or the server license for 4+ users.
It is just Donation Tiers I think. Maybe the per user thing only hides the “Buy Immich” button for only that specific user.
I really want to use (and support) this, but my case would be the server running on a windows pc with great hardware for all the ML/AI stuff and SSD database storage, but all my media on a NAS. (I’m a flight sim addict, Linux isn’t an option or I’d do it in a heartbeat) Last time I tried, I got the server running in docker pretty easily, but could not for the life of me get my media connected. Any chance that process has improved?
FWIW you’re probably looking for https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-machine-learning namely removing the demanding tasks from the NAS.
I know it’s not really adding anything to the conversation but I can’t not say thank you that’s dope.
Gratitude always adds to anything! Take care
Ooh, that’s really cool
I’m running it on in docker and I’ve connected it to my NAS mounted as a network drive. I set it up a few months ago, do it’s better since then.
Don’t even worry about the hardware, I’ve got move set up on a raspberry Pi 5. It’ll take a while to do all the classification on your existing library, but new photos get classified fast enough. You’re unlikely to need to do a smart search immediately after you’ve taken the pic.
For clarity, I’m not on Windows (obv, raspberry Pi), and I’m not using docker directly; I’m running HAOS on my pi, and I’m using the immich add-on. I know it uses docker, but I can’t tell you the exact command to run.
That’s amazing. I have a Pi 4 currently running home assistant and pihole. Sounds like my pi family might be growing soon. Had no idea the 5 could run those features. Appreciate you
If it weren’t Docker-dependant, I’d imagine this would be a good FreedomBox app.
Sounds more like a Freedombox problem for not supporting one of the best ways to run sevrer software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m still disappointed that tags are absent from the mobile app.
im like maybe one of few people who barely take photos. its great because i dont need to worry about the costs of cloud storage
I mostly set it up for a few major albums like my wedding album. Other than that it’s like 90% dog pictures lmao
One thing I don’t get, if someone could explain it to me, is what’s the point of immich over e.g. Nextcloud? Immich is just for photo and video, right? Why not just have a cloud file drive instead? To me, I feel like it’s a waste to have both, since I use Nextcloud to both sync my PC and as a secondary backup, in which case I’d have two copies of my photos on my home server if I wanted to use Immich as well. Am I missing something or is it for people with different workflows?
Nextcloud is like Google drive, immich is like Google photos.
You’d typically prefer to look at your photo albums in Google photos instead of Google drive.Because it has a lot of photo specific features:
- face recognition: enables you to (mostly) automatic tagging of who’s in the photo
- map of images, e.g. look at all the images you have taken in Italy
- (local) AI to search images by keywords, e.g. “sunset at the beach”
- memories: what happened on this day in the previous years
These are just the ones on top of my head, but you’ll probably get the idea. If you just want to back up you photos then nextcloud is more than enough, but you’d probably enjoy the immich features once you used them.
Regarding the two copies: you can use immich on an external library, so you don’t have to have to copies.
It’s like asking why should I use paperless when I can just keep my documents as PDFs in my nextcloud.
The issue for me is that Nextcloud has these features as well with App add-ons. I have yet to try Immich because what’s more important for me is the actual backup\upload of my photos than actually browsing them. Maybe someday, but my self hosting initiatives typically involve me chasing a shiny red ball of a deployment, and Immich just isn’t shiny enough for me yet.
Sure, if you just want upload / backup it’s not worth it. If your currently happy with nextcloud then there is no reason to try immich.
But I highly recommend to sometimes view old photos to keep the memories alive.
I haven’t looked into the nextlcoud add-ons, but didn’t have a great experience with the ones I tried so far. In general I’m not really happy with nextlcoud even for file sync / share, but I haven’t found any replacement, every thing else is much worse.
The AI search is just crazy, especially when you adjust the model quality.
How does it compare to Photoprism? Been on that solution for a while and I really like it, but have seen lots of people suggest Immich as well.
I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.
My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.
Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.
Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.
I dearly wish to use and support this app.
But here’s the thing: containers - like so many other mechanisms - suffer from supply-chain risks due to reduced validation to the degree assumed and required compared to, say, good packaging that integrates with the resident source of truth on a given system. Containers, like so many other risky mechanisms that dates back to CPAN or earlier, cannot exist in a secure environment.
For those of us working where we can to minimize repair/recovery work through best practice, Immich cannot be run.
I know there’s a homebrew workaround, but given it’s external to the dev effort it’s a risk that it won’t suddenly work as a reliable update resource; and that risk stymies uptake for us.
Now, I know I’ve suggested there’s imperfection in a number of favourite technologies and methods, and that’s fine. If downvotes is how you defend these sacred cows, I understand.
Sure supply chain attacks are a thing, but containers aren’t the issue. Any package delivery mechanism can suffer from it. Its up to you to verify those containers and/or build it yourself
Yup. Whoever backdoored xz was very close to getting it into production. The only reason they got caught was a slight performance regression and an inquisitive and dedicated developer. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/
Some years ago, a backdoor made it into Gentoo. https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-infection-proves-windows-malware-monopoly-is-over-gentoo-ships-backdoor-updated/
@corsicanguppy @sonofearth People concerned about this kind of thing could sponsor distributions to create native packages. For example, hire a debian developer to package and include immich in debian.
I’ve personally been meaning to package navidrome for debian for several years now, but other things have taken priority.
Couldn’t you just lazy build your own images if you don’t trust the source?
Even then most of these containerized apps can be run perfectly fine as a host binary, you just have to make your own start script and a systemd unit which isn’t that bad.
You could then build a completely custom image if you’d like, or move it into a VM if you don’t like the idea of running it baremetal.
I am a supporter and ordered the retro demo disk. Itll be here soon :)
Buying my copy soon!
Thanks for the reminder, done as well :)
I’ve tried Immich, but found my plain SMB shares already did 80% of what immich could do. The remaining 20% I could do easily with my favorite photo/video viewers (looping, filtering, tagging, location data).
I also hate how it’s only a web portal for desktop. There’s no native desktop app, and no seamless integration with file browsers, video players, etc.
Maybe I look at it again in a few years
You can setup external libraries with it. So you, say, upload your photos and videos to your SMB Share, point that SMB Share as external Library in Immich and you will get the benefits of Immich while you can browse your Share normally as you would. I mean yes this is a workaround but it works.
Yup, purchased myself 2 days ago. Absolutely deserve all of the support!
As someone who only used the stock synology app and has always wanted to try something else, what features and things does this do better? I am close to trying it out just to see. Im sure it will solve my 1 big issue where I can’t control the location of photos that default to my application storage, which is pretty small, instead of my actual storage array.
Does everything Google photos does. Their app looks/feels exactly Google’s app, including sharing links. Assuming you’re running it on reasonably powerful hardware, it does all the same face recognition and ML based search that Google photos does.
Does it have an Android app that will automatically back up photos and videos that I take? Is there a way to do it without exposing a bunch of stuff from my home network?
Yes, and yes.
Their Android app feels like an exact clone of the Google Photos Android app.
To access it remotely, you can use Tailscale like someone else mentioned. But you need to have Tailscale installed on everyone’s phones.
You can also use a Cloudflare Tunnel to allow it to be accessed over the Internet without exposing anything from your home network directly to the Internet.
The latter is useful when I want to share a secret link to a photo album after hanging out with people so everybody can upload the photos they took to one place (something I used to do a lot with Google Photos)
I currently have a Wireguard server setup on my router with the client on my phone that connects automatically any time I leave home (thanks Tasker!). This is essentially the same as the tail scale setup, right??
Any idea how much that cloudflare tunnel costs?? I’d love to be able to share via a link rather than sending individual pictures, but my current setup really only allows it if that person is connected to my home wifi.
