One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don’t know.
Seriously everyone pushes Immich so hard I’m a little suspicious of it now :D
Edit: all right, all right, I installed it. It has a thing about not uploading all the pictures I give it, some error out. I have a feeling it is due to the library being on a NAS share.
The fediverse is small and the Immich dev is one of our own, not surprising that it’s super popular
83k Github stars in under 4 years is definitely indicative of an excellent project
Github stars are indicative of nothing
They are indicative of something. That something is just not always “this project is good”.
Correct: it’s like trying to equate “correct” with “popular”, and keeping in mind how the last US elections have turned out.
But it’s good to be in a big network of other users with the same product, nonetheless.
Thousands of them are indicative
You can just buy them, same way you can buy likes on any other platform. Don’t use them as any kind of metric.
You can but if you buy 80k people are gonna investigate and will easily find out you did. Stars are public. I have a folder on my computer with a dataset of 90% of all stars on github
It’s crazy good for something FREE. Like infinitely better than any major crop google apple etc because you KEEP your photos. Anything you upload to the cloud is being mined by them.
The only thing I tell people is that you need a cloud backup.
I have an automated nightly worker that zips all my photos encrypts them with a 32 character password and then uploads it to a bulk storage facility.
I do something similar using restic to encrypt, deduplicate, and backup my photos to backblaze every now and then. Out of curiosity, any particular reason you choose zip over something like restic?
I use restic too, just said zip since more people might understand it easier
Ah, got you!
and then uploads it to a bulk storage facility.
Any suggestions and estimate pricing?
I use backblaze it’s like $3 a month or something
Agree, backblaze has been great
Wasabi is a very affordable destination for backups. And it has the advantage of not being one of the big three.
I use backblaze, $6/TB/mo. i set it up with restic backups to get my storage usage so low, that I’ve used it for 4 months and haven’t paid yet.
Yeah. I just put the media location on my nas, and that is being mirrored to hetzner.
It’s just that good
Shhhh! No one can no we are all being played by the immich overlords.
As a newbie in selfhosting, Immich is what I use almost every day. And it is so good. A literal Google Photos but it’s my own. Snappy web app and android app. Has epic face recognition, contextual search and now even text recognition. All that on an efficient and not so powerful N100 cpu. I can totally see why community loves it.
Yeah :) Maybe give lychee a try :) it’s minimalistes and does one thing, but it does it well !!!
I found it a couple of months ago without hearing about it before. I was in an ideal place for a Google Photos replacement.
There’s a couple of rough edges but it is, indeed, best-of-class.
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!
Currently working with immich go for migrating my images from a folder based structure. It works like a breeze.
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 haven’t used Immich, so no. I might get around to it sometime in the next couple months.
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.
It is just Donation Tiers I think. Maybe the per user thing only hides the “Buy Immich” button for only that specific user.
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.
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 it 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
I’m still disappointed that tags are absent from the mobile app.
I am a supporter and ordered the retro demo disk. Itll be here soon :)
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?
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 AI search is just crazy, especially when you adjust the model quality.
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.
It does take quite a bit of upkeep, especially if you don’t use it frequently. I recently found my instance broke due to a bad addon, and then Authelia also broke because NC decided thier OIDC addon is not supported on the latest v32. I was able to re-enable without issue, but still flagged as unsupported.
Sounds like I’m talking myself into Immich already haha.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
You don’t even need powerfull hardware. It works perfectly on a raspberry pi 4
You don’t even need reasonably powerful hardware, I do it on my raspberry Pi 5. It just takes a little longer, which isn’t usually a problem except for the first time you import your library.
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.
Yep. Tailscale uses wireguard under the hood so that setup sounds exactly the same.
The Cloudflare tunnel is free. They don’t seem to have a traffic cap either. They’ll charge you if you want to use a non apex domain (e.g. subdomain) or if you need their more advanced bot detection/defense products. But a basic/standard setup like what us self hosters have is free.
Yes. I use it, no issues. Use tail scale to backup while away from the home network.
Yup, purchased myself 2 days ago. Absolutely deserve all of the support!
Is it better than NC?
If you use Nextcloud, install the App Memories and you will have the same functions as Immich plus all the upload functions of Nextcloud.
But if you are not interested in all the Nextcloud functionalities (including contact and calendar sync, musicserver, filesharing, etc) and just want picture management, Immich is the better choice.
That’s exactly what I have, and that’s exactly what I wanted … DARN … oh well. I guess it’s nice to have the document sync as well
Never used NC but this just works.
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
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 doI wanted. 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.
