Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management
github.com559 points by rzk 6 days ago
559 points by rzk 6 days ago
I would love to give this a try but its software supply chain story seems like a car crash, with dependency bumps needed every few days: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/commits/main/server/pac...
I'm keen to use it as soon as the dependency story is mature (eg. it is packaged in Debian). This doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
I'm sure many people won't care about this. But for me, it's a measure of quality. I expect to be able to deploy and not worry about it, except for security updates, for at least a couple of years, preferably more. Constantly moving dependencies spidering out to a multitude of other projects, and Docker Compose, provide no such confidence.
Edit:
Ironically, just after posting that I came across this, which I think proves why my concern is warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657
Debian isn't immune to this, but it's much harder for such an attack to be successful when dependencies aren't constantly changing.
> Ironically, just after posting that I came across this, which I think proves why my concern is warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169657
> Debian isn't immune to this, but it's much harder for such an attack to be successful when dependencies aren't constantly changing.
Immich is more immune to this issue because they wait 5 days before raising PRs to bump dependencies, which is a good practice https://github.com/immich-app/.github/blob/main/renovate-con...
OK, more maybe, but that is nothing next to Debian, where a huge Debian userbase settles on a single set of versions for all dependencies for a year (usually more) at a time.
I would expect an operating system and a single application have a different approach to dependency management.
Debian is both an operating system and a distribution of single applications. Its (excellent) dependency management applies to both. It doesn't have a software supply chain problem because it takes dependency management seriously.
I've been keeping my eye on Immich for a while and keep waiting for a stable release to try it out, but that hasn't happened yet. I'm also dreading having to setup proper backups if I were to switch to this over Google photos. My current solution is to backup critical homelab things to Google Drive automatically but I'd want a proper off-site backup if I were going to self host all my photos.
So you use Google Photos and backup to Google Drive? Sorry to say, but if Google ever decides to deactivate your account (which can and will happen for any reason, real or imagined), you lose everything.
A stable release is only a couple months out. Maybe do a Takeout until then, and put it in S3 Glacier, or similar?
I quite like their backup story. Immich has one folder that you need to backup. It stores file and dump of db that immich does on schedule. I don’t care that much about db dump but backuping photos os very easy
To be fair, there’s a massive banner on their front page warning users it’s in beta. Until they settle on a proper release it’ll continue to be a bit chaotic. All software development is like that.
This looks like one of those projects that will never settle and have a stable slower release cycle.
I don’t think so. They are steadily approaching their defined and published goals for stable release. I’m guessing it will come this year.
This looks like a project that’s under heavy development (it is) responsibly keeping up with dependencies. This gives me more confidence, not less.
To be honest, a decent image server that can be the root server for a CDN and do the right things with modern web formats is something that should be standard and built in by now, with nobody needing to build and install their own.
That said, this is far better than my own non-existent image server.
For me a measure of quality is the rendered HTML code, which should use all the content sectioning elements and not be bloated with gazillions of divs and classes. This software is well off the pace in this regard.
Why is docker compose a red flag? That feels like a benefit to me.
It's not a problem that Docker Compose can be used and a configuration is provided. What's an indicator of a dependency problem is when it's the only way to deploy the software. If, instead, they could say "all required dependencies ship in Debian at a sufficient version to meet our requirements" then that would be ideal (Debian isn't a hard requirement for me, but I use it as an example since it sets a bar similar to the one I want software I deploy to meet). Or even just "nearly all dependencies except this one" would be much better.
100% -- firs time I have seen providing a docker compose file is a sign of weakness.
Yeah... I'm not sure that I've ever seen a complex app with multiple, separate service/database requirements (redis, pg, etc) packaged in a Linux distro repository... but I could be wrong.
controversial but docker compose is for development and demos. for prod give me a binary, a config file / systemd unit file, and tell me how to configure external dependencies and let me decide how to manage them.
and if you're serious, k8s config. otherwise don't waste my time.
Waste your time? You know what would waste my time? Building out my own deployment of Redis/Postgres, all the dependencies, systemd services, ML server, and backup solutions (yes, the compose takes regular DB backups for you) and then keeping it all updated manually, just to host photos on my local network for my family of 4. Do you think making your life needlessly difficult is a feature? Then read the docs and deploy to a K8s cluster. Nothing is preventing you from doing that.
But this is for running on an old PC in your closet next to your router. Not serving 40k concurrent users. I would not even consider trying to scale it past a dozen family members. And anytime I run an upgrade or config change I just do it in prod.
You want to run it in docker and manage it with some tool. I use dockge and click the upgrade button every couple of days / weeks (when the app or website tells me). that's it.
Immich is an excellent piece of software, I have switch all my photo needs from over 25 years to it. It will mature and it actually already is. Don't hold yourself back with such practicalities.
Are there any/many applications that require a configured database (like PostgreSQL) and Redis/Valkey in Debian's package manager at all?
Also, Docker-compose is pretty great in terms of getting complex applications up and running.
Absolutely love immich. Prior to the release of the new "Beta timeline", it was difficult to recommend without reservation, because there were a lot of performance issues on Android, and syncing was just non-functional on my wife's iPhone. However, since enabling the beta timeline, the app is basically perfect now. I've been running it for months without issue, and having a first-class CLI means I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup. Big thanks to the immich team!
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.
Does iCloud by any chance strip the exif data from the photos, so the real date is simply not available anymore?
I removed myself from beta. I always have iPhone and Android apps stalling on backing up unless the app is open.
The recent betas have been extremely performant for me, especially today’s. Might be worth checking out again.
Some performance bottlenecks seem to be still in. I added around 200 images and 10 videos of my last vacation manually via Intent to the Immich app on Android.
The startup of the Activity is VERY slow. Images are rendered one by one in the list view (potentially in full resolution?) and the scrolling in the list is quite slow. The upload button does not keep the "uploading" state but after some time jumps back to the initial "start upload" state. Going into background or turning the screen off sometimes stops the upload. This test was done on my Samsung S23 Ultra (so CPU power should not be the issue).
Nevertheless the upload works as expected if I stay in the app and keep the screen active. Seems like this is not really the intended way of uploading things to Immich (auto upload is).
Maybe it's because my server is still on v.1.139.4, but I have had the opposite experience with the new beta timeline on Android. I disabled it after trying it for a week because it took so long for thumbnails to load vs. the stable version. Compared to Google Photos, any version of the Immich timeline I've tried feels extremely clunky. It's a great backup alternative and I commend the team behind it, but it is far from being a product I'd recommend as an everyday photo gallery app.
> I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup
Interesting, would you mind elaborating on how you do that? I take it you have your backup key stored on your home server then? What tool do you use to decrypt & parse the backup?
Sure! I make Signal backups on my Android device, sync them to my home server via FolderSync, and then run a nightly script that uses signalbackup-tools[1] to extract media from my family group chats and upload them to my immich server via their CLI.
Couldn't you simply select the Signal folder that contains the media and let Immich monitor changes
Runs on a Pi4 in a cabinet with a lot of other self hosted stuff. Data is stored on a NAS. Performance on the Pi4 isn't the greatest, but it works without any annoyance.
It has been hosting my SO's and my photos for a few months, the transition from Google Photos was pretty easy and it is almost a drop in replacement. I love it.
Make sure to checkout https://github.com/simulot/immich-go, it was a great help migrating my Google Takeout to Immich.
Immich supports search by CLIP and I would find it highly useful to search for stuff by semantic meaning (I rely on Google Photos' ability to do that for now). How does your Pi4 handle CLIP?
I'm not running on a Pi4, but I am running on an N150 which is in roughly the same performance league, and CLIP searching is instant in my ~10K photo set. The expense is at classification time, not search time. Classification was a few hours on that, so, not convenient if you're staring at it and wanting to play with it instantly, but it's not like it took months or something either. Of course if you've got 100,000 photos it may be some days for an RPi, but it's still just something you can let it crank away at, it's not like you have to stare at it while it happens.
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.
Not op, I use cloudflare tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports "local" and "external" connection settings, so it can connect to the Immich instance directly when on home wifi, and use the tunnel when out and about.
I use Tailscale for this, always connected and Immich pointing at the TS IP. I haven’t yet made the jump to full syncing, so I have a manually curated library of photos that I access anywhere but I am planning on starting to test this feature soon (I take a lot of junk throwaway photos with the phone and don’t want to sync everything). I’ll have to see how it best works for me.
But Immich is a great app, minimal to no fuss setting it up in a container on my NAS. My only potentially unfounded concern is when I upgrade the images. They changed the different component containers images over time, sometime with breaking changes. So I always half expect that an upgrade will screw up the setup and I’ll have to start from scratch with the indexing.
Not op, but a combination of tailscale and a public VM is my setup for this. VM from oracle is free btw.
Not OP, Tailscale is easiest, quickest, and free up to 100 devices as of today. It also has a feature to provide a public URL if needed, or can be run with Cloudflare Tunnel at the same time.
The only annoying thing for me with tailscale is having to have its VPN always on.
If I need to connect to another VPN or need to access some geo restricted page, then I need to disconnect tailscale.
Otherwise it's great, but I'm not sure I could convince my wife to use it.
As other's have already mentioned, currently I am using Tailscale. But I plan to somewhere in the future change that to something a bit more controlled by myself. Like a self hosted Wireguard VPN on some VPS.
I was also thinking about just reverse proxying my local instance to some public domain. But currently do not trust immich to be safe enough to allow for public exposure.
I use tailscale with split tunneling so that traffic to the home range goes... home.
That minimizes battery impact. This missus hasn't complained. Yet.
I would love to use Immich but I'm not into running a home server - electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay. Also I just don't want to manage the hardware.
I've looked into cloud hosting. But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space. Object storage is cheap but not supported by Immich. Block storage is not cheap.
I did look into s3fuse but the concensus seemed to be that lots of tiny files like thumbnails wouldn't perform well.
Does anyone cloud host it? What's your solution?
One very easy and painless way is Pikapods (https://www.pikapods.com/).
A pikapod with 2vcpus, 8gb of ram, and 1tb of storage is $200 a year. That's not too bad, but it's the maximum amount of storage so if you need to go over that you would have to attach separate storage (if that's possible).
Hetzner Storage Box is quite reasonable: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/#matrix
I'm kind of surprised that using object storage wasn't a first-class concern. Though I guess if running it at home was the biggest thing, that's not the top priority, but still. Using fast, cheap object stores (often with CDNs in front) has been commonplace for images, videos, and similar content for decades now. For virtually anything that uses some dynamic amount of storage based on user actions, my expectation is that I'll be able to configure it to store and fetch from S3 (or similar).
Yeah this was pretty much my reaction, and seeing that it's not supported (either by Immich or Photoprism) really made me think these projects are not for me.
Photoprism shouldn't be in consideration at all. They felt the need to post in their FAQ that not checking authorization/authentication before serving photos* if directly linked is OK because its "industry standard" and (paraphrased) "difficult/impossible to implement"
* might just be thumbnails. But lets be honest- a 1/10 scale thumbnail of 40MP shot is... still a ton of detail.
The team just announced a 1-click option on digital ocean, if you want it cloud hosted set up:
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.
Wouldn’t you want your photos to be encrypted at rest on the Hetzner storage box?
I don't really care about that, since my threat model doesn't involve Hetzner looking through my photos and training an AI model on them. If/when I move this off to my own hardware, then I'll do full disk encryption, since my threat model may involve someone stealing my hardware.
Docker could be run on the VPS, and the storage leg could be encrypted.
I'm presuming some VPS providers allow converting your VPS disk image to something that supports encryption.
Is that something that docker can do?
I presume gocryptfs can be used to wrap an SMB mounted Hetzner storage box. Haven’t tried it myself though.
I would be careful storing any personal data on it unencrypted.
rclone.
Just use rclone if you need to turn object storage semantics usage into an encrypted mount.
It doesn't do well with non-object-storage access patterns but we're not putting an sqlite database on it here so that should be fine.
rclone has a `crypt` layer you can just paper over any of it's backends and still access through any of it's comfortable ways.
I'd personally likely bind mount the database folder over the rclone mount or the other way around, as needed to keep that database on a local filesystem.
In my experience mounting smb share inside docker containers has been very very unreliable...
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
I'm currently using Nextcloud Memories connected to a Wasabi bucket for photos and being "not supersnappy" is a real dealbreaker. When I scroll through hundreds or thousands of photos and have to wait five or ten seconds for each new page of thumbnails to load, then the same when I open a photos, I quickly go back to Google photos.
I wish it'd be easy to plug it to a s3 backend and thumbnails etc. ephemeral things could just be on disk.
Yes, that would be the obvious solution. Database and thumbnails on disk, everything else on s3.
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.
> electricity isn't that reliable here and putting in backup power is more expensive than I want to pay
A small UPS that can communicate its power state over USB isn't too expensive. So if power goes out, it sends a message to its host that it should shutdown after a certain amount of time and then when power restores, it turns the server back on. I can understand the desire to not have to manage all that though.
"But of course, photos and videos take up a lot of space."
Videos take up a lot of space. Photos increasingly don't. 20 years of family photos for me takes up 150GB, and that's with me being very slovenly about cleaning up the "bad" photos, if I found a decent workflow for trimming photos I could probably cut that down by 75% pretty easily. Linode will attach 160GB of storage for $16/month, plus you'd need a $5/month VM to attach that to. https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage
I acknowledge that you may be in a position where that is too much, but on the other hand, broadly speaking, it's not going to get much cheaper than this even in the next few years. It's not like it's $500/month anymore and there's room for it to be cut by $300/month.
Immich can also survive without necessarily being up all the time. If you have a computer of any kind and any reasonable spec that spends a reasonable amount of time being on, you can use tailscale or something to hook it to your phone and run a backup process every so often to a cloud block storage. It's OK that it isn't always up and then you get to pay object storage prices, which for 150GB now is as close to negligible as you can reasonably get.
You could run a small vm in the cloud and use a storage solution like backblaze or something that stores things relatively inexpensively.
The hardware isn't that much to manage anymore these days, a small usff uses very little electricity, can stay up for a few hours on a UPS.
Tools like Proxmox make it point and click like any cloud provider within reason.
I did some half ass backup solution. Bought a LifePo4 12AH battery, hooked up a compatible charger, hooked up a dc-dc converter to power up a N100 mini pc, my mikrotik router etc. Works perfectly fine as of now...
Does this continuously charge and discharge the battery, using up battery cycles?
If you want cloud hosting and fully E2E encrypted by a team that deeply cares about privacy and security, try Ente. They also have Google Authenticator alternative called Ente Auth.
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.
`rclone mount` an `rclone crypt` over a Cloudflare R3 backend of `rclone`? Or if it's sufficiently often "off/idle", take 3 USB HDDs (1~2 years ago I bought an iirc WD MyPassport 5TB for very similar workload) into a RAID-5 and have appropriate off-site backup that you actively check to have successfully gotten the latest daily backup's file contents (check a couple (3~5) random files as well as a few (3~5 ish) critical/database/metadata files) at least every 1~3 months.
Also, as opportunities arise like for example from a major upgrade to local storage capacity, try to fully test a backup restore emulated to "your home burned to the ground while you were at the office/on holiday" conditions every 1~3 years if you can afford to spend the bandwidth for it.
Consider burning in drives for a group-buy you do with local friends if necessary to at least get such a full restore trial every about 3 years. Try as best to consider a trial every about 5 years to be a "cost of doing business" that's not just nice to have but essential to the value proposition of the data archive storing home server.
Oh and yeah, I fully mean to let the drives go to sleep when you're not accessing them through "manual"/interactive means (exceptions are limited-time background queued work with a set override timer, and the daily backup runs, which will also unlock the drives from their regular sleep-doesn't-get-interrupted-for-no-good-reason enforcement; ofc this is all something you do only if you can and feel like you want to: just hunting down rouge accesses/wake-ups happening at odd times by setting up some minor logging of which programs/files/accesses (or at the very least _when exactly_) are causing the drives to wake up is something you could very well get away with). Also take care to ensure they get good airflow: stack them with gaps between and ideally just take a decent but low-cost 120mm fan that you just hook to 5V from USB (if you don't have a fan header laying around) and rig with some cardboard and tape to channel air across your drives. The drives want to be around 30~45 C, consider hooking the smart temperature readout to a kill switch in case of fan failure.
Self-hosting seems easiest to think about as a home appliance.
Out of compute, storage, database, networking, etc, which is most preferable to be just an appliance?
It's pretty reasonable to get reliable storage self-hosted without the headache. If a big setup isn't needed, it's reasonably attractive to set up your own storage with reasonable power draw, which can be kept up with more reasonable UPS'.
Just because one can build and run a storage array on their own, doesn't mean it would be the best allcoation of their ongoing attention to maintain and be on call for a daycare for hard drives.
If seamless storage as good (and sometimes better) than a cloud is the minimum, it has to be something trustable, and run like a reliable home appliance needing minimum maintenance.
Lots of folk choose NAS enclosures that have raid mirroring and hot-swap drives built in quite inexpensively using things like Synology or QNAPs. The web admin interfaces on them are reasonable, and it's trivial to poke along with a youtube video to setup a RAID 5-10, and send email notifications how you like if it wanted to bring something to your attention.
Other things that become way more valuable over the years:
- NAS can be configured to backup offsite to the cloud backup of your choice, or another NAS. I know folks running them for 5-10 years and never think about it. Decent NAS with appropriate drives, secured of course. Some people even mail the enclosure to a datacenter and have them plug it in and keep it online.
- If you get a reasonably basic NAS with an intel Celeron CPU, power usage can remain low, but ram can be upgraded on it to run a few services as needed on it, both directly, and as docker images. It's pretty wild.
- If you do consider it, my recommendation is to pick one that has 2 extra drive slots than you need, and start from there. People who buy two bays can outgrow them quick, plus it's only a mirrored raid between two drives. Raid 5 and higher is great, if one drive is starting to have issues, you can just swap it while it's all running and the storage will heal.
Hope that helps. Having data close to crunch can be valuable.
it's really not that hard. I've set up backblaze which is reasonably cheap. with the help of AI I was able to setup a permanent cron job that backs up everything from local into B2 using rclone, which client side encryption. It's epic. I haven't looked at it for a while but I do DR test every once in a while a small subset and it works really well. I use postgres as DB and this is the big one to back up daily. Rest is just the increment. Can be further optimised I guess but I'm happy with it.
Have a look at https://ente.io/.
That looks interesting, and it does support s3 from the look of it. However, I have to say I'm getting strong "performative open source" vibes from it. Have you tried self hosting? How was it?
I recently created https://immich.pro to partially address this problem. I've got spare compute and storage that I'd like to turn into MRR. While the privacy angle isn't _fantastic_ maybe some people won't care. Could be better than trusting Google/Apple.
I recently looked into both Immich and Ente.io for syncing and also sharing photos since 1) Syncthing has been rather unreliable for me in the last year, 2) my photo library has become too big to just sync it across devices, 3) I was never really happy with NextCloud for sharing photos.
Immich looked really nice but in the end I went with Ente because of its E2E encryption. So far I'm really happy!
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?
Not op but personally I don’t really trust syncthing on iOS. Something about how Möbius sync works on the apple OS makes it so occasionally my folders disappear locally on my phone, triggering a deletion on all other devices.
It used to work very reliably for many years and I used it for pretty much everything (photos, ebooks, notes, Signal backups, …). However, last fall it simply stopped syncing (traffic at 0 B/s) in 90% of the cases, no matter the file size, even though my devices see each other and Syncthing recognizes that files are out of sync. I have already reset and reinstalled Syncthing various times – no idea what's going on.
My gut feeling says that it's the Android client[0], but I'll have to find the time to look into this more closely.
I've also encountered this periodically and the way I've gotten things back to normal was to 'reset database' in Syncthing-Fork's troubleshooting settings. Is that what you meant by reset?
Not quite, I just purged the app from my phone entirely, including all settings, and then reinstalled it.
Previously:
1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541
1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40772809
3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796
7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42984617
4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537564
1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731179
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Immich Progress Update [July 2024] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859102 - July 2024 (5 comments)
Immich – Self-hosted photo and video management solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563541 - June 2024 (5 comments)
AGPL Self-hosted photo and video management solution (Docker + iOS/Android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40030151 - April 2024 (3 comments)
Immich is changing its license from MIT to AGPLv3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336890 - Feb 2024 (46 comments)
Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673224 - July 2023 (344 comments)
Immich: Self-hosted photos and videos backup for Android and iOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33159796 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)
Humbly sharing my own project: Video Hub App which lets you browse your videos in an elegant infinite scroll gallery with various ways of searching, filtering, and tagging. Only local - nothing goes online with my app.
https://videohubapp.com/ and it's open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
Looks nice. Does this allow the export of the organizational and meta data?
The "hub" or database / save file has extension `.vha2` but it's a simple text JSON with this format:
https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfac...
Cool. Why not an embedded player, it would make browsing much faster than opening opening up the default system player?
Variety of reasons, not all fitting everyone. For my preference I like the minimalist MPC-BE interface at full screen on a separate monitor; others might prefer GridPlayer or something else. I feel like external player gives everyone the customization they prefer.
Embedded player would require making a tremendous number of design options: where does it reside in the interface, what does it cover up when open? and if it can pop out as a separate window, what value does it bring over an external player?
I've been using it for a couple of years and I find absolutely stellar. I wrote the (quite long) of my process to find the perfect alternative (for me) to Google Photos, so in case anyone's interested
https://medium.com/@javipas/thats-how-i-ve-replaced-google-p...
Google Photo's sneakily imposed storage limitations a few years ago, after a long time advertising "unlimited" storage for standard quality photos. The constant bitching that I was almost out of space, and the wasted time in an effort to free up space, were what pushed me to finally look for a self hosted solution.
I've been very pleased using immich for about a year now.
Highly recommend [0]selfh.st if you are looking for software to run locally. Its a maintained directory for open and closed source software.
The colors of the select box text (Tags, Alternatives, Sort, Search) are the same (or very close) color as the background making them unreadable.
Any opinion on why Immich instead of Photoprism? I’m considering to pick one of them for my media library and Immich not being labeled as stable scares me a bit.
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.
> Immich started as a project after Photoprism changed their licensing to restrict several features
It didn't, that's just a timing coincidence. Immich was started because none of the existing projects offered the google photos-like experience.
Fair 'nuff, my memory is a bit fuzzy as that was a while ago. That was definitely part of the reason it got so much initial momentum, however, even if it was just a coincidence.
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?
I was using PhotoPrism for a few years and switched over to Immich and am very glad I did.
- There was no good mobile backup story. State-of-the-art was WebDAV sync and import delays which would truncate files and other issues on back connections. It also made deletion risky.
- The UI had lots of things that felt very opinionated for a very specific workflow that seems niche. Things like auto-adding generated titles and other things.
- The face recognition is much worse, especially for non-white faces. Even detection didn't seem to have a good setting that would reliably identify what is a face without way too many false positives.
- Immich's semantic image search is way better than what was on PhotoPrism where it seemed to just find a few tags.
- PhotoPrism had lots of UI quirks like the persistent selection that almost never worked how I wanted it to.
Lots of other odds and ends as well. There isn't anything that I actually miss from PhotoPrism.
I personally use Photoprism, though I don't love either.
Both still feels like the sad-er side of open-source WRT polish - stability, reliability and ease-of-use.
I would be willing to pay for something great that I can self-host, but sadly nothing truly great exists.
Photoprism is lacking batch edit for tags/metadata https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/271
I just started looking into Ente which works very well but I don’t like 100MB Dart chromium app (I may build my own native frontend in iced.rs).
However I’m wondering how Immich compares it seems less interested in the encryption security and sharing aspects and more heavy on the image editor aspect.
Both are selfhostable. So it maybe an effort to migrate one day.
Immich isn't an editor at all, I don't think it can even rotate an image 90 degrees. It's very focused on having multiple users upload photos and create shared albums (public or just to other users). Doesn't do any encryption at all tho.
Immich uses Flutter as well, fyi
There’s no escape. People just gotta write Javascript apps when we could have none.
Flutter does not use JavaScript, although it can compile to JavaScript. It also does not use chromium. I'm not sure why ente is 300MB but that is not standard for a Flutter app.
I have terabytes of iphone photos/videos accumulated over the years. Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries so I’ve been splitting them by year which is fine for archiving but horrible for actually browsing photos.
Immich has been absolutely awesome for this — I can finally look at all my pictures from any year from anywhere in the world. I’m very happy and hope the creators find a way to sustainably finance the project.
The upload feature in the mobile app is not a 1 to 1 replacement of apple photos import so i still do that via apple photos, but that’s something I can live with.
For a while I was running a windows VM with the iCloud for windows utility that syncs your photos to a folder on your windows PC, iirc it worker reasonably well as an 'automated' sync solution. (under the surface the folder was a share on my NAS, which in turn fed into a separate immich instance)
> Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries
Some would say it's deliberately made to keep the library cluttered so you have to pay more for cloud storage.
Why Are Our Photo Libraries Such a MESS? (Ben Vallack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYeVWyNxaY
I was hoping we'd have immich stable earlier in 2025, now it's starting to look like maybe 2026 but they haven't pushed it on the roadmap so I'm holding out hope.
Immich is extremely stable even if not labeled as such. My personal experience is zero maintenance (other than updating docker container) since deployment several years ago.
Stability also implies that we don’t have to update our server version every couple of days/weeks because otherwise the mobile app stops working. I’m ok upgrading but it gets old wondering why the photos aren’t showing up and then realizing that it’s because the versions are out of sync and the mobile app just refuses to talk to the server.
Yeah, short compatibility ranges between the app and sever is one of my biggest pain points right now.
I went through one upgrade a year or so ago that forced me to redo my backup so I'm a little shy of going all in again until they say stable.
This sounds a bit like my experience with Home Assistant, it's very stable as long as I don't frequently update it. If I install every update I've frequently messed up my installation/config.
> If I install every update I've frequently messed up my installation/config.
I've had it running for a year and have fearlessly and immediately updated. Never messed anything up, somewhat remarkably.
I set up Immich last week and I absolutely love it. Docker is my "happy place" and I found the setup pretty straightforward, though it does have some rough edges that I anticipate will be sorted out as the project continues to mature.
I showed Immich to my partner and they loved it so much that we've ordered significantly more storage for the server to accommodate it. We're currently using both Google Photos and OneDrive, but with this we'll be ditching OneDrive and filling that niche with Immich (as well as expanded network storage in general).
The website and documentation is super clear about not using it as the only source of photos. This is why we'll keep using Google Photos, and why I'll also be backing up Immich and portions of the network storage to B2 via restic. I've used this snapshotting pattern for my general server data for years, and it's even saved me a couple of times. Backups are something you hope to never need to use, but boy are they satisfying when you do need to use them and have them set up properly!
I just wish it didn't need Postgres and SQLite was an option.
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.
There’s also a vector extension on SQLite. Or it could be handed off to milvus lite or something else.
I run a homeserver and self host applications (freshrss, linkding). I just don't understand the security enough to trust my photos. I've gone with Ente.io. Their 3 tiered backup and my local backup should be good enough.
The other issue is my family use my account and don't want to be in charge if my backups fail.
I do love what immich is doing though and would love to run it.
A review from having used this project seriously for three months (self-hosted on a small NAS device, deployed/updated via Docker Compose): it's great. The web application is stable and very configurable (though ML performance will depend on the host). The Android web app is excellent, and a drop-in replacement for Google Photos. I'm still running the two side-by-side until they get to a stable release, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this as a self-hosted solution.
Recently installed and it’s chewing through 25 years of digital photos, has been some weeks now and expecting it to take another week.
But - seems great. I was prompted to do this after the death of a friend and the subsequent hunt for photos, so I’m hoping the facial recognition lives up to its billing.
I don’t really like having the NAS on 24/7 but I do like the idea of having that local photo sync. Probably cheaper to start with iCloud given the costs of 20TB drives and energy prices, however.
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).
I'm considering a migration from Synology Photos to this, is this supported in some way or I should transfer / reimport everything manually?
I've migrated from Synology Photos. It's pretty seamless, since Immich now supports External Library. I use Docker Compose in Synology, so basically all I have to do is just mount existing Synology Photos folders to Immich. Works fine, no issue so far.
However, I'm back to Synology Photos. I'm using Immich iOS apps. The upload/syncing is noticeably a lot slower than Synology. Gave it a few months, but it's not getting any better. Moved back to Synology Photos for now.
Immich looks like the first real alternative to Google Photos that doesn’t feel like a toy project. For a lot of us, self-hosting isn’t just about privacy — it’s about not being locked out of 10+ years of memories if a company decides to pivot or shut down.
I would love to self-host this stuff (using Immich, or Ente) but my family's bus factor is 1 and the risk of losing all the pictures really prevents me from taking this step. Sure, maybe my wife could reach out to my techie friends but why create the problem in the first place?
The solution is packaging.
My Immich server performs a nightly backup to a 2tb flash drive labelled "PHOTOS" attached to the router. My partner knows where it is and what it's for, and everyone knows how to use a flash drive.
Are you rotating flash drives and such? I would worry about something happening to me, then she goes to use the flash drive, and the data is corrupt or the drive is fried.
This. It is true science how to preserve data long-term. And if you want to encrypt it (e2e or not), you better have very good plan how to recover it when you die
Nope. I recognize it's a risk, but it still seems like the solution with the least compromises and the highest probability of success.
My server sends me notifications for every update with the rsync output so I'll know if any problems arise while I'm around. The last drive in this position lasted 4 years without incident, and I only replaced it earlier this year because it was full.
Is there a way to export things like notes to a sidecar file? Basically need to have photo123.jpg and photo123.jpg_notes.txt available.
I’m trying to archive, document and make accessible family photos, but fear any work I do organizing information in immich may as well be throwing it into black hole.
I'm comfortable trading some metadata for a foolproof handoff of the assets themselves. The library is organized in year/month/day folders so it's navigable that way.
I back up the complete Immich filesystem and database, and include a docker-compose.yml, so if it was handed to someone technically inclined they'd have all that.
A middle ground worth considering is keeping iCloud as is, as the functional backup your family knows how to use, and Immich as a backup for that.
If you can't backup your essential local data then self hosting isn't really ever an option for you
It's not about backing up. It's about non-technical family members being able to reliably recover the data.
What solution are you using now?
I feel the same, so I keep photos on hard drives and usb drives in different locations. I have a Restic backup at Backblaze but that is where the bus factor comes in. I don't know what would be best.
This serves as a great reminder for me to set up Immich when I get time, and a reason/excuse to purchase a better GPU. I have been uneasy with my dependence on Google for a while now.
[EDIT]: the following was intended as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45168333
I understand the author's point against the perceived complexity of 1-5 star rating systems, but it's worthy of note that star ratings are extremely common (ubiquitous?) in more advanced photo management/editing software such as Darktable and Lightroom. As a photographer, I see why the feature might have been included.
Does Immich have features that need a high-end GPU? I hosted it on a machine with a 1050Ti, and see others in this comment section mentioning using a RPi.
Mine is running as a container on an old Mac Pro 2013 (running Proxmox). My GPU is not even as good as yours.
It runs great.
The “beta timeline” required hashing that took forever but this was on my wife’s iPhone and nothing to do with the back-end (she has 50,000 photos).
The machine-learning stuff uses the GPU. Facial recognition for example. It takes longer on low-end hardware but I am not sure why that is a problem.
The image categorization can use GPU acceleration, many seem to be noting it runs well enough on CPU mode even on modest hardware, but importing say hundreds of gigs may take longer for classification (ingress) steps.
Years ago I've passed on Immich because it was "prone to breakage" and went with a directory organization and syncthing for syncing. I still see immich doesn't have a stable release which is a bummer, although people report it is quite stable. I'm glad I went with the organization method I did. I do a lot more pruning of photos and less hoarding. I actually am able to view photos without getting "burnt out".
I have been looking for such a thing for so long! Since this can be too much to develop from scratch I was hoping I could use Claude or something to start off on it.
I have gone for days in rage because Google photos would hog on memory and I had no folder view to know which pictures/videos were the culprit and I wouldn't get a folder view. If this works, I might spend some time working on this project, just to pay my regards.
I had been on Flickr for 15y for personal photos hosting, and switched to immich a little over 2y ago, no looking back. The feature set is nice, and goes the right direction. A project I'm happy to support.
Is there any reason tagging isn't supported in the mobile app?
Also, the first two links Documentation and About both point to the same place.
I have been using Nextcloud Photos because I already use Nextcloud to store all my photos. I have always been interested in Immich though. NC Photos has pretty much all the features I need (except maybe face recognition) but the performance isn't great.
Has anyone switched from NC Photos -> Immich and have any thoughts on the process (and how well Immich plays with NC if I keep my photos stored there)?
I switched from Nextcloud Photos to Nextcloud Memories to Immich. I submitted a patch [1] to Immich to make it possible to directly login via (Nextcloud) OIDC which, in combination with the Nextcloud 'External Sites' app makes it possible to integrate Immich directly into Nextcloud. I do not automatically add all photo and video material synced to Nextcloud into Immich yet, relying on a set of scripts I've been using for years to maintain all our media in a single repository. It should be possible to either use Nextcloud to sync media which is then shown in Immich through its 'External Libraries' feature (this is how I use it) as well as to use Immich to sync media and access it that way. No matter how it is used Immich can be integrated to be as easily accessible as any 'native' Nextcloud app. Performance is far better than Nextcloud Memories, this was my main reason for moving away from the latter. The search and facial recognition features in Immich do not require a server with GPU access, performance is fine on my by now rather aged DL380 G7.
[1] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18763/commits/fe7a...
Immich edges it out on people recognition and context search but otherwise similar in features. The Immich interface is much more like Google Photos and I find that to be better.
Regardless of where you're coming from I recommend migrating to Immich by "uploading" all your photos using the immich cli, and letting it manage the library.
Nextcloud was dog slow for me, Immich just flies. And the client app is far better both on iOS and Android. Nextcloud never worked for my SO, Immich just does.
Its great however I still think they could simplify usage: - admin vs config menu - I always search in both - mounted folders vs backup folders: I would welcome a Simple Filter in the main view as I find the folder view ugly - Initial setup with all the jobs a big complicated
Been running it and it’s a beauty! Runs great on a weak-ish mini pc with pictures via nfs on a NAS
Really great job, been happy so far. Would be better if the text is searchable via OCR.
ah it's not? that would be a blocker for me
We truly live in the future already, where OCR is a normal expectation. (And possible)
I have a raspi sitting idle and would love to use it to run this! What are common solutions for backups? I would hate to lose all my photos. Is buying a Synology the only option?
There's lots of other options... I'm not sure I could recommend Synology these days as they've started to vendor lock to only their drives, etc.
You could get a NAS from TerraMaster and swap the OS for TruNAS Scale or Unraid. They're relatively reasonable for the hardware, you can also DIY the hardware but that brings in other issues. Got an F4-424 Pro for a backup NAS myself. Worth noting a few big drives will cost you more than the other hardware though. 12TB was the pricing sweet spot when I got mine.
In my case, all photos are stored in Synology, then run nightly backup to Backblaze.
I use immich every day and I'm a big fan of it, but the search feature is dismal and still falls short of any other major image hosting provider:
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/8377
The way that semantic search works, they don't cap a relevance score (since it's all relative), and they don't allow you to sort through some kind of time index either.
Been self-hosting for a while. Amazing set of features and web and mobile apps work flawlessly.
Just wish it could compress pictures, is there an alternative which compresses pictures?
I'd really like to build a bolt-on to immich that makes calls to imagemagick just to do simple stuff like rotate and compress, there's a ton of forks tho there must be someone who's thrown in one of those web editor suites
I’ve been testing with PikaPods and costs less than $6 a month. Been happy with it; actually, pretty happy with whatever comes to PikaPods (no affiliation).
If you're not looking to self host immich, try PixelUnion.eu
I've been using immich for awhile now and it has been great!
Fantastic software, I am surprise more people don't use it.
I'm a happy user and supporter, it's awesome software!
Immich is fantastic. I'm itching to reply but not 100% sure what I want to say, I've got like a bunch of immediate, parallel thought processes about it.
1. I've got 25 years of photos and video that I originally organized by folder (date + title of contents) but got very unwieldy once my wife and I both got smartphones back in mid-late-00's -- this archive has lived on external HDDs (spinning disk) and copied to new ones as capacities increased. In early-mid 2010's I got 2TB with Google and uploaded to Google Photos; it was great, but neither of us ever really utilized it, so I was just paying for cloud backup.
2. I am old-ish, have no concept of "home lab" (because everybody who had one or more computers and messed around with computers basically had what's now called home lab), and tend to keep/repurpose tech that goes out of service -- I've always hosted where it was appropriate (home, colo, cloud, whatever), and always have run many devices in a closet. Given the ~1TB of personal media, it was inevitable that I'd want some kind of self-run solution if only for speed + physical access.
3. I liked Google Photos interface; getting out of it was impossible. Add in 15+ years of unorganized iPhone photo/video backups (pulled out via iExplorer and other apps) in real folders on a real hard drive, and it really was a godsend in starting with a "normal" (yet dysfunctional) archive of original content. Once I set up Immich, I was able to upload all of it and at the bare minimum have a year/month-organized archive of stuff, written to an enterprise HDD (while keeping the old source hard drive(s)). The iOS app is pretty good (way more performant now with the beta timeline) and the CLI + API are great.
4. I have an Ubuntu server in the dusty closet; decent little piece of crap 8-core / 32gb that runs some websites and services. That's where I installed a refurb 12TB drive and Immich. I had an HP Z420 with 128gb ram that was my workstation for a few years, I upgraded to a Z640 dual-xeon with 256gb, and just had the old stuff sitting around -- I installed TrueNAS on that and threw in a bunch of cheap Ironwolf drives, set up a ZFS pool, run Immich on the Ubuntu box and then Syncthing all of it to the NAS for duplication. I recognize that having a bunch of equipment around is a luxury and a privilege, but I'm also a cheap POS and buy everything used/off-lease/refurbished/eBay/etc, and reuse what I can as it gets upgraded. That said, you can get massive local storage and compute if you look around, be patient, and don't impulse-buy.
5. Since Immich predated the NAS and I'm still running it on the Ubuntu box versus in a TrueNAS container, upgrades are less turnkey; for instance, I let mine sit idle from 1.29x to 1.41x, and there were three breaking upgrades in between. It took some fiddling and staggered upgrading on command line to get from where I was all the way to latest; I experienced no data loss though, everything moved over, but it wasn't one-click/one-command. Syncthing backups from machine A to B aren't exactly invisible either, because if A shits the bed it would probably corrupt B, and even if it didn't, while I do have the files duplicated, I'd have to more or less replicate the original install and copy the files from B->A to get the interface running again.
6. The mobile app + features are very seamless and good at this point; my wife hates computers but can find what she needs on her phone super easily. And the beta timeline is very performant with regards to handling a quarter million photos and videos. I haven't fully vetted the latest app-initiated from-phone automated backups, but did notice mine were flowing from my phone to server without even realizing it. That helps a LOT with the inevitable couple-times-a-decade phone upgrade since the main "backup bottleneck" is getting all that personal media out of there. The rest just goes easily with iCloud backups and device-to-device restorations.
7. I don't back any of this up to cloud; I thought about maybe Backblaze or something, but haven't pulled the trigger on anything. Syncing to and restoring from sounds like a nightmare. Since 1998 I think I've only had 2 or 3 drives actually die on me; one was recently (the NOT important one) which prompted the TrueNAS box. I ended up with multiple 2xMIRROR pairs striped in a VDEV pool and feel pretty OK about that for now, which the Immich archive also syncs to. End of the day, anything is better than being imprisoned by Google Photos or iCloud Photos.
8. I also don't expose any of this stuff to the internet; outside of the home network, we have to VPN in to get access. Also don't have external contributors or anything. YMMV because I know a lot of people like to share out to family, or set extended family up to archive with them.
End of the day, fiddly upgrade annoyances aside, it's the only Franken-solution I've found thus far that gives easy access to a giant archive, and spreads itself out enough to where I'm not terrified of losing everything. Really well-done stuff!
Thanks for those details! I came along a similar trajectory, starting when we had our first kid which happened right around the time when phone cameras got good. Which means many gigabytes of video from phones filling up monthly.
I actually ended up building something like immich just a bit more halfbaked for our home use, that could take the whole /MobileSync iOS backup and pull out anything that looks like a photo or video. That way our workflow was, back up the phone in iTunes, let the app process the MobileSync backup, confirm they are visible, and hit the delete all button on the phone. Rinse, repeat. The storage was on a beige box with a couple mirrored drives.
At this point the collection is about a terabyte, which is not extreme by modern home lab standards. My main remaining concern at this point is that the file system is just plain ext4. Even though I mirror the collection on a regular schedule, more and more I am wondering if there is a chance of bitrot since as far as I know none if it is checksumed. I would love a solution that periodically scans objects on the file system. I would love to have an easy way to tell which of the copies is the corrupted one, since with two copies in my case I can't take the majority.
p.s. and I guess one question for you, do you think I would benefit from switching to immich for part of this workflow? I'm thinking I can't just throw raw iOS backups at it so maybe I need a bit of preprocessing there, but otherwise let it take over the cataloging and just keep the underlying storage backed up.
If I understood correctly, it sounds like you could probably change very little of your current setup and just add in an extra step in a script where you use their CLI to upload new content after you do iOS backups [0]
Files get hashed before upload to avoid duplication, so I would imagine that this would also be fine to use in tandem with the mobile app; the app pushes stuff out as it's designed to do, whenever it does it, but then if you upload from a manual backup as well, it would only ingest stuff that's not already in the archive.
[0] https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface/#qui...
any opinion on how does this compare with ente?
I love immich!
Loving Immich
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I can't get past the name. So cringe makes me not want to come near it
Download the repo, open in VS Code, and do a search + replace from "Immich", as well as the "Immich" part of file names to whatever you want.
Then, go into the design folder of the repo and replace all the images with whatever logo names you want.
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On the contrary, I have seen tons of good choices after getting past the choice in name.
I'm not a formally trained programmer, so I won't pretend to know better than Immich's engineering team. But feel free to create pull requests to improve it. You're free to choose any other software.
Wild assumption. There are lots of alternatives in the space and immich stands out among them at near feature-parity to google and apple photos while being super easy to self host.
Can we make it into an app ?? For windows and mac like click and install ? That can scan all the folders and do all its stuff !??
macOS on arm, you can download the ios app and install it. That's what I did to import my wife's photos.