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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...

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.
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 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.
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!
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.

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?

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!

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

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.

[0] https://selfh.st/apps/

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.
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.

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.

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.
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.
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.

I'm considering a migration from Synology Photos to this, is this supported in some way or I should transfer / reimport everything manually?
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?
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.
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.

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 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)?

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.

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
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.
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.
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?
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’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).

https://www.pikapods.com/apps#photo

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!