Considering that it’s free, always improving and self-hosted, I am more than happy that it lacks some minor features from Google Photos. :) It’s not perfect, but I can relax that nothing like this would happen to me:
Not only that, but Google Photos already pulled a huge bait-and-switch. It used to be free unlimited photo storage for compressed photos…until they just stopped.
I am not concerned about that. Business primary goal is to make money, and Google is business, so any free service is temporary, especially if not powered by ads.
if only photosync would work properly in the background on ios … i thought it is supposed to but it just doesnt do the thing by itself. sometimes i get a notification about 0/5xx photos being synced. hm. i know its more like ios sabotaging the software here, yet still it prevents me from using it more :/
Apple sabotages your user experience at every turn unless you use their solutions which cost money and your response is to stop using other software. Sounds like the desired outcome for Apple.
Noticed it stopped working yesterday, wasnt at home so I couldn’t really get into it, just checked the docker logs via portainer on the go and was like “wtf is this error?!” Was relieved when I learned what the issue was and that it’s just a restructuring of the containers.
While it can be unnerving that they don’t shy away from breaking things in order to improve the service, it’s actually a very good thing and keeps the app from getting bogged down in some "but backwards compatibility"legacy code hell (wonder what some people in Redmond would know about that). Let’s just hope that they never publish an update that permanently breaks things when you haven’t followed a very strict weird update procedure or something.
Or, if you do have it auto-update (like I do) prepare for things to break every now and then. I auto-update just about all containers except those that would break either my home automation or my ability to login to my network and fix things. Everything else auto-updates, including Immich.
My Immich broke this weekend when they switched the stack over to pgvecto, to use vector searching in Postgres. Easily fixed, but took me a solid minute to figure out what had changed.
Which is kinda weird they didn’t communicate this one so well. In the lead-up to v.1.88.0, Alex made an announcement on Github to let people know the breaking change was the removal of the web container from the stack, rolling the webserver into the main server container itself. That was a good move, as all I did was flip my Watchtower container on that host to monitor only.
Dunno why they didn’t do something similar for the Postgres change. Was just as breaking.
roofuskit is right. Unless you use it as secondary method of backing up your memories - it is foolish. There are constant breaking changes that requires modification to Docker-Compose for Immich project. But you do you. :) I am not Google to tell you what to do. 😅
Immich saves pictures on the filesystem, where they are easily picked up by all my backup solutions. My pictures also get uploaded on NextCloud before being moved to Immich’s auto-upload folder.
… Where exactly is the risk for my precious memories? The bloody thing could rm -rf /* for all I care.
Immich’s repo explicitly states not to rely on it as a primary backup of your photos and videos. Seems to me the more foolish thing would be to ignore that advice.
They have mentioned that once out of dev/alpha status they will figure out proper release versioning so you can pin a major version and not get breaking changes.
And don’t forget to change the default file export size. The default is 2gb, which for me resulted in over 300 files to download and there’s no easy to way to automate it. 50gb is max which was much better for me
I tried the larger file size, but my internet is slow and google kept pulling the plug on my download. Even with a download manager it was un-resumable. Finally, I just re-exported at 2 GB and now I have to babysit the download of 23 different files.
Thanks for the reminder to check my docker compose file. I finally deployed immich for the family last week. I had tried it before, but held out for external libraries.
We never really used Google photos or iCloud, so having a similar experience with the library on my NAS is amazing.
For me Photoprism is unusable for the simple fact that they don’t support multiple users. Also Photoprism doesn’t have an official app which I can easily use on my phone to sync photos.
yeah the simple workflow of the app -> immich server makes it seamless. i think that is the magic part of immich, the barrier to entry for getting your photos in (and the WAF) is key.
I’ve just set up an Immich server and the UI is nice and uploading is quite fast. Waiting for Google takeout to finish so I can import my whole library…
Also your Lemmy account is marked as a bot btw. Some people block bot accounts.
Photoprism has different approach. Last time I tried I wasn’t impressed. Immich, on the other hand, gives me almost identical experience to Google Photos. I was heavily using Google Photos, so this is probably the reason why I am pro-immich.
Over the holidays I experimented with Immich, especially after they added support for existing folders. These are my initial thoughts comparing it to PhotoPrism.
I find the application quite appealing; it runs more smoothly on both web and mobile platforms compared to PhotoPrism (PP). However, it lacks the polish and some of the features present in PP, such as sidebar options for different views.
The face detection functionality in Immich differs from PP. It works well, especially when identifying younger versions of people. However, it struggles to distinguish between many mother-son pictures, and sister-sister. I adjusted the threshold, but now I have to manually merge clusters of images. It’s inconvenient that I can only merge 5 clusters at a time, and there’s no way to change this in the configuration. This limitation is frustrating. However, the ability to have multiple accounts and share photos is a positive feature.
I appreciate the story-like feature that shows what happened ‘n’ years ago, but it’s disappointing that others you share the library with can’t see it. Also, the mobile and web applications lack consistency; for example, merging photos and getting suggestions for existing names is not possible on the mobile version.
My feelings about Immich are mixed, and I hope the app continues to be developed and improved.
Installed it because of this thread to my homelab today. I never really managed my phone images in any way, never uploaded them anywhere. This was the first time. About 5 gigabytes of images and videos were synced to my NAS in a few minutes, now I can search them and all that. It’s a pretty cool setup, although the installation is a bit tricky if you don’t go to the path they give you. I run a Postgres server in Proxmox, and you have to install just the right version of pgvecto.rs for the system to work.
Browsing the issues I was able to figure out what went wrong, and after downgrading, no issues.
But it’s not that difficult to dedicate Docker compose file for an “immich project” and use exactly as developer suggests. You are not like going to have 100+ users, more like 1-10 users and even RPI would be enough. It’s not an issue to have small database along immich project on the same host.
Though if you have something better than a Pi that would be ideal. Then it can do nice things like face detection, object detection for search, and transcoding.
It just doesn’t feel right to have multiple postgres databases running, if every other service uses the one in the network. Having already monitoring, disk space and backups set…
Think this way: postgress db is just part of immich. That’s it - separate your services into logical units.
That’s actually makes more sense to do at home lab. Bringing down your main DB breaks a lot of your services. By separating - only part would be broken.
My postgress db lives in the same docker compose file where immich is. If I decide to delete immich - it’s very simple to run “docker compose down” and delete folders. :)
Ask yourself what your “job” in the homelab should be: do you want to manage what apps are available or do you want to be a DB admin? Because if you are sharing DB-containers between multiple applications, then you’ve basically signed up to checking the release notes of each release of each involved app closely to check for changes like this.
Treating “immich+postgres+redis+…” as a single unit that you deploy and upgrade together makes everything simpler at the (probably small) cost of requiring some more resources. But even on a 4GB-ram RPi that’s unlikely to become the primary issue soon.
A bit off topic, but Synology Photos is not vendor-agnostic and open source sofrware that you can host on your RPI or home server. It’s Synology NAS specific, isn’t it?
That’s right, yeah. I’ve already got the NAS and my photos are on it though, so for my case, I may as well use it unless it’s got any flaws or deficiencies :)
After seeing this post I finally gave it a whirl. After a few days of use, I’ve decided to stick with photoprism. It’s interesting to see how they each have different strengths. I think immich looks more promising, but I ran into problems with a ton of missing thumbnails, map photo clusters that weren’t actionable, black panorama images, and some things in the UI that I just wasn’t into. Great app though! It’s really exciting to see multiple self hosted image apps being developed. I kept my launch configs and customizations and will give it another look in 3-6 months.
The only thing preventing me to move from photoview to immich is the lack of sorting/viewing photos by folder hierarchy. I love the UI and the machine learning customisation options. They recently added the “external albums” feature, so I am hoping this folder hierarchy thing, too, will soon be implemented.
i semi-agree. i added a feature request explicitly asking for that in the really early days of the project.
What i REALLY want from the project is adding to the 3-2-1 type of backup strategy. I want it to also store a backup in an external system. something like local filesystem like it is now, then have a versioned type of backup in an S3 compatible buckets (backblaze B2??). something like a simple borg backup or other incremental backup system.
since it talks a lot about backup of photos, i dont really see it is a backup solution.
Yes. I want to put it into cloud storage that I control and can move around as required, so that I can’t run out of space. And so that I don’t need to manage a local physical drive.
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Playing with the demo, it lacks adding text/captions and reordering photos compared to Google Photos. Any other suggestions?
Considering that it’s free, always improving and self-hosted, I am more than happy that it lacks some minor features from Google Photos. :) It’s not perfect, but I can relax that nothing like this would happen to me:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked
Not only that, but Google Photos already pulled a huge bait-and-switch. It used to be free unlimited photo storage for compressed photos…until they just stopped.
I love immich!
I am not concerned about that. Business primary goal is to make money, and Google is business, so any free service is temporary, especially if not powered by ads.
the color scheme of that icon physically hurts to look at
Wow! You found the problem. Congrats!
Time to use arcticons
I am a bit confused what is meant by:
“You can do this by connecting to the immich database as a superuser and running…”
How do I connect to the database exactly?
Use something like pgAdmin, DBeaver or the pg cli to connect to your postgres instance. Then run the command from the changelog as a SQL query.
You only need to do this in a specific scenario, “Note: If you are running your database with a non-superuser role for Immich”
If you’re running the docker stack that immich provides you don’t need to do this.
if only photosync would work properly in the background on ios … i thought it is supposed to but it just doesnt do the thing by itself. sometimes i get a notification about 0/5xx photos being synced. hm. i know its more like ios sabotaging the software here, yet still it prevents me from using it more :/
Apple sabotages your user experience at every turn unless you use their solutions which cost money and your response is to stop using other software. Sounds like the desired outcome for Apple.
Have you tried the Immich app? I know in general iOS has such restrictive power management that syncing can be unreliable.
thats what i meant – is there an alternative option?
iOS is awful about how it handles photos. It doesn’t really permit other apps to manage them automatically. I’ve fought this issue lots.
Noticed it stopped working yesterday, wasnt at home so I couldn’t really get into it, just checked the docker logs via portainer on the go and was like “wtf is this error?!” Was relieved when I learned what the issue was and that it’s just a restructuring of the containers.
While it can be unnerving that they don’t shy away from breaking things in order to improve the service, it’s actually a very good thing and keeps the app from getting bogged down in some "but backwards compatibility"legacy code hell (wonder what some people in Redmond would know about that). Let’s just hope that they never publish an update that permanently breaks things when you haven’t followed a very strict weird update procedure or something.
Do not have docker containers auto update.
Unless the container follows semver and only auto updates minor versions.
Edit : Which Immich isn’t.
Or, if you do have it auto-update (like I do) prepare for things to break every now and then. I auto-update just about all containers except those that would break either my home automation or my ability to login to my network and fix things. Everything else auto-updates, including Immich.
My Immich broke this weekend when they switched the stack over to
pgvecto, to use vector searching in Postgres. Easily fixed, but took me a solid minute to figure out what had changed.Which is kinda weird they didn’t communicate this one so well. In the lead-up to v.1.88.0, Alex made an announcement on Github to let people know the breaking change was the removal of the web container from the stack, rolling the webserver into the main server container itself. That was a good move, as all I did was flip my Watchtower container on that host to monitor only.
Dunno why they didn’t do something similar for the Postgres change. Was just as breaking.
Updating software that’s in such early development without reading the release notes is foolish.
Is it hard to breathe in that rarified air, up on your high horse?
I’ll keep taking my calculated risks. You keep judging strangers on the internet. 👍
roofuskit is right. Unless you use it as secondary method of backing up your memories - it is foolish. There are constant breaking changes that requires modification to Docker-Compose for Immich project. But you do you. :) I am not Google to tell you what to do. 😅
Immich saves pictures on the filesystem, where they are easily picked up by all my backup solutions. My pictures also get uploaded on NextCloud before being moved to Immich’s auto-upload folder.
… Where exactly is the risk for my precious memories? The bloody thing could
rm -rf /*for all I care.Immich’s repo explicitly states not to rely on it as a primary backup of your photos and videos. Seems to me the more foolish thing would be to ignore that advice.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They have mentioned that once out of dev/alpha status they will figure out proper release versioning so you can pin a major version and not get breaking changes.
you should exclude the immich stack from auto-updating and subscribe to immich releases.
most of the time will just be a
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d && docker compose logs -fAnd for the love of god don’t go for latest, just stick to the release tags
Looks interesting, thanks for the rec!
Is there a way to semi-easily import my Google Photos archive?
You can use Google Takeout to request all of your Google photos to be downloaded
And don’t forget to change the default file export size. The default is 2gb, which for me resulted in over 300 files to download and there’s no easy to way to automate it. 50gb is max which was much better for me
I tried the larger file size, but my internet is slow and google kept pulling the plug on my download. Even with a download manager it was un-resumable. Finally, I just re-exported at 2 GB and now I have to babysit the download of 23 different files.
This blog post taught me how to download directly to my NAS using curl. https://michelenasti.com/from-google-photos-to-synology-photos/
Oh dang. The applicable parts of that would’ve saved me a lot of headache. Thanks for sharing.
Take a look into immich-go
+1 for it. Used it previously and just recently. Works like a charm!
Thanks for the reminder to check my docker compose file. I finally deployed immich for the family last week. I had tried it before, but held out for external libraries.
We never really used Google photos or iCloud, so having a similar experience with the library on my NAS is amazing.
How do ppl think of immich Vs photoprism? I dislike photoprism because every action takes 10 seconds
For me Photoprism is unusable for the simple fact that they don’t support multiple users. Also Photoprism doesn’t have an official app which I can easily use on my phone to sync photos.
yeah the simple workflow of the app -> immich server makes it seamless. i think that is the magic part of immich, the barrier to entry for getting your photos in (and the WAF) is key.
I think photoprism supports multiple users.
If you pay $72 per year…
I’ve just set up an Immich server and the UI is nice and uploading is quite fast. Waiting for Google takeout to finish so I can import my whole library…
Also your Lemmy account is marked as a bot btw. Some people block bot accounts.
Photoprism has different approach. Last time I tried I wasn’t impressed. Immich, on the other hand, gives me almost identical experience to Google Photos. I was heavily using Google Photos, so this is probably the reason why I am pro-immich.
Over the holidays I experimented with Immich, especially after they added support for existing folders. These are my initial thoughts comparing it to PhotoPrism.
I find the application quite appealing; it runs more smoothly on both web and mobile platforms compared to PhotoPrism (PP). However, it lacks the polish and some of the features present in PP, such as sidebar options for different views.
The face detection functionality in Immich differs from PP. It works well, especially when identifying younger versions of people. However, it struggles to distinguish between many mother-son pictures, and sister-sister. I adjusted the threshold, but now I have to manually merge clusters of images. It’s inconvenient that I can only merge 5 clusters at a time, and there’s no way to change this in the configuration. This limitation is frustrating. However, the ability to have multiple accounts and share photos is a positive feature.
I appreciate the story-like feature that shows what happened ‘n’ years ago, but it’s disappointing that others you share the library with can’t see it. Also, the mobile and web applications lack consistency; for example, merging photos and getting suggestions for existing names is not possible on the mobile version.
My feelings about Immich are mixed, and I hope the app continues to be developed and improved.
Installed it because of this thread to my homelab today. I never really managed my phone images in any way, never uploaded them anywhere. This was the first time. About 5 gigabytes of images and videos were synced to my NAS in a few minutes, now I can search them and all that. It’s a pretty cool setup, although the installation is a bit tricky if you don’t go to the path they give you. I run a Postgres server in Proxmox, and you have to install just the right version of pgvecto.rs for the system to work.
Browsing the issues I was able to figure out what went wrong, and after downgrading, no issues.
But it’s not that difficult to dedicate Docker compose file for an “immich project” and use exactly as developer suggests. You are not like going to have 100+ users, more like 1-10 users and even RPI would be enough. It’s not an issue to have small database along immich project on the same host.
Though if you have something better than a Pi that would be ideal. Then it can do nice things like face detection, object detection for search, and transcoding.
It just doesn’t feel right to have multiple postgres databases running, if every other service uses the one in the network. Having already monitoring, disk space and backups set…
Think this way: postgress db is just part of immich. That’s it - separate your services into logical units.
That’s actually makes more sense to do at home lab. Bringing down your main DB breaks a lot of your services. By separating - only part would be broken.
My postgress db lives in the same docker compose file where immich is. If I decide to delete immich - it’s very simple to run “docker compose down” and delete folders. :)
Ask yourself what your “job” in the homelab should be: do you want to manage what apps are available or do you want to be a DB admin? Because if you are sharing DB-containers between multiple applications, then you’ve basically signed up to checking the release notes of each release of each involved app closely to check for changes like this.
Treating “immich+postgres+redis+…” as a single unit that you deploy and upgrade together makes everything simpler at the (probably small) cost of requiring some more resources. But even on a 4GB-ram RPi that’s unlikely to become the primary issue soon.
Any idea how it compares to Synology Photos?
I have no idea, but I heard only good things about both of them
Thanks :)
A bit off topic, but Synology Photos is not vendor-agnostic and open source sofrware that you can host on your RPI or home server. It’s Synology NAS specific, isn’t it?
That’s right, yeah. I’ve already got the NAS and my photos are on it though, so for my case, I may as well use it unless it’s got any flaws or deficiencies :)
I think you can use Synology photos as the backup for the images and this as your front end … But not sure haven’t done it.
I’ll look into that, thanks :)
40+ years of photos already sorted into albums and sub albums make immich useless to me. I am using LibrePhoto which feels slower but works as well.
We will see what the future holds for both projects.
Immich supports external folders now. You can mount them as read only.
Interesting… But worth migrating from LibrePhotos? Does immich support base-path? To reverse-proxy as https://whatever/photos instead of https://photos.Whatever?
Never used Librephoto, regarding base path support I don’t think Immich supports that.
No it doesn’t. Seems devs don’t care. Anyway, testing immich now, let’s see.
After seeing this post I finally gave it a whirl. After a few days of use, I’ve decided to stick with photoprism. It’s interesting to see how they each have different strengths. I think immich looks more promising, but I ran into problems with a ton of missing thumbnails, map photo clusters that weren’t actionable, black panorama images, and some things in the UI that I just wasn’t into. Great app though! It’s really exciting to see multiple self hosted image apps being developed. I kept my launch configs and customizations and will give it another look in 3-6 months.
The only thing preventing me to move from photoview to immich is the lack of sorting/viewing photos by folder hierarchy. I love the UI and the machine learning customisation options. They recently added the “external albums” feature, so I am hoping this folder hierarchy thing, too, will soon be implemented.
The only thing holding me back with Immich has been the non-obvious back end storage options.
I’d like to keep my data in an S3 bucket, but from what I can tell it’s still unsupported because of some limitations with fuse.
i semi-agree. i added a feature request explicitly asking for that in the really early days of the project.
What i REALLY want from the project is adding to the 3-2-1 type of backup strategy. I want it to also store a backup in an external system. something like local filesystem like it is now, then have a versioned type of backup in an S3 compatible buckets (backblaze B2??). something like a simple borg backup or other incremental backup system.
since it talks a lot about backup of photos, i dont really see it is a backup solution.
note: i LOVE immich
I think I’ll have to do this myself, separately.
Just a question - are you considering AWS unlimited S3 storage where you pay-as-you-use?
Yes. I want to put it into cloud storage that I control and can move around as required, so that I can’t run out of space. And so that I don’t need to manage a local physical drive.