Promised myself I will support them after they go stable. They kept their promise and so did I
from sonofearth@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 01 Nov 07:45
https://lemmy.world/post/38160907
from sonofearth@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 01 Nov 07:45
https://lemmy.world/post/38160907
One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don’t know.
threaded - newest
What is it and what does it do?
immich.app
Immich
Google photo self hosted alternative
Immich! Photo management: immich.app
Immich: Image Backup* solution — like Google Photos or Ente Photos but self-hosted.
*Backup in the sense of uploading your photos to a server you own. You should backup the database as well as your library with 3-2-1 method.
What 2 different media types are you using for the “2” part?
Spinning and flash.
Why does it need to be two types? Can’t I have 2 spinning?
You put them in a safe. Safe falls down, spinning is gone.
You put them in a safe and forget about them for some time. Flash is gone, spinning still has data.
Good point!
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6c4d6e85-f8bc-4ffc-842f-ca44b2cadb21.gif">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0ddb5689-c0e7-4920-bdcd-4145c33d9ad3.gif">
FLASH! AAAAAAAA
The world needs those two gifs combined so we can more easily (and awesomely!) answer this question in the future.
Short: It is a second Hardrive using borg that backs up the primary Hardrive.
Long: My Backup strategy:-
Databases and other imp files:
For databases the backup happens every night that gets saved on the server itself. Then when my laptop connects either to the home network or to the Internet, the backup zip files on my server syncs to my laptop via syncthing. Then my laptop’s data is backed up to OneDrive (encrypted) — this includes the immich database backups. I usually keep 7 days worth of backup files just incase some get corrupted and I can just go back to the previous day.
Library
Since my Immich Library is big, daily borg backups are not possible for 200 gigs. So I have scheduled them every Sunday morning when I rarely use the server. The hardrive is exclusively used only for Immich. That hardrive is then backed up to another hardrive using borg and also to my OneDrive using rclone. (All encrypted). So 3 copies of the data, 2 on 2 different hardives (off which 1 is primary) and 1 offsite.
I do nightly borg backups of much more than 200gb. The idea of incremental backups is you’re only doing the changes, and photos don’t tend to change.
What challenge did you come across with a 200GB backup?
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Ente is also open source and can be self-hosted.
If it works then great. I find it pretty lacking compared to Immich.
I guess they fill different niches. I use Ente for the e2ee, that’s pretty important to me. Immich definitely seems more like a drop in Google Photos alternative, I just use software on my computer to do that instead.
E2EE is definitely important for uploads on someone else’s server. On my server? Ehhh, not so much. The entire drive is already encrypted. Another layer of encryption would just slow it down. Just my opinion.
I would think e2ee would be important if youre uploading files when away from your local network. If that isn’t enabled, then it’s far less important. At that point, it would only matter if there was a compromised client harvesting your wifi packets.
Immich automatically uploads when I connect to wifi so that’s not really a problem. Nor am I personally concerned with someone MITMing my personal photos, I just want them out of corporate silos that use them to exploit me or hand them over to the gov in a dragnet.
If this is happening via a VPN you almost definitely already have transit encryption
Fair point, and if ypure worried about privacy while transferring images, a VPN should have already been considered.
Even without e2ee or a VPN, just plain old HTTPS should be enough to secure that part, or am I missing something?
True, but if you control both endpoints, e2ee and https look very similar.
Their auth is better than the tool itself (last time I evaluated options which was maybe a year ago)
Oh they update a lot. The clients have gotten really snappy, which is nice because browsing photos felt a bit cumbersome before. There’s now automatic albums and facial recognition, if you opt in to that. Was going to say that there’s no editing tool but there is. It’s quite basic though, three tabs, crop, transform (rotate, flip, resize), and colours (brightness, contrast, saturation, and blur for some reason lmao).
There’s also a bunch of sharing features. You could share images or albums directly, or even create embeds for if you have a portfolio website. I pretty much only use it as a backup service though.
From the logo, it looks like immich
https://immich.app/
I got the supporter for free, because I donated to them before they joined FUTO. I donate frequently to opensource projects. This is a good way to say thanks to the devs 😊
Even small donations are fine, so please donate to projects you enjoy 👍🏻
I didn’t know they were giving supporter status to people who donated before they joined FUTO
You needed to connect your Github account once, the app checked if you donated, then you got the supporter status
They joined that open washing company? ughhhh
It’s a photo album? I kept hearing about it. I’ve been using a combo of just plain files, and sometimes nextcloud. Immich sounds like something to look into.
Certainly, especially because of the search features, social features and the ability to organise your photos, and the nice looking user interface.
The ML is really good. Google’s Face recognition is over-confident sometimes and is difficult to remove the tagged faces and add correct ones. Immich’s is very accurate and if it misses something I can just add them — 1 step instead of 2 with Google’s.
Also, if it turns out that immich misses too many faces, or has too many false positives, or creates too many different persons for one face, or groups different persons together, you can tune that. You can set the threshold values for all these things, or just use a different ML model and reanalyse your whole library. Even on an older CPU without any special ML features, it takes less than a night to reanalyse a hundred thousand pictures or so.
also, it’s just stating the obvious, but it’s not on a company’s server that will sell all your info to the highest bidder
using it for some months now and it’s pretty much perfect already. never looked back to Google photos.
I did the same after they revamped the backup functionality in the app, and it now finally seems to be trustworthy enough as my main method to get my pictures from my phone into the cloud. Could finally cancel my Google subscription as well.
Same bro, just became a supporter myself. Worth every dollar!
Immich sounds great.
Does it have E2EE? I rent a VPS and would prefer personal files that I have on it to be protected.
It is fundamentally built around the files being decrypted in RAM, for all the search features. You can use an encrypted partition for storing the photos and DB, to avoid having plaintext files on disk.
ente.io has e2ee. Tehg recently opened up their software so self hosting.
I font have enough exp with both Immich and Ente to make a statement as to whether they have all of the same features or not.
Same, just bought a server license yesterday!
Does it support multi-tenancy?
For instance, being a backup and media manager solution for multiple people in my family hosted on one server.
The same with a few friends that want to get out from under Google’s thumb.
Yes
It does, but it doesn’t handle encryption at rest. Everyone needs to be aware that the immich admin can see their photos on the disk.
So wait, we hate FUTO but love Immich?
May I ask why do we hate FUTO?
They’ve been featuring projects on their page that they display their donations on, projects that did not know or outright refused, without their consent or understanding.
lemmy.ml/post/37910334
lemmy.zip/post/51673470
they’re wearing the clothes of “open source” but they run like a proverbial nazi bar: drewdevault.com/…/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.h…
Except the person who wrote that, regardless of the actual issues with FUTO, cannot be trusted and is an unreliable source.
I really would encourage people to not treat that guy as a real source, but use it as a starting point for evaluating his sources, such as they are, on their own merits.
The above post isn’t the first I’ve heard bad about FUTO. GrapheneOS has also spoken out against them
I think there could be more to it. Louis Rossmann had personal issues with the lead dev there a year or two ago due to how they interact in their forum, and I think he had some great reasons to be concerned. Since then the lead dev has stepped away as project lead, but I doubt the bad blood is completely gone.
I think it’s a bit suspicious that they don’t mention what feature(s) FUTO wanted. Given their interaction with other projects, I’m guessing they wanted a “supporter” badge for people who have bought the software (no change in functionality other than the badge). I’m guessing also that due to their interaction with Rossmann, they’re uninterested in clarifying, esp. if it would put FUTO in a better light if they did.
Then again, maybe FUTO is a bunch of scumbags. It just seems the slant against them is so much stronger than the actual negative impact from a handful of repos having source-available licenses instead of FOSS licenses.
There is 5+ more years to it than that
Thank you for linking this.
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Why do you say they’re unreliable and can’t be trusted?
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Yeah, I read this article twice now, and the only identifiable wrongdoing on FUTO’s part is donating to FOSS projects without using their “institutional practice”… Which is a bizarre complaint.
The article is rife with “something ain’t right at FUTO”, but fails to wrap words around that statement.
May I ask what the fuck FUTO is?
The company that employed the core Immich devs about a year ago to give them a full-time salary to keep working on Immich. Founded and funded by a millionaire whose stated goal is to try and make a viable business model out of software that doesn’t abuse its users
Immich is actually open source.
I find it wild in this day and age how questions like (“why do WE hate” such and such) are being asked in the first place, then answered through one person’s opinion piece mindlessly linked from all angles. Please, for gawd sake, stop listening to random fedditors/redditors about what opinions you should adopt!
IMHO (<- there’s a novel approach), the criticisms of FUTO are just as biased and political as FUTO themselves, and everyone should be sceptical of bias from all sides. Apparently, focusing on ‘privacy, decentralization, and right to repair’ - is being too political, and they’re not allowed to have a philosophical take on what they imagine successful open source to be. (Incidentally, I’m not necessarily on FUTOs side, just pissed off at the nature of social media to obviate the need of critical thinking and make everything black or white.)
I mean sure but… did you read the piece linked? It backs up it’s claims. Not gonna sit here and act like I verified every single thing linked in the piece but I checked a good handful and it seems pretty straightforward. FUTO is pretty sketchy at the very least, and there’s good reason to consider them a fascist org
My read is that FUTO as a software movement is totally fine, it does what it claims on the tin. The people behind FUTO are a different story, and the main person bankrolling it seems to have friends with odd views (I think they’re blown out of proportion, but they’re still concerning).
You’ll never find a perfect movement. Here’s what FUTO seems to prioritize:
That sounds pretty good to me! I’d prefer it to be FOSS, but allowing me to distribute modifications for non-commercial use is probably good enough for most things.
I probably disagree with their founder politically, and I’d run FUTO differently, but I think their software is good and I could maintain it myself if needed, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters to me.
FUTO doesn’t seem interested in getting involved in politics, they’re merely musing philosophically, and their products aren’t profitable, so it doesn’t really matter to me what their political positions are.
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Software can’t be fascist, it’s just software. The makers or users can be fascist though. If that statement was true, Lemmy would be tankie.
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No, that’s not fascist. Facial recognition software can be used for a variety of reasons, like unlocking a phone or laptop, gaining access to secure areas, or home automation stuff.
It’s only fascist if used by a government to oppress minorities. The software itself cannot be fascist, but it can be used by fascists.
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The fault lies with the makers and users of the softeware. Software doesn’t have political opinions, it’s software.
It’s like saying Panzer tanks were fascist because they were built by the Nazis. Tanks cannot be fascist, they’re tanks. So despite being made and used by fascists, they’re not fascist, they’re tanks.
That’s the same exact thing here. Facial recognition software can be used by fascists, but that doesn’t make the software itself fascist.
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Again, it’s not the software itself that’s fascist, it’s what it’s being used for that’s fascist. Facial recognition for determining citizenship could absolutely be used for non-fascist purposes, like simplifying border crossings to not require documentation (i.e. completely opt-in). Likewise, surveillance systems can also not be used until there’s an actual warrant (i.e. no passive recording), which can help in catching dangerous criminals.
The technology itself isn’t fascist, it’s how it’s applied that’s fascist. The mass data collection is fascist, the tools used to collect that data isn’t fascist in the same way that guns and tanks aren’t fascist, but they can certainly be used by fascists.
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If anyone is refusing to engage, it’s you. You provided no argument for your position, whereas I’ve explained as best I can in detail, with examples of similar things. Me not agreeing with you isn’t “refusing to engage,” it’s a good faith debate.
If there’s some point you’ve made that I’ve failed to address, I apologize, I tried to be thorough to not waste any time going back and forth.
The other person deleted their comment so I can’t really know what the argument was, but I would like to make a distinction:
While tools cannot be political themselves, tools can lend themselves to specific political purposes.
A tank cannot itself be fascist, but it can make fascism more viable. Surveillance software cannot be political, but it is easily abused by fascists to destroy political opposition.
What matters is the harm and benefits. Is the harm caused by the tool justified by it’s benefits? Or are the primary use cases for the tool to prop up fascism?
(I suspect that “authoritarianism” would be a better term to use here, but I’m continuing the theme of the thread)
Their argument was that software can, in itself, be fascist, and that’s what we went around and around on. The example given was facial recognition software that can determine race (and later, country of origin).
Essentially, I said exactly what you’re saying, while they argued the opposite. I wish I quoted them, but I did only directly address their claims, if you’ll take my word for it.
I don’t want the government to have and use facial recognition software (their example) and extensive security camera systems (my example, such as Flock), not because those solutions are fascist in and of themselves, but that they can be used by fascists to accomplish their goals. Even if the current regime uses them purely for good (i.e. completely opt in facial recognition, cameras inaccessible to police until there’s a warrant with no passive collection) the next regime may not.
The extension of the argument I’m making (and maybe them kinda?) is that it’s functionally the same as if the software were political.
You can make software that nearly exclusively benefits a particular political belief for family of beliefs.
So even if it’s not actually technically political, it can be functionally political, at which point the argument is splitting hairs.
I think those are important hairs to split.
Let’s say there’s a camera system built due to a direct public vote and rolled out by a political party all agree defends democracy. The stated goal is catching red light violations and speeders, and it’s a popular system. As part of the functionality it reads license plates, and that is verified by a human every time, and no footage is stored if there’s no violation.
Is that system fascist? Most would say no, and it exists in many states, like California and Washington.
Then the next election, a fascist is elected, and one of the first moves is to repurpose that system to track undesirables, and now it stores a ton of footage.
Is that system now fascist? It’s the same exact system as in the previous example, it’s just being used for fascist ends, such as tracking vehicles with certain plates (e.g. Illegal immigrants, minorities, etc) Nothing has changed in the capabilities or programming of the system, the only change was when to capture footage, what people use it for, and how long to store it.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to design a fascist system, such as an LLM that only gives fascist answers, but that’s an incredibly narrow definition.
Just because a product has a plausibly deniable use case doesn’t really mean that it’s not functionally political.
If someone creates a super invasive surveillance system and initially uses it for a seemingly benign purpose, that doesn’t mean the intention all along wasn’t more nefarious, especially if the system was practically irresistible for power structures and it’s use directly lead to authoritarianism. Like giving someone their first hit for free.
In a case like that, I would discount the benign use as a red herring, and say that the software is functionally political.
The intention can be fascist, sure, but that doesn’t mean the solution is fascist.
For example, I think it’s pretty clear that Lemmy was designed by tankies to create a safe space for tankies (why would the instances the main devs maintain be overly protective of China and Russia if it weren’t?), but that doesn’t make Lemmy “tankie,” it’s a software project that can be used by fascists, tankies, commies, anarchists, statists, etc, because it’s just a software program.
Likewise, a surveillance system can be used by a fascist government, private company to protect company secrets, government agency like the Pentagon for internal use, or even private individuals to ID who is at the door. It’s only fascist of it’s used to further fascist goals, like identifying minorities or protestors. But then, it’s still not the software that’s fascist, but the whole system, meaning how people use it and the policies in place.
The chance of a given piece of software being “fascist” is incredibly low, since it would need to act in a fascist way and only a fascist way, or only be useful for fascist ends. Like the fascist LLM example I gave, or a training simulator that is hard-coded to only present fascist ideology.
Right. That’s what we’re talking about.
But I think the bar is a little lower. I think it’s enough to be primarily useful for (eg) fascist goals. If it happens to have minor non-fascist uses, I don’t think that materially changes anything.
I don’t think that Lemmy is primarily useful for furthering tankie goals.
I think that privacy invading surveillance systems are primarily useful for furthering authoritarian goals, by intention or not. There are some nice alternative uses, but I think that the use case of primary importance is in service to authoritarianism, which makes it authoritarian software.
And I disagree. I think this all started when we allowed things like traffic light cameras, speed cameras, and toll cameras to automatically bill based on license plate. I don’t think most would consider those to be “primarily useful for furthering authoritarian goals,” they’re merely there for routine law enforcement with specific goals.
Flock cameras are basically that same exact system, but instead of only being used when something tangible is triggered (red light, radar, or toll booth motion sensor), they passively collect information. Flock is a private company that sells its surveillance services to cities (and private orgs) to assist with tracking down license plates or alerting when there’s a gunshot detection. This is allegedly legal because you don’t have any expectation of privacy when you’re in public (hence why Ring doorbells are legal), and private companies don’t have to follow the same rules as law enforcement. I personally don’t think Flock’s founders are fascist, they seem to genuinely want to help reduce crime. I worked for a similar company that mostly did perimeter security (i.e. generally only operated on private property), and the founder was absolutely not fascist, but they did want to help reduce crime.
I personally don’t consider either of those systems fascist by nature, but they can be used to achieve fascist goals. Tracking burglars across neighborhoods doesn’t sound especially fascist to me, but tracking protestors certainly does. These are very dangerous technologies that can easily be used for fascist purposes, so I think we shouldn’t allow them to be used at all, not because they are fascist, but because they can easily be used for fascist ends just by changing conventions around its use.
I don’t think we need to label a system as authoritarian or fascist to oppose them, we just need to point out how easily they can be misused.
So this is why I’m trying to avoid using the term fascist, because it means something specific but nobody can really agree what that thing is. For the purposes of this discussion, I’d prefer to say “authoritarian”.
I wouldn’t call traffic cameras invasive because they’re only at (some) intersections. But it’s still kind of borderline.
A private citizen recording people in public and the government doing so are fundamentally different. I think that having the government subcontract away that responsibility to maintain privacy is an abdication of that responsibility and is an intentional act to move towards authoritarian on the part of the govt. Now if the private company intends to help the government do that, is immaterial; that is the only major use case for their product, so it is functionally a tool with an authoritarian purpose.
Is it such a dichotomy in reality? No.
But we need to be exceptionally careful when we see these gray areas
It’s more that people probably know what it means, but choose to misuse it to smear their political enemies, and then other people who don’t know what it means repeat it.
Here’s a clear definition in case you or anyone else that reads this isn’t clear on it (or pick your favorite dictionary, it’ll be similar):
Is a network of cameras with facial recognition fascist according to that definition? No. Is it useful to people pushing for such a government? Yes. Is it useful to other authoritarian systems of government? Yes. Is it useful to non-authoritarian systems of government and non-government entities, including private citizens? Also yes.
What if they’re at every intersection, stop signs included?
If the only thing that turns something into an authoritarian system is scale, then it’s not the system that’s authoritarian, but the way they’re used that is authoritarian.
I oppose red light cameras not because they’re authoritarian in and of themselves, but because they can be used by authoritarians to screw people. I oppose Ring doorbells not because they’re authoritarian, but because the corporation has control and can hand that data over to authoritarians without consent from the owner (or be compelled by authoritarians).
“Authoritarian” is an adjective that describes people, governments, or policies, not inanimate objects or software systems.
Exactly! The capability to record the public isn’t authoritarian, the government policy of recording the public is authoritarian.
This may sound like a pedantic point, but I think it’s an important one. If cameras are authoritarian, then ban cameras and the problem goes away right? The government will just use radar, track financial transactions, or something else entirely, and you have the same problem.
The real problem isn’t cameras or facial recognition, but that the government tracks people. To solve that problem, we shouldn’t ban the various ways the government can track people, we should ban the government from tracking people. Don’t b regulate the tools, regulate the people using the tools.
I mostly agree with you, so we’re probably not really doing much in this discussion. I’m trying not to be pedantic, but as my name will tell you, I find that to be a challenge lol.
I agree wrt how to regulate.
If disallow the govt from broad indiscriminate surveillance and disallow the govt from circumventing that rule by subcontracting it to private entities, then these companies and products that perform the mass surveillance would naturally become unprofitable and collapse. I would argue that such a product would be by its nature political, because it’s only practical use case was the furtherance of a political goal.
Cameras aren’t political, but the use of cameras for mass govt-level surveillance is political.
To me where it gets tricky is when private entities grow to government-sized proportions, and begin to use these same tools for similar purposes. I think that is also a problem, but it becomes harder to frame it.
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Hahah you mean like Lemmy itself?
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Yes I read it when it first came out, and again after a recent update. It’s very opinionated and I remain unconvinced the criticisms amounts to very much. At the least, certainly not to the point where words like nazi and fascist should be thrown around!
For example, I dislike Yarin’s and Lunduke’s politics but I did at least watched Yarin’s interview. (Did you? It was boring, and entirely tech-oriented, nothing controversial at all.) But… trial by association I guess. And anyway, it’s not the article itself I have a problem with - it’s the borrowing of second-hand opinions as if they should be your own. Sometimes, it’s prudent to reserve judgement (until ‘verifying every single thing’), or criticise specific ideas, without leaping to ad hominem per consortium.
As far as I can tell the worst thing they did was call their source available license open source, which isn’t even that bad.
I’m not sure what “piece linked” you’re talking about, since none of the parent comments of this comment actually have a link in them.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of FUTO, but I did read their statement about open source and it sounds pretty good to me. I actually think they’re capitulating a little bit too much by deciding not to call it open source anymore. As far as I’m concerned, if the source is available and anyone can contribute, that’s open source. I don’t particularly care whether or not it’s free for Google to incorporate it into their increasingly-enshitified products or not.
Creative Commons (an org to which FUTO says they have donated) doesn’t like their licences being used for software, presumably for finicky technical legal reasons. But if you imagine the broad spirit of their licences applying to software, all the main CC licences would be open source in my opinion. All combinations of Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike, and No Derivatives, as well as CC0 respect the important elements of open source.
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Fantastic rebuttal kindergartener, you convinced everyone.
The duality of man.
I don’t hate FUTO, but I distrust them.
On one hand, their operation is creepy and suspicious.
On the other, I like the idea of licenses that allow unrestricted private use and modification but forbid commercial exploitation. Those two situations are not equivalent. I realize this is an unpopular opinion in many FOSS circles, but we are already being exploited to death by the rich and powerful and they must not be entitled to the value of our collective free and voluntary labor. If we ever realize a society in which wealth and power is effectively capped for such entities, then I would change my tune. Until then, fuck them. Our collective software is for the collective, not for wealth hoarders and despots.
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Seriously everyone pushes Immich so hard I’m a little suspicious of it now :D
Edit: all right, all right, I installed it. It has a thing about not uploading all the pictures I give it, some error out. I have a feeling it is due to the library being on a NAS share.
Yeah :) Maybe give lychee a try :) it’s minimalist and does one thing, but it does it well !!!
The fediverse is small and the Immich dev is one of our own, not surprising that it’s super popular
It’s just that good
It’s crazy good for something FREE. Like infinitely better than any major crop google apple etc because you KEEP your photos. Anything you upload to the cloud is being mined by them.
The only thing I tell people is that you need a cloud backup.
I have an automated nightly worker that zips all my photos encrypts them with a 32 character password and then uploads it to a bulk storage facility.
Any suggestions and estimate pricing?
I use backblaze it’s like $3 a month or something
Agree, backblaze has been great
Wasabi is a very affordable destination for backups. And it has the advantage of not being one of the big three.
I use backblaze, $6/TB/mo. i set it up with restic backups to get my storage usage so low, that I’ve used it for 4 months and haven’t paid yet.
Yeah. I just put the media location on my nas, and that is being mirrored to hetzner.
I do something similar using restic to encrypt, deduplicate, and backup my photos to backblaze every now and then. Out of curiosity, any particular reason you choose zip over something like restic?
I use restic too, just said zip since more people might understand it easier
Ah, got you!
83k Github stars in under 4 years is definitely indicative of an excellent project
Github stars are indicative of nothing
Thousands of them are indicative
You can just buy them, same way you can buy likes on any other platform. Don’t use them as any kind of metric.
You can but if you buy 80k people are gonna investigate and will easily find out you did. Stars are public. I have a folder on my computer with a dataset of 90% of all stars on github
Correct: it’s like trying to equate “correct” with “popular”, and keeping in mind how the last US elections have turned out.
But it’s good to be in a big network of other users with the same product, nonetheless.
They are indicative of something. That something is just not always “this project is good”.
I found it a couple of months ago without hearing about it before. I was in an ideal place for a Google Photos replacement.
There’s a couple of rough edges but it is, indeed, best-of-class.
Shhhh! No one can no we are all being played by the immich overlords.
As a newbie in selfhosting, Immich is what I use almost every day. And it is so good. A literal Google Photos but it’s my own. Snappy web app and android app. Has epic face recognition, contextual search and now even text recognition. All that on an efficient and not so powerful N100 cpu. I can totally see why community loves it.
Is it better than NC?
If you use Nextcloud, install the App Memories and you will have the same functions as Immich plus all the upload functions of Nextcloud.
But if you are not interested in all the Nextcloud functionalities (including contact and calendar sync, musicserver, filesharing, etc) and just want picture management, Immich is the better choice.
That’s exactly what I have, and that’s exactly what I wanted … DARN … oh well. I guess it’s nice to have the document sync as well
Never used NC but this just works.
As someone who only used the stock synology app and has always wanted to try something else, what features and things does this do better? I am close to trying it out just to see. Im sure it will solve my 1 big issue where I can’t control the location of photos that default to my application storage, which is pretty small, instead of my actual storage array.
Does everything Google photos does. Their app looks/feels exactly Google’s app, including sharing links. Assuming you’re running it on reasonably powerful hardware, it does all the same face recognition and ML based search that Google photos does.
Does it have an Android app that will automatically back up photos and videos that I take? Is there a way to do it without exposing a bunch of stuff from my home network?
Yes. I use it, no issues. Use tail scale to backup while away from the home network.
Yes, and yes.
Their Android app feels like an exact clone of the Google Photos Android app.
To access it remotely, you can use Tailscale like someone else mentioned. But you need to have Tailscale installed on everyone’s phones.
You can also use a Cloudflare Tunnel to allow it to be accessed over the Internet without exposing anything from your home network directly to the Internet.
The latter is useful when I want to share a secret link to a photo album after hanging out with people so everybody can upload the photos they took to one place (something I used to do a lot with Google Photos)
I currently have a Wireguard server setup on my router with the client on my phone that connects automatically any time I leave home (thanks Tasker!). This is essentially the same as the tail scale setup, right??
Any idea how much that cloudflare tunnel costs?? I’d love to be able to share via a link rather than sending individual pictures, but my current setup really only allows it if that person is connected to my home wifi.
Yep. Tailscale uses wireguard under the hood so that setup sounds exactly the same.
The Cloudflare tunnel is free. They don’t seem to have a traffic cap either. They’ll charge you if you want to use a non apex domain (e.g. subdomain) or if you need their more advanced bot detection/defense products. But a basic/standard setup like what us self hosters have is free.
You don’t even need reasonably powerful hardware, I do it on my raspberry Pi 5. It just takes a little longer, which isn’t usually a problem except for the first time you import your library.
You don’t even need powerfull hardware. It works perfectly on a raspberry pi 4
Yup, purchased myself 2 days ago. Absolutely deserve all of the support!
I’ve tried Immich, but found my plain SMB shares already did 80% of what
immich could doI wanted. The remaining 20% I could do easily with my favorite photo/video viewers (looping, filtering, tagging, location data).I also hate how it’s only a web portal for desktop. There’s no native desktop app, and no seamless integration with file browsers, video players, etc.
Maybe I look at it again in a few years
You can setup external libraries with it. So you, say, upload your photos and videos to your SMB Share, point that SMB Share as external Library in Immich and you will get the benefits of Immich while you can browse your Share normally as you would. I mean yes this is a workaround but it works.
Thanks for the reminder, done as well :)
Buying my copy soon!
I am a supporter and ordered the retro demo disk. Itll be here soon :)
I dearly wish to use and support this app.
But here’s the thing: containers - like so many other mechanisms - suffer from supply-chain risks due to reduced validation to the degree assumed and required compared to, say, good packaging that integrates with the resident source of truth on a given system. Containers, like so many other risky mechanisms that dates back to CPAN or earlier, cannot exist in a secure environment.
For those of us working where we can to minimize repair/recovery work through best practice, Immich cannot be run.
I know there’s a homebrew workaround, but given it’s external to the dev effort it’s a risk that it won’t suddenly work as a reliable update resource; and that risk stymies uptake for us.
Now, I know I’ve suggested there’s imperfection in a number of favourite technologies and methods, and that’s fine. If downvotes is how you defend these sacred cows, I understand.
Couldn’t you just lazy build your own images if you don’t trust the source?
Even then most of these containerized apps can be run perfectly fine as a host binary, you just have to make your own start script and a systemd unit which isn’t that bad.
You could then build a completely custom image if you’d like, or move it into a VM if you don’t like the idea of running it baremetal.
@corsicanguppy @sonofearth People concerned about this kind of thing could sponsor distributions to create native packages. For example, hire a debian developer to package and include immich in debian.
I've personally been meaning to package navidrome for debian for several years now, but other things have taken priority.
Sure supply chain attacks are a thing, but containers aren’t the issue. Any package delivery mechanism can suffer from it. Its up to you to verify those containers and/or build it yourself
Yup. Whoever backdoored xz was very close to getting it into production. The only reason they got caught was a slight performance regression and an inquisitive and dedicated developer. arstechnica.com/…/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils…
Some years ago, a backdoor made it into Gentoo. zdnet.com/…/linux-infection-proves-windows-malwar…
How does it compare to Photoprism? Been on that solution for a while and I really like it, but have seen lots of people suggest Immich as well.
EDIT: github.com/photoprism/photoprism
I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.
My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.
Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.
Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.
One thing I don’t get, if someone could explain it to me, is what’s the point of immich over e.g. Nextcloud? Immich is just for photo and video, right? Why not just have a cloud file drive instead? To me, I feel like it’s a waste to have both, since I use Nextcloud to both sync my PC and as a secondary backup, in which case I’d have two copies of my photos on my home server if I wanted to use Immich as well. Am I missing something or is it for people with different workflows?
Because it has a lot of photo specific features:
These are just the ones on top of my head, but you’ll probably get the idea. If you just want to back up you photos then nextcloud is more than enough, but you’d probably enjoy the immich features once you used them.
Regarding the two copies: you can use immich on an external library, so you don’t have to have to copies.
It’s like asking why should I use paperless when I can just keep my documents as PDFs in my nextcloud.
The AI search is just crazy, especially when you adjust the model quality.
The issue for me is that Nextcloud has these features as well with App add-ons. I have yet to try Immich because what’s more important for me is the actual backup\upload of my photos than actually browsing them. Maybe someday, but my self hosting initiatives typically involve me chasing a shiny red ball of a deployment, and Immich just isn’t shiny enough for me yet.
Sure, if you just want upload / backup it’s not worth it. If your currently happy with nextcloud then there is no reason to try immich.
But I highly recommend to sometimes view old photos to keep the memories alive.
I haven’t looked into the nextlcoud add-ons, but didn’t have a great experience with the ones I tried so far. In general I’m not really happy with nextlcoud even for file sync / share, but I haven’t found any replacement, every thing else is much worse.
It does take quite a bit of upkeep, especially if you don’t use it frequently. I recently found my instance broke due to a bad addon, and then Authelia also broke because NC decided thier OIDC addon is not supported on the latest v32. I was able to re-enable without issue, but still flagged as unsupported.
Sounds like I’m talking myself into Immich already haha.
Nextcloud is like Google drive, immich is like Google photos.
You’d typically prefer to look at your photo albums in Google photos instead of Google drive.
im like maybe one of few people who barely take photos. its great because i dont need to worry about the costs of cloud storage
I mostly set it up for a few major albums like my wedding album. Other than that it’s like 90% dog pictures lmao
I’m still disappointed that tags are absent from the mobile app.
If it weren’t Docker-dependant, I’d imagine this would be a good FreedomBox app.
Sounds more like a Freedombox problem for not supporting one of the best ways to run sevrer software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I really want to use (and support) this, but my case would be the server running on a windows pc with great hardware for all the ML/AI stuff and SSD database storage, but all my media on a NAS. (I’m a flight sim addict, Linux isn’t an option or I’d do it in a heartbeat) Last time I tried, I got the server running in docker pretty easily, but could not for the life of me get my media connected. Any chance that process has improved?
I’m running it on in docker and I’ve connected it to my NAS mounted as a network drive. I set it up a few months ago, do it’s better since then.
Don’t even worry about the hardware, I’ve got it set up on a raspberry Pi 5. It’ll take a while to do all the classification on your existing library, but new photos get classified fast enough. You’re unlikely to need to do a smart search immediately after you’ve taken the pic.
For clarity, I’m not on Windows (obv, raspberry Pi), and I’m not using docker directly; I’m running HAOS on my pi, and I’m using the immich add-on. I know it uses docker, but I can’t tell you the exact command to run.
That’s amazing. I have a Pi 4 currently running home assistant and pihole. Sounds like my pi family might be growing soon. Had no idea the 5 could run those features. Appreciate you
FWIW you’re probably looking for docs.immich.app/guides/remote-machine-learning namely removing the demanding tasks from the NAS.
Ooh, that’s really cool
I know it’s not really adding anything to the conversation but I can’t not say thank you that’s dope.
Gratitude always adds to anything! Take care
I dont get the “server” vs “individual” support levels? Im an individual and I have a server…but presumably everyone buying immich has a server? Otherwise it’s pointless? Or is it expected that I buy a server package, plus an individual package for each and every user?
I know it’s OSS and so any and all donations are voluntary - just the naming here confuses me.
It is just Donation Tiers I think. Maybe the per user thing only hides the “Buy Immich” button for only that specific user.
Server is meant for all users of a single server.
So, you could buy 1-3 individual licenses or the server license for 4+ users.
Hmm. While I applaud Immich for existing at all, it kind of feels developed with not me as a user in mind. I have Terabytes of pictures I have taken over the couple of decades of my adult life. They are all neatly organized in folders on my NAS. There is no easy way to just tell Immich “oy, that folder structure? Turn it into albums” I am never going to manually put my 400k+ images into albums. And the folder view in the Android app is behind too many clicks to make it any fun using it.
I guess I have to wrangle with the CLI or something to turn my folders into albums.
But… why??? People use existing file structures. Make it easy for those to integrate into your app.
Nothing of the sort on the roadmap either. Unless integrating folder structures into Immich albums gets more user friendly, I am reluctant to support the devs.
I’ll probably do it anyway because as I said, I’m glad the project exists.
Thanks.
Yeah, ideally something like Immich is just some metadata pointing at existing files. An album should be some combination of synced directories (i.e. new files added outside Immich should be detected and added, if selected) and individual files.
That doesn’t sound that complex. Maybe I’ll look into Immich and see about adding that. I don’t currently use it, but I don’t have an image solution, so I’ll give it a shot.
Did you see the external libraries options?
I haven’t used Immich, so no. I might get around to it sometime in the next couple months.
No problemo! github.com/Salvoxia/immich-folder-album-creator
Sounds exactly like what I need. I’ll give it a try. Thanks a lot!
Currently working with immich go for migrating my images from a folder based structure. It works like a breeze.