Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.
But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.
I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
You can use https://www.photosync-app.com/home if all you want is a local backup. It has a killer feature Immich is still missing: encryption at rest of the photos.
I personally find it nicer to unlock my phone to decrypt (Face ID) then dealing with having to auth with my headless server. Is there a way to manage this without putting the keys for LUKS or similar somewhere risky? Main threat is someone stealing the NAS during a break in.
You can store the key in the TPM. If someone steals the NAS, they can only decrypt it if they continue running the exact same software, which you harden (e.g. disable password login from the TTY).
Or you can SSH in and type the key once per reboot.
Had gazillion copies of folders and iphoto libraries in various backups, but since i moved to linux as daily driver was on the hunt for a good photo archiver. Just recently started using Immich. Tried Photoprism too which would have also fit my need well, but somehow Immich won the coin toss ! (After many years was able to pull that one pic my wife was after from my archive !). My all those duplicates have been now been pulled and deduped and condensed into an immich library.
I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged).
Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i need my own local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data).
Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !
I don't think cost is the main reason you should move. Things like photos, gmail are definitely subsided by google so it's not a fair comparison.
It's getting pretty easy to add backup for self hosting so that is becoming the smallest problem.
Agree with you, still worth it
In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)
There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).
Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive
(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)
I mean it could also get dropped yea, sure. This is just a neutral discussion of the costs, I'm not making an argument for anything.
(As for data, the third hard disk isn't actually bought yet and is meant to represent an offsite backup. I might use something like AWS Glacier or Hetzner Storage Box for this anyways cuz this is mostly for experimentation. I just like the idea of having a homelab.)
Once a year I go through my photos and select my favourites and have them printed to paper. Using Google's print service (as an example) you can spend about $80 to have 150 photos printed into a book. If you do this once a year you will soon have a lovely shelf of paper photos you can easily store, easily look at and show to other people and hand down to your kids and their kids, etc. Long term I suspect my collection of books is far more likely to survive than my google account.
We got rid of my mom’s family photo books. Nobody has space / desire for 50 pounds of photos unfortunately. We use a rotating electronic frame now to cycle photos.
I jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...
People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.
This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does become a chore over time and there is always a cost. You can justify it by saying you are getting value out of it but in my experience, this is true for every activity. Everyone has limited time and spending it importantly is important to me.
Good news, my coding agents can access my proxmox and HA and immich and make having a homelab easier than it ever has been. I actually just used codex to help me find dupes across multiple user libraries in immich and quarantine them. In immich, I can only dedupe across a single user library. I used codex to find grid based images that I needed to convert into animated images from back in my iphone 4 days. It located the images, wrote software to convert to webp and handled it.
Codex reviewed my immich setup and recommended I change things the clip model, came up with a better backup strat and found holes in my system.
My codex will ADB into my NVIDIA Shield and proxmox and setup accounts, install packages, create Home Assistant integrations to tie it all together. As a hobbyist, these are things that I would never even think about taking on.
I bought a hdmi-cec controller for my projector last week. Firmware didnt work with the PX3-pro, but it was tied to my ESPHome. Codex diagnosed the issue, rewrote, tested and uploaded the firmware OTA. All done from my phone while I was waiting in line at a store.
> a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks
This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
Other benefits not mentioned include not signing your data or life away to whatever Google's lawyers or marketers have decided is best for them, contributing to FLOSS even if only as an end user, not being a victim of rug-pulls...the list goes on.
Obviously this isn't for everybody, because there's no denying it takes time. The point is that for many, this is a very easy tradeoff to make when factoring in all of the other benefits.
This is mostly wording. It is a commitment, it has an opportunity cost, there are tradeoffs.
> This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
So many opportunities but the day is still 24 hours long. You still have to choose your opportunities wisely, and give up something else in the process. And if you look at the big picture those who choose to take this opportunity are not so many compared to those who just pay with data so they don't have to pay with time and effort. Everyone pays money in the end.
> You still have to choose your opportunities wisely
It's odd that you've gone off on this as opposed to people who spend their 'opportunity time' on Netflix, Call of Duty or D&D.
Sysadmin is a hobby I enjoy and I don't consider it lost time, or wasted opportunity, when so many of my colleagues go out getting drunk or watch football.
"Gone off on this"? Wait till you see me go off on people with a lack of reading comprehension, a pathological persecution complex, and a giant chip on their shoulder.
Anyway, if you ask your parents to explain my comment to you, they'll probably immediately tell you that it's a generic comment on the inability to take up every opportunity all the time. You choose one thing, others choose another, everyone does their own math (you should probably ask someone to do your math for you). I don't care about your hobby which is why I didn't mention "sysadmin", "Netflix", "Call of Duty" or "D&D", nor did I say which one I consider "better" or "worthwhile". Just that you can't do them all.
If you have to jump through this set of hoops to come to the conclusion that you want to outsource the effort of self-admin, just save the trouble and deal with not being the target audience.
Was it a full moon or what's with the dick attitude? It's a few sentences that basically say "you can't have all the hobbies, some people choose something else, everyone pays with whatever they can afford". What's the point of your reply other than the attempted jab at the end?
> jump through this set of hoops
And a weak jab that was for someone who's overwhelmed from trying to parse a couple of sentences. If you thought it's objectively wrong you would have already pointed that out loudly and offensively.
So you just took the opportunity to feel like a big boy and tell me "this admin stuff is not for you". Good for you big boy, glad you got that out of the system.
Of course, you also outsource the effort for almost everything around you (even your reading comprehension), to someone else - an expert, the person you're talking to, or your parents. But you can download a compose file and import it in what's probably a NAS with a nice "import" GUI so welcome to the "target audience". I'm a big boy too, you see, one with actual reading comprehension ;).
> If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much.
And I happily used a Google pro subscription for a while. Even when they doubled the price. Then they started actually limiting it to 5TB and it wasn't worth it.
I guarantee you I am saving boatloads compared to the $100/month tier I'd need for all my data. That pays off my entire hardware budget in under a year and the time I spent is worth a fraction of that.
The value of the homelab for me is things I can’t pay money to get any other way. I would never recommend it for just replacing cloud storage, ROI is not good.
There’s nothing as nice as Plex for consuming media IMHO, and home assistant/homebridge glue a pile of cheap IoT stuff into a single, cohesive, useable setup.
I am a reluctant admin. I resent spending time on it. It feels like work, which after 10 hours of doing similar things for much better pay grinds on you. Luckily it doesn’t take much time to keep it going after the initial setup.
Thread and Matter give me hope one day the IoT stuff might be okay. I have no hope I will ever be able to get the single media portal any other way.
I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.
I run all my own stuff local-first, but I am also a systems and networking engineer and understand all of the concepts so I can build it properly. It takes time, and the willingness to do so. If you don't already have the knowledge to set things like this up, and are really doing it to save money as a consumer, then Google Photos as a product is more of a fit and the user will definitely have a better experience.
For someone like me, it's easy and quick and I have a very robust incremental backup system with air-gapped copies. So it does save me money, because it only takes my time and knowledge.
There is no absolute answer, because it's subjective depending on the needs of the user.
This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright
Depends heavily on the software cost and how far from core competency it is.
If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY.
If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it.
Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.
The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.
And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately
It definitely can, but Its easier than ever to fork an older version and modify with claude, or just switch to a different OSS provider. With commercial tools there's no rolling back. In fact, I would pay money to go back to the pre Allen Dye liquid ass IOS update.
Yes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms
Exactly. Though when something similar happened to me, and I was able to salvage most of it, the next thing I did was:
discard/reject/delete: ≈400GB → 25GB → 3GB (< a decade ago; I remember) (I was shocked to see how little of that really mattered).
and since then I have been backing up starting from that 3GB set which, more than a decade later, is obviously more now, but the learning was don't let amount of data control/tame you, it should be the other way round. So I can just use multiple PAYG backup destinations without worrying about insane costs.
The amount of photos and videos I took also went astronomically down after that. I realised what I was missing - I had lost the data and for the most part I didn't have many of those scenes/moments to begin with. Because I was busy taking those digital photos and videos.
“You _will_ lose them”, as in, somehow Immich will do something to lose them (like making a mistake in a dedupe process which deletes the wrong things), or are you just saying you also need to keep backups?
For cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future.
If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.
Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.
Yes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly.
I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.
My primary use case for Immich is not as a Google Photos replacement, but as a backup of my photos that are on Google Photos. With all the horror stories in the past of folks getting locked out of their Google accounts (and this all Google services) for misunderstandings without a successful appeal, I don't want to risk losing all of my memories just because Google decided that they needed to lock my account for some reason or another. I'll trust that Google won't lose my data but I don't trust that they will continue to let me access it indefinitely.
I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
It’s data privacy. You won’t save any money, google is dirt cheap when it comes to storage, because of their scale. (I’m talking storage you can use for Immich pictures)
In hindsight I am baffled that I accepted for google to have all my pictures, scan all the faces, etc. Insane.
But when everyone is doing it, it turns something off in the brain. I attended a seminar where the explanation was: We don’t have the cognitive resource to do a deep analysis (or any analysis) of every single decision every minute, which is why, evolutionary, we relied on crowd wisdom to move such decisions from CPU to ASIC, the ASIC being “is everyone else doing it?”.
I am still angry at myself that I gave them my pictures for years, the pictures of my relatives’ kids, etc.
@Immich team: pleeeeease add the horizon straightening feature.
In my experience, if you want to use all Immich ML features fluently, the device fee is much more expensive than the Google subscription fee. I think there is only one metric that can attract people, which is privacy.
I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.
My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.
Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.
Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.
I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.
One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account. It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.
I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free.
After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.
> The ability to upload photos from your device automatically
I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.
It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.
Easy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..
It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index.
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ is their best attempt to address your concern, but honestly I'm fine with navigating my photos solely using immich. (with annual backup copy stored in cold cloud storage)
I believe that's a setting, you can have it store the files in a more predictable directory hierarchy. Though it's better to make that choice early on before doing a lot of imports.
I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to preserve storage space.
Yeah, sharing is one of the big problems with Immich. You either need to expose your whole instance to make share links publicly accessible (and there's no way to secure user accounts with 2FA), or create user accounts for the people you want to share with and/or invite them and set up your VPN for them to access the shares.
There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).
Is there a way to sponsor a feature request to improve the sharing and user auth story? Passkeys could be used here (versus MFA/2FA), because if the passkey is lost, you can simply delete it and have the known user go through the onboarding flow again to create a new passkey.
I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things).
I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier.
I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, process, suggest relationships
If a thousand people ask an AI for a generic photo app, that's not only a huge waste of time and money, a lot of them are going to experience data loss because of it. And only a couple will know how to use docker.
Everyone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most.
The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N.
I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI.
The amount of code produced will remain significantly higher than before AI, but it will go down a bit, compared to the peak (and I’m not sure we’ve reached peak)
Great project but I believe Google Photos pricing is quite reasonable and alluring.
I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this
Google Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium. If you count your phone as another copy/medium you still need a 3rd copy somewhere if you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy.
> not accessible to my family
My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
It is possible in general, but almost everybody doing self hosting (and as outlined in the article) does it on a local network and not on the internet. Most people that self host don't want to have to be a sysadmin in their free time in order to have a reasonable risk of not leaking all your families photos to the internet.
I gave Immich a fair try, but it could not replace Apple Photos for my use case. YMMV, but my favorite Photos app features simply weren't available.
I use Apple's top-notch editing for all sorts of stuff - RAW images, videos, basic enhancements, etc. When I tested, Immich didn't have very good, if any, editing features.
I also love Apple's search functions, and it Just Works™. I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.
I also did not really care for Immich's UI, it felt overly basic and Material Design to me, but that is only personal preference.
Another gap is metadata. In Apple Photos I can tap the little "I" icon to see a lot of capture metadata, and in Immich I did not see an equivalent to how good Apple's one is.
> I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.
It’s less than you think! Consider that Apple’s image recognition happens on your phone. Also, it doesn’t matter if indexing is slow, as long as the photos are indexed before you need to search for them.
The greatest weakness of Google Photos is that it has no real incremental, automated backup features. If it could incrementally sync over to other services, it would be much better. The closest is to manually use Google Takeout to export specific time ranges, and then copy those elsewhere.
I mean I have dozens of TBs of raw photos, google photos or icloud simply arent an option.
And the thing I particularly enjoy about immich is that it's semantic searching is leagues better than any of the proprietary solutions in a lot of use cases. Particularly it works amazing for various brands and IP that 'cloud' offerings simply wont recognize.
As a retired semi-professional photographer I find it amazing how many photos some people have in their library. A mother with over 200GB of photos, 80% are junk, repeats, etc. She never looks at them either.
Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.
That's me in a nutshell. I have close to 300GiB in Google Photos, mostly photos and videos of my children. I take a lot of photographs because getting a good shot, for me, is mostly a matter of luck. I don't delete that many photos because it's active work and I don't really care to spend the time. I do curate an album of decent ones, just so the few people who care can see new photos and videos every now and then. I pay a relatively small fee for 2 TiB of space.
Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...
My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.
Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.
[self promo warning]
Setting up self hosting alternatives like immich is still the biggest adoption barrier out there. Most people are not technical.
I had the same problem even as a technical personal.
I built malmo to solve that. 1 click install for immich
malmo.network/store/immich
Underlying OS fully open source, install it on your own box or use a hosting provider
Horses for courses, but you’re comparing your best-case scenario to a worst-case Immich scenario. Admittedly I had a home lab box for it and am technical, but my effort was essentially pointing Claude at the Docker image and remembering a port number for setting up my phone.
Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The impetus to finally set up Immich came from my wife pushing past that. Even at fifty cents a GB forever, it’s not going to scale as well as essentially 0, though that depends on considering the drive as a sunk cost.
And now I finally have to suck it up and establish an off-site backup plan to make my scenario like for like. Damn you!
Neither of your proposed solutions are really similar to Immich, the first is certainly private and secure, but you don't get many of the conviniences like location-based search, automatic face/object tagging, automatic OCR, etc.
Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.
I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance
Yeah, and those photos aren’t available to you in a meaningful way when you’re out and about. Finding photos of Aunt Cassie over the years takes more effort.
I do both, folders for backup, Immich for indexing and mobile access. Real simple docker compose file I wrote once to get the whole thing going years ago.
Doesn’t have to be either or, and a dumb folder only accomplishes a portion of my needs.
I don't understand these types of comments. It's clear you don't value the features Immich provides. Can you not imagine someone else valuing them?
What are you trying to communicate to us? Maybe you are just trying to tell people that they can get away with simpler solution if all they care about is unscheduled photo backup. If so, I feel there is a less antagonistic way for you to say it.
The only thing I wanted to communicate is that "easier than ever" shouldn't be anywhere in the article. Neither should really the part about saving money, but others have mentioned it, so I don't have to.
Otherwise I think Immich seems like a cool project, and I hope they're successful.
I added the part about putting photos in a folder, to at least contribute with a different solution, which for me has worked very well for very long.
I use Immich, but saved me money it has not.
Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Still worth it, imo.
Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.
But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.
I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
You can use https://www.photosync-app.com/home if all you want is a local backup. It has a killer feature Immich is still missing: encryption at rest of the photos.
Just use LUKS, eCryptfs, or ZFS encryption. It’s not the application’s job to do encryption at rest, it’s the filesystem’s.
I personally find it nicer to unlock my phone to decrypt (Face ID) then dealing with having to auth with my headless server. Is there a way to manage this without putting the keys for LUKS or similar somewhere risky? Main threat is someone stealing the NAS during a break in.
You can store the key in the TPM. If someone steals the NAS, they can only decrypt it if they continue running the exact same software, which you harden (e.g. disable password login from the TTY).
Or you can SSH in and type the key once per reboot.
Just run both Google Photos and Immich on your phone. Open Immich once a week to sync all your recently taken photos.
Had gazillion copies of folders and iphoto libraries in various backups, but since i moved to linux as daily driver was on the hunt for a good photo archiver. Just recently started using Immich. Tried Photoprism too which would have also fit my need well, but somehow Immich won the coin toss ! (After many years was able to pull that one pic my wife was after from my archive !). My all those duplicates have been now been pulled and deduped and condensed into an immich library.
I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged).
Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i need my own local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data).
Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !
I don't think cost is the main reason you should move. Things like photos, gmail are definitely subsided by google so it's not a fair comparison. It's getting pretty easy to add backup for self hosting so that is becoming the smallest problem. Agree with you, still worth it
In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)
There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).
Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive
(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)
But its all under 1 roof and can be taken from you in a fire or be stolen?
I mean it could also get dropped yea, sure. This is just a neutral discussion of the costs, I'm not making an argument for anything.
(As for data, the third hard disk isn't actually bought yet and is meant to represent an offsite backup. I might use something like AWS Glacier or Hetzner Storage Box for this anyways cuz this is mostly for experimentation. I just like the idea of having a homelab.)
Ya, my setup still includes the google drive expense as that’s my offsite.
Nice, I see how that affects the cost benefit analysis for sure
Once a year I go through my photos and select my favourites and have them printed to paper. Using Google's print service (as an example) you can spend about $80 to have 150 photos printed into a book. If you do this once a year you will soon have a lovely shelf of paper photos you can easily store, easily look at and show to other people and hand down to your kids and their kids, etc. Long term I suspect my collection of books is far more likely to survive than my google account.
We got rid of my mom’s family photo books. Nobody has space / desire for 50 pounds of photos unfortunately. We use a rotating electronic frame now to cycle photos.
Long term your kids will probably wish they were digitized as well
I jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...
People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.
This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
What you call a commitment, many call a hobby / learning / refreshening opportunity.
yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does become a chore over time and there is always a cost. You can justify it by saying you are getting value out of it but in my experience, this is true for every activity. Everyone has limited time and spending it importantly is important to me.
Good news, my coding agents can access my proxmox and HA and immich and make having a homelab easier than it ever has been. I actually just used codex to help me find dupes across multiple user libraries in immich and quarantine them. In immich, I can only dedupe across a single user library. I used codex to find grid based images that I needed to convert into animated images from back in my iphone 4 days. It located the images, wrote software to convert to webp and handled it.
Codex reviewed my immich setup and recommended I change things the clip model, came up with a better backup strat and found holes in my system.
My codex will ADB into my NVIDIA Shield and proxmox and setup accounts, install packages, create Home Assistant integrations to tie it all together. As a hobbyist, these are things that I would never even think about taking on.
I bought a hdmi-cec controller for my projector last week. Firmware didnt work with the PX3-pro, but it was tied to my ESPHome. Codex diagnosed the issue, rewrote, tested and uploaded the firmware OTA. All done from my phone while I was waiting in line at a store.
> yes but there is still an opportunity cost
I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs
> a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks
This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
Other benefits not mentioned include not signing your data or life away to whatever Google's lawyers or marketers have decided is best for them, contributing to FLOSS even if only as an end user, not being a victim of rug-pulls...the list goes on.
Obviously this isn't for everybody, because there's no denying it takes time. The point is that for many, this is a very easy tradeoff to make when factoring in all of the other benefits.
> I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs
This is mostly wording. It is a commitment, it has an opportunity cost, there are tradeoffs.
> This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.
So many opportunities but the day is still 24 hours long. You still have to choose your opportunities wisely, and give up something else in the process. And if you look at the big picture those who choose to take this opportunity are not so many compared to those who just pay with data so they don't have to pay with time and effort. Everyone pays money in the end.
> You still have to choose your opportunities wisely
It's odd that you've gone off on this as opposed to people who spend their 'opportunity time' on Netflix, Call of Duty or D&D.
Sysadmin is a hobby I enjoy and I don't consider it lost time, or wasted opportunity, when so many of my colleagues go out getting drunk or watch football.
> It's odd that you've gone off on this
"Gone off on this"? Wait till you see me go off on people with a lack of reading comprehension, a pathological persecution complex, and a giant chip on their shoulder.
Anyway, if you ask your parents to explain my comment to you, they'll probably immediately tell you that it's a generic comment on the inability to take up every opportunity all the time. You choose one thing, others choose another, everyone does their own math (you should probably ask someone to do your math for you). I don't care about your hobby which is why I didn't mention "sysadmin", "Netflix", "Call of Duty" or "D&D", nor did I say which one I consider "better" or "worthwhile". Just that you can't do them all.
> This is mostly wording
Right, but the distinction is relevant in the context of the original claim:
> People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend
My point was that many of us do account for this time in the aforementioned ways.
Plus, once it's set up, it practically runs itself if you have a sane backup methodology and are only running upgrades every couple months.
If you have to jump through this set of hoops to come to the conclusion that you want to outsource the effort of self-admin, just save the trouble and deal with not being the target audience.
Was it a full moon or what's with the dick attitude? It's a few sentences that basically say "you can't have all the hobbies, some people choose something else, everyone pays with whatever they can afford". What's the point of your reply other than the attempted jab at the end?
> jump through this set of hoops
And a weak jab that was for someone who's overwhelmed from trying to parse a couple of sentences. If you thought it's objectively wrong you would have already pointed that out loudly and offensively.
So you just took the opportunity to feel like a big boy and tell me "this admin stuff is not for you". Good for you big boy, glad you got that out of the system.
Of course, you also outsource the effort for almost everything around you (even your reading comprehension), to someone else - an expert, the person you're talking to, or your parents. But you can download a compose file and import it in what's probably a NAS with a nice "import" GUI so welcome to the "target audience". I'm a big boy too, you see, one with actual reading comprehension ;).
> If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much.
And I happily used a Google pro subscription for a while. Even when they doubled the price. Then they started actually limiting it to 5TB and it wasn't worth it.
I guarantee you I am saving boatloads compared to the $100/month tier I'd need for all my data. That pays off my entire hardware budget in under a year and the time I spent is worth a fraction of that.
The value of the homelab for me is things I can’t pay money to get any other way. I would never recommend it for just replacing cloud storage, ROI is not good.
There’s nothing as nice as Plex for consuming media IMHO, and home assistant/homebridge glue a pile of cheap IoT stuff into a single, cohesive, useable setup.
I am a reluctant admin. I resent spending time on it. It feels like work, which after 10 hours of doing similar things for much better pay grinds on you. Luckily it doesn’t take much time to keep it going after the initial setup.
Thread and Matter give me hope one day the IoT stuff might be okay. I have no hope I will ever be able to get the single media portal any other way.
I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.
I run all my own stuff local-first, but I am also a systems and networking engineer and understand all of the concepts so I can build it properly. It takes time, and the willingness to do so. If you don't already have the knowledge to set things like this up, and are really doing it to save money as a consumer, then Google Photos as a product is more of a fit and the user will definitely have a better experience.
For someone like me, it's easy and quick and I have a very robust incremental backup system with air-gapped copies. So it does save me money, because it only takes my time and knowledge.
There is no absolute answer, because it's subjective depending on the needs of the user.
This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright
Depends heavily on the software cost and how far from core competency it is.
If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY.
If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it.
Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.
The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.
And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately
OSS lets you take your time.
For example, paperless-ngx was already an absolute ball of mud, and now there’s a new major version that’s somehow even worse.
I’m just not upgrading. It’s behind a VPN, I control what files it can ingest, so it’s okay if it’s old.
I’m looking at a few alternatives and I’ll switch when they are mature and when I have the time, but there’s essentially no deadline.
It definitely can, but Its easier than ever to fork an older version and modify with claude, or just switch to a different OSS provider. With commercial tools there's no rolling back. In fact, I would pay money to go back to the pre Allen Dye liquid ass IOS update.
Eh, once it's set up the maintenance cost is minimal. Cron'd backups and such and you won't have to worry.
Yes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms
What's the math for the cost of getting banned from Google for some stupid AI reason?
Google takeout is pretty good with exporting photos.
Be aware that for a few 100's Go the google takeout files will contains corrupted data.
You have to make at least 2 takeout to be sure to have all your files in good shape.
The problem is notto download but to verify and be sure nothing else is missing.
Last I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?
They do also split up to 2GB archives. So they are very manageable
You can change the split size. But yes.
I exported something like 450GB photos in chunks of 50GB iirc.
Tip: export the takeout to Google drive then download it from there.
Otherwise link downloads have # of times you can retry before they are deleted.
I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years.
Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.
Exactly. Though when something similar happened to me, and I was able to salvage most of it, the next thing I did was:
discard/reject/delete: ≈400GB → 25GB → 3GB (< a decade ago; I remember) (I was shocked to see how little of that really mattered).
and since then I have been backing up starting from that 3GB set which, more than a decade later, is obviously more now, but the learning was don't let amount of data control/tame you, it should be the other way round. So I can just use multiple PAYG backup destinations without worrying about insane costs.
The amount of photos and videos I took also went astronomically down after that. I realised what I was missing - I had lost the data and for the most part I didn't have many of those scenes/moments to begin with. Because I was busy taking those digital photos and videos.
Of all my possessions, I would discard my photos last.
Same here. My family photos are a treasure to me.
“You _will_ lose them”, as in, somehow Immich will do something to lose them (like making a mistake in a dedupe process which deletes the wrong things), or are you just saying you also need to keep backups?
Whatever system it is on will die, etc.
unlike Photos, you don’t have a team of professionals managing it 24/7.
(that said, takeout your Google Photos too, because single point of failure, etc).
More so that any storage system will eventually fail me thinks.
is nas + backup to amazon glacier a good solution?
For cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future.
If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.
Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.
Yes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly.
I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.
I wouldn’t back up directly to Glacier, because you want to be able to verify your backups, and reading from Glacier is expensive.
Yes. Should have 1 onsite + 1 offsite backup ideally.
I always follow 321 for important things. Three copies, two media types, one offsite.
My primary use case for Immich is not as a Google Photos replacement, but as a backup of my photos that are on Google Photos. With all the horror stories in the past of folks getting locked out of their Google accounts (and this all Google services) for misunderstandings without a successful appeal, I don't want to risk losing all of my memories just because Google decided that they needed to lock my account for some reason or another. I'll trust that Google won't lose my data but I don't trust that they will continue to let me access it indefinitely.
I don’t get that. Why isn’t google takeout easier, simpler, faster? Am I missing something?
I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me: Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)It’s data privacy. You won’t save any money, google is dirt cheap when it comes to storage, because of their scale. (I’m talking storage you can use for Immich pictures)
In hindsight I am baffled that I accepted for google to have all my pictures, scan all the faces, etc. Insane.
But when everyone is doing it, it turns something off in the brain. I attended a seminar where the explanation was: We don’t have the cognitive resource to do a deep analysis (or any analysis) of every single decision every minute, which is why, evolutionary, we relied on crowd wisdom to move such decisions from CPU to ASIC, the ASIC being “is everyone else doing it?”.
I am still angry at myself that I gave them my pictures for years, the pictures of my relatives’ kids, etc.
@Immich team: pleeeeease add the horizon straightening feature.
In my experience, if you want to use all Immich ML features fluently, the device fee is much more expensive than the Google subscription fee. I think there is only one metric that can attract people, which is privacy.
I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.
My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.
Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.
Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.
Immich is such a wonderful piece of OSS software. I've replaced Google Photos with it. And then some.
For the nerds...https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.
Any info on your public proxy setup?
Likely https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy
I started there and ended up rewriting it in Preact/Go which is the direction I've been heading with the apps I maintain for myself.
Not the commenttor, however I personally am a big fan of Cloudflare tunnels.
One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account. It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.
I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free.
After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.
Immich is wonderful, but if you're mostly looking for a solution to take your mind off the problem and don't want to self-host, try Ente photos.
> The ability to upload photos from your device automatically
I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.
It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.
Docs for context: https://docs.immich.app/features/mobile-backup/
https://github.com/immich-app/immich
Easy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..
It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index.
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
What do you mean opaquely named directories? It’s yyyy/yyyy-MM-dd/originalFileName. Those opaquely named files are the thumbnails.
Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.
For this exact reason, I'm using Immich by pointing it to my folder structure as an "external library" https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/
https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ is their best attempt to address your concern, but honestly I'm fine with navigating my photos solely using immich. (with annual backup copy stored in cold cloud storage)
I believe that's a setting, you can have it store the files in a more predictable directory hierarchy. Though it's better to make that choice early on before doing a lot of imports.
I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to preserve storage space.
Yeah, sharing is one of the big problems with Immich. You either need to expose your whole instance to make share links publicly accessible (and there's no way to secure user accounts with 2FA), or create user accounts for the people you want to share with and/or invite them and set up your VPN for them to access the shares.
There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).
Is there a way to sponsor a feature request to improve the sharing and user auth story? Passkeys could be used here (versus MFA/2FA), because if the passkey is lost, you can simply delete it and have the known user go through the onboarding flow again to create a new passkey.
Open Noodle is a fork of Immich which addresses the lack of Sharing: https://opennoodle.de/features/?category=sharing
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I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things).
I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier.
I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, process, suggest relationships
If a thousand people ask an AI for a generic photo app, that's not only a huge waste of time and money, a lot of them are going to experience data loss because of it. And only a couple will know how to use docker.
Everyone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most.
The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N.
I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI.
The amount of code produced will remain significantly higher than before AI, but it will go down a bit, compared to the peak (and I’m not sure we’ve reached peak)
Great project but I believe Google Photos pricing is quite reasonable and alluring.
I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this
Google Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium. If you count your phone as another copy/medium you still need a 3rd copy somewhere if you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy.
> not accessible to my family
My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
Why would it not be accessible to your family? Immich allows sharing links
It is possible in general, but almost everybody doing self hosting (and as outlined in the article) does it on a local network and not on the internet. Most people that self host don't want to have to be a sysadmin in their free time in order to have a reasonable risk of not leaking all your families photos to the internet.
There is an immich proxy project: https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy
I wouldn't make the instance itself public, but I think this is a decent tradeoff. Of course still requires one to be a sysadmin.
I gave Immich a fair try, but it could not replace Apple Photos for my use case. YMMV, but my favorite Photos app features simply weren't available.
I use Apple's top-notch editing for all sorts of stuff - RAW images, videos, basic enhancements, etc. When I tested, Immich didn't have very good, if any, editing features.
I also love Apple's search functions, and it Just Works™. I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.
I also did not really care for Immich's UI, it felt overly basic and Material Design to me, but that is only personal preference.
Another gap is metadata. In Apple Photos I can tap the little "I" icon to see a lot of capture metadata, and in Immich I did not see an equivalent to how good Apple's one is.
> I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.
It’s less than you think! Consider that Apple’s image recognition happens on your phone. Also, it doesn’t matter if indexing is slow, as long as the photos are indexed before you need to search for them.
I used to run Immich on a 2nd gen Core i3.
I have google photos and pay 10$ / Month.
I also have a zfs based fileserver setup were i do snapshots before i backup from my desktop were i manage my pictures.
I backup my zfs based filesystem online for off-side.
My images (a lot of pictures, dslr quality, raw) is around 2tb.
You don't just replicate what a company like Google does for you for 10$ and without knowing stuff about...
The greatest weakness of Google Photos is that it has no real incremental, automated backup features. If it could incrementally sync over to other services, it would be much better. The closest is to manually use Google Takeout to export specific time ranges, and then copy those elsewhere.
Great project, saved my photos when the Pixel device wasn't as waterproof as promised.
Immich seems way too complex for what I need. Redis, Postgres and Docker just to look at your photos? Eugh
I just use Shotwell: https://shotwell-project.org/
Shotwell is great, but it's a single-machine photo organizer; I don't think you can really compare it to Immich on level ground.
I wrote my own blog about moving to self-hosting on Hetzner with Immich
https://www.sam-brink.com/posts/self-host
Fantastic project. I have been using it for about a year and have had no problems yet. Building another box to deploy for family.
Very curious about how frictionless is the Immich - iPhone / iCloud Photos sync, especially offloaded photos.
I'm using photoprism for a few years now, but the companion app on the phone is always the pain point.
I made the switch from photoprism to immich a couple years ago and the app is far better. Sad to hear it hasn't improved in the mean time.
Can this sync when you migrate onto LAN?
> By default, Immich will only upload photos and videos when connected to Wi-Fi. You can change this behavior in the backup settings page.
It can also optionally switch to connecting to a local ip/hostname when on your lan.
nice, thx!
I mean I have dozens of TBs of raw photos, google photos or icloud simply arent an option.
And the thing I particularly enjoy about immich is that it's semantic searching is leagues better than any of the proprietary solutions in a lot of use cases. Particularly it works amazing for various brands and IP that 'cloud' offerings simply wont recognize.
I use with borgbase and borgmatic
As a retired semi-professional photographer I find it amazing how many photos some people have in their library. A mother with over 200GB of photos, 80% are junk, repeats, etc. She never looks at them either.
Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.
That's me in a nutshell. I have close to 300GiB in Google Photos, mostly photos and videos of my children. I take a lot of photographs because getting a good shot, for me, is mostly a matter of luck. I don't delete that many photos because it's active work and I don't really care to spend the time. I do curate an album of decent ones, just so the few people who care can see new photos and videos every now and then. I pay a relatively small fee for 2 TiB of space.
"it’s now easier than ever"
Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...
My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.
Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.
[self promo warning] Setting up self hosting alternatives like immich is still the biggest adoption barrier out there. Most people are not technical. I had the same problem even as a technical personal.
I built malmo to solve that. 1 click install for immich malmo.network/store/immich
Underlying OS fully open source, install it on your own box or use a hosting provider
Horses for courses, but you’re comparing your best-case scenario to a worst-case Immich scenario. Admittedly I had a home lab box for it and am technical, but my effort was essentially pointing Claude at the Docker image and remembering a port number for setting up my phone.
Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The impetus to finally set up Immich came from my wife pushing past that. Even at fifty cents a GB forever, it’s not going to scale as well as essentially 0, though that depends on considering the drive as a sunk cost.
And now I finally have to suck it up and establish an off-site backup plan to make my scenario like for like. Damn you!
Google sells 100 gi for $2/mo. So it's a lot more than 2g.
Neither of your proposed solutions are really similar to Immich, the first is certainly private and secure, but you don't get many of the conviniences like location-based search, automatic face/object tagging, automatic OCR, etc.
Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.
I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance
Use claude code or any other llm to set this up for you then
I have Syncthing on my android phone, my laptop and my always-on nuc at home. There's a folder where I keep anything I want to backup.
Or you can use this and pay no dollar per month for an accessible indexed search of 12+ months of photos, not used to train AI models.
Yes, I already pay no dollar per month for storing my photos in a folder and it's not used to train any AI model.
Yeah, and those photos aren’t available to you in a meaningful way when you’re out and about. Finding photos of Aunt Cassie over the years takes more effort.
I do both, folders for backup, Immich for indexing and mobile access. Real simple docker compose file I wrote once to get the whole thing going years ago.
Doesn’t have to be either or, and a dumb folder only accomplishes a portion of my needs.
I don't understand these types of comments. It's clear you don't value the features Immich provides. Can you not imagine someone else valuing them?
What are you trying to communicate to us? Maybe you are just trying to tell people that they can get away with simpler solution if all they care about is unscheduled photo backup. If so, I feel there is a less antagonistic way for you to say it.
The only thing I wanted to communicate is that "easier than ever" shouldn't be anywhere in the article. Neither should really the part about saving money, but others have mentioned it, so I don't have to.
Otherwise I think Immich seems like a cool project, and I hope they're successful.
I added the part about putting photos in a folder, to at least contribute with a different solution, which for me has worked very well for very long.