Immich: opinion revised
Immich: opinion revised
Immich is a modern photo management web application which aims to be similar to Google Photo. It can be uses to backup phone photos and also manage older collection of older photos.
Hi fellow self-hoster.
Almost one year ago i did experiment with Immich and found, at the time, that it was not up to pair to what i was expecting from it. Basically my use case was slightly different from the Immich user experience.
After all this time i decided to give it another go and i am amazed! It has grown a lot, it now has all the features i need and where lacking at the time.
So, in just a few hours i set it up and configured my external libraries, backup, storage template and OIDC authentication with authelia. All works.
Great kudos to the devs which are doing an amazing work.
I have documented all the steps of the process with the link on top of this post, hope it can be useful for someone.
Your website hasa banner that says it uses cookies and that by using it I acknowledge having read the privacy policy, but if I click More Information it takes me to a page the wiki says want created yet.
Never noticed. I don't do anything with the cookies anyway, its just a docuwiki self hosted, no ads, no data collection, nothing. I don't even store logs.
I might need to write the privacy policy... Will do tomorrow.
Im not familiar with doku wiki but here's a few thoughts
- privacy policy is good to have regardless of what you do with rest of my comments
- your site is creating a cookie "dokuwiki" for user tracking.
- cookie is created regardless of user agreement, rather than waiting for acceptance (implied or explicit agreement). As in i visit the page, i click nothing and i already have the dokuwiki cookie.
- i like umami analytics for a cookieless google analytics alternative. They have a generous free cloud option for hobby users and umami is also self hostable. Then you can get rid of any banner.
If you don't process any user data beyond what is technologically required to make the website work, you don't need to inform the user about it.
Afaik the cookie policy on your site is not GDPR compliant, at least how it is currently worded. If all cookies are "technically necessary" for function of the site, then I think all you need to do is say that. (I think for a wiki it's acceptable to require clients to allow caching of image data, so your server doesn't have to pay for more bandwidth).
i have double checked but i do not have any banner on my wiki at all... Where did you see one? The only cookie is a technical cookie only used for your preferences and no tracking.
I'm using immich for half a year or so now. There only problem is that it did not chunked uploads. So one large video just never uploaded, and I had to use nextcloud to upload it instead. Otherwise, it's great.
If you're self hosting Immich on your local network, I've gotten around this by setting the Immich app to use my local ip address while on my home wifi network.
Yes, i encountered this issue as well. Seems that tweaking NGINX setting helped. Still stupid that a large upload will stall all the others.
I love immich. I just wish for two things:
- synchronised deletes on client server
- the edit tools on mobile to actually work on the photo at hand instead of creating a new photo with new metadata. May as well not have the tools, tbh.
What is synchronized deletes on client server?
Thank you for this. I plan to look at the authentication part more closely, but that's the part I can't quite figure out (being an amateur at this stuff but still trying), since I'm nervous with just a password accessing it remotely or from the phone.
Authelia, NGINX, there is so much that's confusing to me, but this might help.
I’d recommend setting up a VPN, like tailscale. The internet is an evil place where everyone hates you and a single tiny mistake will mess you up. Remove risk and enjoy the hobby more.
Some people will argue that serving stuff on open ports to the public internet is fine. They are not wrong, but don’t do it until you know, understand and accept the risks.(’normal_distribution_meme.pbm’)
Remember, risk is ’probability’ times ’shitshow’, and other people can, in general, only help you determine the probability.
Feel free to ask, even in pm, if I can help. Not a guru myself, but getting a bit more experience overtime.
I'm curious;
Which ML CLIP model did you go with, and how accurate are you finding the search results?
I found the default kinda sub-par, particularly when it came to text in images.
Switched to "immich-app/XLM-Roberta-Large-Vit-B-16Plus" and it's improved a bit; but I still find the search somewhat lacking.
The best one I have found was one of the newer ones that was added a few months ago. ViT-B-16-SigLIP__webli
Really impressed with the accuracy even with multi word search like "espresso machine"
My only issue with it is that on my iphone, the app constantly freezes and says I have 3 photos left to upload. It’s almost certain to freeze for a few minutes and the upload becomes stalled as well. This behavior made it take a long time to backup my library and it makes it a pain in the ass to share photos quickly with people. Popping into the webUI has none of these issues (just no uploading of my photos). I still quite love the app
How did you do external backups?
I used to use a docker container that makes db dumps of the database and drops it into the same persistent storage folder the main application uses. I use this for everything in docker that had a db.
Immich as recently integrated this into the app itself so its no longer needed.
All my docker persistent data is in a top level folder called dockerdata.
In that I have sub folders like immich which get mounted as volumes in the docker apps.
So now I have only 1 folder to backup for everything. I use zfs snapshots to backup locally (zfs auto shot) and borgmatic for remote backups (borgbase).
All my dockers all compose files that are in git.
I can restore he entire server by restoring 1 data folder and 1 compose file per stack.
I backup with restic the database backups done by immich, not the database itself, and the Library/library folder which contains the actual images and videos.
Haven't checked in a while but is there any hope for cloud storage of the image library yet? I'm kind of holding out for S3 support because I don't want to manage multiple terabytes locally.
I don't think immich supports this natively but you could mount an S3 store with s3fs-fuse and put the library on there without much trouble. Or many other options like webdav.
I have a problem generating thumbnails for photos taken from summer 2023 until now (using my iPhone 12 Pro). It's like a format problem or something. I don't know ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You might want to submit a bug report. Their pace of development is insane for OSS.
I've been trialing some similar apps and none of them really fully satisfy me, including immich. Mostly because they all make it clunky to exclude some photos from showing up, or indexing being slow as hell and not particularly good at removing photos I recently ignored, deleted or moved. Immich in particular is bad with the ignore part. I wish I could edit a text block that defined ignore rules like a gitignore, but instead you have to add each rule separately in the UI. Then it feels very slow to add thumbnails for raw files and slow to index period. So many of these apps seem to me like they fumbled the ball just short of a touchdown because otherwise the featuresets seem nice.
I have tried damselfly, immich, libre photos, photo prism, and I tried to configure nextcloud memories but I could not even get it running. It seemed pretty complicated and picky about its setup.
I went trough them all and probably a few more (photoview) and Immich is by far the best. Also at that pace of development it will be perfect soon.
Its by far the fastest for thumbnails and indexing so far at least on my hardware.
Nice comment