1y ago

Immich is awesome

I know we had posts like this before, but Immich deserves 👏

One more update, one less container, the best Google Photos alternative, its just amazing!!

Don't forget to edit your docker-compose before updating

73 comments

the color scheme of that icon physically hurts to look at
- Time to use arcticons
- Wow! You found the problem. Congrats!

Noticed it stopped working yesterday, wasnt at home so I couldn't really get into it, just checked the docker logs via portainer on the go and was like "wtf is this error?!" Was relieved when I learned what the issue was and that it's just a restructuring of the containers.
While it can be unnerving that they don't shy away from breaking things in order to improve the service, it's actually a very good thing and keeps the app from getting bogged down in some "but backwards compatibility"legacy code hell (wonder what some people in Redmond would know about that). Let's just hope that they never publish an update that permanently breaks things when you haven't followed a very strict weird update procedure or something.
- you should exclude the immich stack from auto-updating and subscribe to immich releases.
  most of the time will just be a docker compose pull && docker compose up -d && docker compose logs -f
  
  And for the love of god don't go for latest, just stick to the release tags
- They have mentioned that once out of dev/alpha status they will figure out proper release versioning so you can pin a major version and not get breaking changes.
- Do not have docker containers auto update.
  
  Or, if you do have it auto-update (like I do) prepare for things to break every now and then. I auto-update just about all containers except those that would break either my home automation or my ability to login to my network and fix things. Everything else auto-updates, including Immich.
  My Immich broke this weekend when they switched the stack over to pgvecto, to use vector searching in Postgres. Easily fixed, but took me a solid minute to figure out what had changed.
  Which is kinda weird they didn't communicate this one so well. In the lead-up to v.1.88.0, Alex made an announcement on Github to let people know the breaking change was the removal of the web container from the stack, rolling the webserver into the main server container itself. That was a good move, as all I did was flip my Watchtower container on that host to monitor only.
  Dunno why they didn't do something similar for the Postgres change. Was just as breaking.
  
  Unless the container follows semver and only auto updates minor versions.
  Edit : Which Immich isn't.

How do ppl think of immich Vs photoprism? I dislike photoprism because every action takes 10 seconds
- For me Photoprism is unusable for the simple fact that they don't support multiple users. Also Photoprism doesn't have an official app which I can easily use on my phone to sync photos.
  
  yeah the simple workflow of the app -> immich server makes it seamless. i think that is the magic part of immich, the barrier to entry for getting your photos in (and the WAF) is key.
  
  I think photoprism supports multiple users.
  If you pay $72 per year.....
- Photoprism has different approach. Last time I tried I wasn't impressed. Immich, on the other hand, gives me almost identical experience to Google Photos. I was heavily using Google Photos, so this is probably the reason why I am pro-immich.
- I've just set up an Immich server and the UI is nice and uploading is quite fast. Waiting for Google takeout to finish so I can import my whole library....
  Also your Lemmy account is marked as a bot btw. Some people block bot accounts.

Looks interesting, thanks for the rec!
Is there a way to semi-easily import my Google Photos archive?
- Take a look into immich-go
  
  +1 for it. Used it previously and just recently. Works like a charm!
- You can use Google Takeout to request all of your Google photos to be downloaded
  
  And don't forget to change the default file export size. The default is 2gb, which for me resulted in over 300 files to download and there's no easy to way to automate it. 50gb is max which was much better for me

Installed it because of this thread to my homelab today. I never really managed my phone images in any way, never uploaded them anywhere. This was the first time. About 5 gigabytes of images and videos were synced to my NAS in a few minutes, now I can search them and all that. It's a pretty cool setup, although the installation is a bit tricky if you don't go to the path they give you. I run a Postgres server in Proxmox, and you have to install just the right version of pgvecto.rs for the system to work.
Browsing the issues I was able to figure out what went wrong, and after downgrading, no issues.
- But it's not that difficult to dedicate Docker compose file for an "immich project" and use exactly as developer suggests. You are not like going to have 100+ users, more like 1-10 users and even RPI would be enough. It's not an issue to have small database along immich project on the same host.
  
  It just doesn't feel right to have multiple postgres databases running, if every other service uses the one in the network. Having already monitoring, disk space and backups set...
  
  Though if you have something better than a Pi that would be ideal. Then it can do nice things like face detection, object detection for search, and transcoding.

Thanks for the reminder to check my docker compose file. I finally deployed immich for the family last week. I had tried it before, but held out for external libraries.
We never really used Google photos or iCloud, so having a similar experience with the library on my NAS is amazing.

The only thing preventing me to move from photoview to immich is the lack of sorting/viewing photos by folder hierarchy. I love the UI and the machine learning customisation options. They recently added the "external albums" feature, so I am hoping this folder hierarchy thing, too, will soon be implemented.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters

NAS Network-Attached Storage
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC Single-Board Computer
2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
[Thread #360 for this sub, first seen 17th Dec 2023, 14:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Fewer Letters	More Letters
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC	Single-Board Computer

The only thing holding me back with Immich has been the non-obvious back end storage options.
I'd like to keep my data in an S3 bucket, but from what I can tell it's still unsupported because of some limitations with fuse.
- Just a question - are you considering AWS unlimited S3 storage where you pay-as-you-use?
  
  Yes. I want to put it into cloud storage that I control and can move around as required, so that I can't run out of space. And so that I don't need to manage a local physical drive.
- i semi-agree. i added a feature request explicitly asking for that in the really early days of the project.
  What i REALLY want from the project is adding to the 3-2-1 type of backup strategy. I want it to also store a backup in an external system. something like local filesystem like it is now, then have a versioned type of backup in an S3 compatible buckets (backblaze B2??). something like a simple borg backup or other incremental backup system.
  since it talks a lot about backup of photos, i dont really see it is a backup solution.
  note: i LOVE immich
  
  I think I'll have to do this myself, separately.

I actually managed to fuck the install up lmao. I run my own postgres so I used the image with extension from the docs. I picked version 0.1.13 since i thought a patch version wouldn't matter, psych, it did. Had to go back to immich v1. 8something because it wouldn't connect even after changing postgres back to the 0.1.11 version mentioned in the docs. Less beer more reading.
- Why dont you run 2nd posgres instance for immich only? Maybe there is a good reason that Im not aware of, but they changed database image in 1.91.0

After seeing this post I finally gave it a whirl. After a few days of use, I've decided to stick with photoprism. It's interesting to see how they each have different strengths. I think immich looks more promising, but I ran into problems with a ton of missing thumbnails, map photo clusters that weren't actionable, black panorama images, and some things in the UI that I just wasn't into. Great app though! It's really exciting to see multiple self hosted image apps being developed. I kept my launch configs and customizations and will give it another look in 3-6 months.

Any idea how it compares to Synology Photos?
- I have no idea, but I heard only good things about both of them
  
  Thanks :)
- A bit off topic, but Synology Photos is not vendor-agnostic and open source sofrware that you can host on your RPI or home server. It's Synology NAS specific, isn't it?
  
  That's right, yeah. I've already got the NAS and my photos are on it though, so for my case, I may as well use it unless it's got any flaws or deficiencies :)
- I think you can use Synology photos as the backup for the images and this as your front end ... But not sure haven't done it.
  
  I'll look into that, thanks :)

Playing with the demo, it lacks adding text/captions and reordering photos compared to Google Photos. Any other suggestions?
- Considering that it's free, always improving and self-hosted, I am more than happy that it lacks some minor features from Google Photos. :) It's not perfect, but I can relax that nothing like this would happen to me:
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked
  
  Not only that, but Google Photos already pulled a huge bait-and-switch. It used to be free unlimited photo storage for compressed photos...until they just stopped.
  I love immich!

Over the holidays I experimented with Immich, especially after they added support for existing folders. These are my initial thoughts comparing it to PhotoPrism.
I find the application quite appealing; it runs more smoothly on both web and mobile platforms compared to PhotoPrism (PP). However, it lacks the polish and some of the features present in PP, such as sidebar options for different views.
The face detection functionality in Immich differs from PP. It works well, especially when identifying younger versions of people. However, it struggles to distinguish between many mother-son pictures, and sister-sister. I adjusted the threshold, but now I have to manually merge clusters of images. It's inconvenient that I can only merge 5 clusters at a time, and there's no way to change this in the configuration. This limitation is frustrating. However, the ability to have multiple accounts and share photos is a positive feature.
I appreciate the story-like feature that shows what happened 'n' years ago, but it's disappointing that others you share the library with can't see it. Also, the mobile and web applications lack consistency; for example, merging photos and getting suggestions for existing names is not possible on the mobile version.
My feelings about Immich are mixed, and I hope the app continues to be developed and improved.

if only photosync would work properly in the background on ios ... i thought it is supposed to but it just doesnt do the thing by itself. sometimes i get a notification about 0/5xx photos being synced. hm. i know its more like ios sabotaging the software here, yet still it prevents me from using it more :/
- Apple sabotages your user experience at every turn unless you use their solutions which cost money and your response is to stop using other software. Sounds like the desired outcome for Apple.
- Have you tried the Immich app? I know in general iOS has such restrictive power management that syncing can be unreliable.
  
  thats what i meant – is there an alternative option?

I am a bit confused what is meant by:
"You can do this by connecting to the immich database as a superuser and running..."
How do I connect to the database exactly?
- Use something like pgAdmin, DBeaver or the pg cli to connect to your postgres instance. Then run the command from the changelog as a SQL query.
- You only need to do this in a specific scenario, "Note: If you are running your database with a non-superuser role for Immich"
  If you're running the docker stack that immich provides you don't need to do this.

Anyone tried to install this on casaos?
- Yeah, it's running Great. Use the BigBear shop version, it's basically ready-to-go

40+ years of photos already sorted into albums and sub albums make immich useless to me. I am using LibrePhoto which feels slower but works as well.
We will see what the future holds for both projects.
- Immich supports external folders now. You can mount them as read only.
  
  Interesting... But worth migrating from LibrePhotos? Does immich support base-path? To reverse-proxy as https://whatever/photos instead of https://photos.Whatever?

73 comments