Not everyone has the technical ability or hardware to selfhost immich, even just for LAN access. If I tried to teach my wife enough about docker/docker-compose to get immich set up, running, kept updated, and troubleshooting when it has problems… I would probably be limping away with a fork stuck in my leg. Could it be a fun project for people that are interested in it? Definitely, but most people want an easy cloud service that works as easily as data-gathering alternatives over something they have to maintain themselves even in the form of occasional docker-compose pull
I have self hosted immich almost a year, tried to make it the standard for my family. For me it was a pain in the ass to keep it running and available to have a smooth experience on my family. I had to rebuild it several times because of complex behavior and a few breaking changes, the iOS app is not working properly, I ended up removing it, too much time consuming.
Personally I don’t trust myself with self-hosting something as important as photos. It would probably be fine, but I’m willing to pay for someone else to manage the infrastructure.
Backups. You should be taking regular backups whether it’s you hosting or Google. If you are, there’s really very little risk.
You’ll also have the images on the phone, which should remain long enough for the images automatically stored to get into backup storage. Personally, all my images upload from my phone automatically after I’m on WiFi for 10 minutes.
Yeah, Immich has been on my radar for a number of years, but I’ve read a lot about breaking changes being a pain to deal with, and I’m a bit busy as it is right now with work and other personal projects to tinker too heavily.
Will take a closer look as I hear a stable release is planned soon.
I’ve been running mine for a year or two and don’t really mess with it at all. I think I remember those breaking changes maybe 18 months ago? Was not difficult to update, and it’s been running smooth as butter since.
I’ve got it installed on my phone with automatic backups enabled. It had no issues with duplicates from both Takeout and the existing photos on my phone. (I even did the upload twice due to running out of space the first time, and there were no dupes). The app has a pretty similar design to Google Photos, so it feels familiar. It also supports Google’s version of “live photos”.
You can create links to share albums or individual photos, and you can also add people to your plan.
I enabled the local machine learning analysis and, while it’s not perfect, it does make for a pretty nice searching experience.
If I’ve learned anything from this community, it’s that having just one open source alternative to a closed source POS run by Google is not the ideal! Competition is always healthy.
The Mozilla foundation also granted some money to ente a company that offers Google photos replacement with end to end encryption.
Anyone used Ente? How is it?
i downloaded it after the news the other day. Presently uploading >200gb of pictures.
Android App has a few quirks, not very snappy, but it looks pretty polished.
The on device ML seems to be pretty accurate once you start tagging people.
We’ll see how it handles me throwing the 200gb at it because it was already stuttering a bit when scrolling through ~15gb of pics.
I havent had the chance to spin up an immich instance yet to compare the two.
All in all, we might need to wait for a longer term user to chime in, but as of now to me it seems good enough.
But… Immich does this just fine, and is pretty great at it.
Options are good
This
One of these is proprietary, so one option is good
Not everyone has the technical ability or hardware to selfhost immich, even just for LAN access. If I tried to teach my wife enough about docker/docker-compose to get immich set up, running, kept updated, and troubleshooting when it has problems… I would probably be limping away with a fork stuck in my leg. Could it be a fun project for people that are interested in it? Definitely, but most people want an easy cloud service that works as easily as data-gathering alternatives over something they have to maintain themselves even in the form of occasional docker-compose pull
I think I’m going to wait until immich thinks so as well
I have self hosted immich almost a year, tried to make it the standard for my family. For me it was a pain in the ass to keep it running and available to have a smooth experience on my family. I had to rebuild it several times because of complex behavior and a few breaking changes, the iOS app is not working properly, I ended up removing it, too much time consuming.
Personally I don’t trust myself with self-hosting something as important as photos. It would probably be fine, but I’m willing to pay for someone else to manage the infrastructure.
Backups. You should be taking regular backups whether it’s you hosting or Google. If you are, there’s really very little risk.
You’ll also have the images on the phone, which should remain long enough for the images automatically stored to get into backup storage. Personally, all my images upload from my phone automatically after I’m on WiFi for 10 minutes.
Yeah, Immich has been on my radar for a number of years, but I’ve read a lot about breaking changes being a pain to deal with, and I’m a bit busy as it is right now with work and other personal projects to tinker too heavily.
Will take a closer look as I hear a stable release is planned soon.
I’ve been running mine for a year or two and don’t really mess with it at all. I think I remember those breaking changes maybe 18 months ago? Was not difficult to update, and it’s been running smooth as butter since.
This is a betrayal of Lord Immich’s good name and estate.
Very happy Ente user here! It’s a great alternative to Google Photos and Immich (since I think photos are too important to self-host).
They have an easy guide for migrating from Google Photos (basically they can import a Takeout export directly).
https://ente.io/faq/migration/from-google-photos/
I’ve got it installed on my phone with automatic backups enabled. It had no issues with duplicates from both Takeout and the existing photos on my phone. (I even did the upload twice due to running out of space the first time, and there were no dupes). The app has a pretty similar design to Google Photos, so it feels familiar. It also supports Google’s version of “live photos”.
You can create links to share albums or individual photos, and you can also add people to your plan.
I enabled the local machine learning analysis and, while it’s not perfect, it does make for a pretty nice searching experience.
Pretty good, very responsive to feedback on Matrix/discord. Great features, love it
We already have Immich though
Okay and? Immich is good but alternatives are always good.
If I’ve learned anything from this community, it’s that having just one open source alternative to a closed source POS run by Google is not the ideal! Competition is always healthy.
More options is good.
Which isn’t a gold standard, Ente is much more stable and featurefull. Also, options are always good.