Immich Self-Hosted Photos and Videos Solution - A Warts and All Review

[@TrionicSeven]

Immich developer here, thanks for your deep dive video.

[@GadgeteerZA]

Only a pleasure! I'm glad it's at that state that is now already great to use as a photo hosting solution.

[@Morfoz13]

Thank you guys for this amazing app❤​@@GadgeteerZA

[@immich-app]

Hi Danie, Alex from Immich here. I love your review, thank you so much for spending a lot of times on it. All of the features you are looking for are actually what I and the team want as well. So we are working toward those goals! I hope you find Immich useful as much as we do and we will for sure keep adding feature to it and keep it as the best open source project with no catch for the users. PS: I nodded a lot while watching the video, thinking "yeah, we need that" :P

[@GadgeteerZA]

Thanks for that response, Alex. I'm so glad to hear it, as right now Immich has the most potential of all the various photo hosting solutions, and I can see it's been advancing quickly. Very glad to hear too that the looked for features can be goals being worked towards. Why I ended up with Piwigo back then was (no Immich yet) was that Piwigo had a community plug-in that imported my 13,000 photos and albums from Flickr, including photo captions. So it may also be worth encouraging the community to come up with import utilities, as that allows existing users of other solutions to migrate more easily to Immich.

[@ossusergroup108]

A really good-looking open source solution for photos! Thanks for featuring it.

[@GadgeteerZA]

Yes probably the best looking one that I can recall seeing - also very responsive.

[@AdamPotaznik]

Thank you for this video 🎉

[@GadgeteerZA]

You're welcome 😊

[@lvdmerwe]

Very well explained!

[@GadgeteerZA]

Glad you think so! Yes, it's just not something you can do only a 5 or 10 minute talk about, to do it any justice.

[@londonbilbo]

It would be very nice to compare also librephotos. You see a lot of " how to install" over there but not deep analysis as yours. Great Job!!!

[@GadgeteerZA]

Thank you! Had a quick look at LibrePhotos. Their comparison to Immich is a bit out of date, but I do like that LibrePhotos also can point to an existing repository of photos, and seem to have an auto-create albums feature that Immich does not have. So I'm interested to see how LibrePhotos handles the external library vs what Immich does, as well as the three captioning options. So, I may well do a video then on LibrePhotos in the next week or two. Thanks for the suggestion!

[@c0wg0d]

This looks great--thanks for the in depth video! I have been exploring options to replace Google Photos, and this might be the best solution for me. I was thinking I would switch to Synology Photos, but it looks like Immich actually has more features than Synology, which is crazy considering it's a paid product! I really like the map feature where you can see where in the world you've taken photos. I wonder though--does Immich handle RAW camera photos? I'll have to try it out and see. It looks like even more great features have been added since you made this video.

[@GadgeteerZA]

Thanks yes raw appears to be handled fine immich.app/docs/features/supported-formats. Immich has already updated twice since my video so expect more features and refinements.

[@Morfoz13]

Immich is awesome and I believe is the best opensource image/video saver, which is very similar to google photos. My only concern is about 2FA. When is it going to be available? OAth is really not continent and quiet hard to setup

[@GadgeteerZA]

Yes it certainly has the most potential and is developing quickly, but as you say there are some features still that need to be added. I've just been testing the latest version this week again, and I'm still missing full public album sharing (without having to send out a link). I miss that for my albums shared right now on Flickr. I'd also like to see the photo caption displaying when hovering over a photo in an album. But best is to log these requests on their project.

[@spv2363]

Was checking if immach was a viable replacement for photoprism as I require multiuser access, but now looking at your name/image wondering if your folks are Boet and Vivienne.

[@GadgeteerZA]

Yes they are!

[@ClemensLaengle]

Do you prefer immich or memories / nextcloud?

[@GadgeteerZA]

On balance, if I had to decide between those two, I'd probably for Immich as it has more photo specific features. I do find Nextcloud a bit heavy, but I suppose it has lots of other useful stuff outside of the photos. Sometimes it is worth going for 3 different apps that do what they do very well vs one product that does a bit of everything. I've also seen about two good updates from Immich in the last few months which means they are moving forwards still.

[@heyLucifurr]

does it copy the contents of the mounted external library ? if so how do i know its done copying? Ive done this but I can see that the images path are still in the external library and not saved inside the immich library.

[@GadgeteerZA]

No, it reads it in place like a drive mapping

[@TerenceKearns]

Do any of these tools allow you to use S3 on the backened for storage? I'd like to use Backblaze to host the photos themselves.

[@GadgeteerZA]

Not directly as far as I know but a few ideas are: 1. Immich has a feature request open at github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/6090 2. Memories does not either, but underlying Nextcloud does connect to S3, so that connection may be seen as a "local" connect (not sure). 3. Piwigo may have a plugin called S3Upload that may do something like this. 4. There may be ways to get Docker to create a virtual sync to S3 i.e. so photos app sees it as a locally mapped volume, with something like this at github.com/efrecon/docker-s3fs-client.

[@serchbey]

Hello, what's the point of immich, I don't understand much, the BACKUP of the photos with the Android APP on the cell phone are saved on the server, in my case I use IMMICH with Unraid, but when I enter the Immich WebUI, the photos are not seen from the cell phone, from what I see they are saved in some folder, but they cannot be seen as they are on the cell phone, so how could the cell phone photos be seen in the IMMICH WebUI? Another thing, how can you recover those cell phone photos that are on the server as BACKUP to the cell phone back in case they are lost on the cell phone? Thanks!

[@GadgeteerZA]

Yes it's more a backup to self-host and view/share your photos outside of the Big Tech hosting environments. That auto-backup is more an auto-upload, as it does not actually restore as a function. The photos get sorted into albums, and you can also upload from desktop into Immich hosting etc. If you wanted to "restore" a few photos, you'd download them from Immich to your phone from inside the app. What is seen in the Immich app UI is the photos on the hosted side, not the phone. Personally I use Syncthing to sync all my phone photos/videos to my desktop, and every few days I delete them from the phone.

[@serchbey]

@GadgeteerZA Thanks for your answer, I've tested, and it works fine, but i prefer Nextcloud so long.

[@serchbey]

@@GadgeteerZA Thanks for your answer, well I think that after having tried Immich I think I'd better stay with Nextcloud for now, many thanks to the creators of Immich.

[@chiragojha7311]

I wish it were simpler to setup.. cannot invest so much time in the learning curve to get the full potental of the product. I just need a software that organises all the photos offline using face recognition.

[@GadgeteerZA]

Unfortunately, all of them have at least a bit of setup involved for self-hosting. Immich still seems the simplest and best for me out of LibrePhotos, Piwigo, and PhotoPrism.

[@Crftbt]

First :)

[@GadgeteerZA]

That was pretty quick, yes!