1d ago

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.

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There's no way to do that for your entire library. Also I assume that would not retain the Immich-specific metadata like the ML object tags and the "people" tagged in the photos.
- You should have a backup solution for your server that should cover this, without that you should probably stick with managed photo backup services.
  
  You should have a backup solution for your server that should cover this
  Thats...why I'm asking?
  managed photo backup services
  ...is that not what Immich is?
  
  Are you paying for Immich somewhere? Then you'd have to trust the administrator to back your data up. I had assumed you were self hosting and by managed services I meant like Google Photos, or indeed someone else's Immich setup.
  
  Are you paying for Immich somewhere?
  No.
  by managed services I meant like Google Photos
  Not doing that for reasons that shouldn't need explaining.
  
  If you're self hosting then you could just copy all the files from your server onto an external drive. I have to say that's not a great backup solution though, and you should learn more about administration of Linux servers so that when things break you can fix them. I wouldn't rely on it as a safe solution to your photos otherwise.
  
  I'm not looking to become a sysadmin, thanks. I just want somewhere to safely store and organize my private photos.
  I don't know how to access the filesystem and copying the library folders would not back up the metadata.
  A great backup solution would be what I mentioned elsewhere. Just put a button to export it to a flash drive or an encrypted file server.
  
  I'm not looking to become a sysadmin
  "I want to be an F1 racer but I don't wanna learn to drive"
  That's what I heard you say
  
  I'm not looking to become a sysadmin
  And that's fine and understandable. But I don't think that Immich is for you. It's not consumer-grade software. It's a piece of Linux server software that requires occasional maintenance and administration. We haven't seen a breaking update in a while but Immich does occasionally release updates where things will break if you don't dig in to the config files and reconfigure it.
  
  If they implemented a proper backup system I wouldn't have to worry about it breaking. That's why I want it.
  There's nothing else I need to access the backend for.

75 comments