On behalf of the team, I'd like to express my heartfelt gratitude for your support in 2024.
Since the first day I posted the video prototype on the self-hosted subreddit, Immich has been on a journey. I still remember the projectās early days and loved seeing those first issues open on GitHub. How exciting it has been to build something useful for so many people. I am grateful for the compassionate community as well as the feedback and criticism we have received this year.
The project's core idea is to do good things without a hidden agenda or ill motives, to give people a delightful choice to manage their digital media besides the solutions from exploitative big cloud providers. Just last year, we were daydreaming of how wonderful it would be if we could do those things daily as our full-time job. One might have said it is good karma, but Louis Rossman from FUTO found us and extended the invitation for the company to fund the project to let us develop the software full-time. It was a dream come true for all the core contributors to talk about Immich, interact with the users, have fun writing code, and build out the features of Immich every day. We would not be here without your love and support for the project.
Similar to last year, hereās a recap of everything the project accomplished in 2024:
Milestones
A new logo
GPU acceleration for machine learning
Library watching
Search enhancement with advanced filtering
Built-in OpenTelemetry metrics
Read-only albums
Email notifications
Microservices container be gone
Web translation
Immich-hosted map tiles
Star rating
Basic editing on mobile
Theming on mobile
Folder view
Tag support
Album sync on mobile
Automatic database backup
Auto-switching server URL in the mobile app
Alternative machine learning URL switching
Supporter Badge / buy.immich.app
and more
Fun
Over 30k stars were added to Immichās sky on GitHub :star: [editor's note: Jan 16, 23940]
Going from MIT to AGPLv3 License
Over 900 awesome people from the community helped make Immich a better software.
Overcame our first marketing fallout with the choice of wording in the product key purchase introduction
Immich isnāt even 3 years old yet. Technically, we are still an infant.
Alex got his 150-day comment streak on Reddit.
As shy as an infant, the project managed to get a lot more screentime from many YouTubers
Coming down from 12 breaking changes in 2023 to 8 breaking changes released in 2024
Next Year
A stable release is our top priority, and we are pushing hard to have it ready by Q1 of 2025.
After the stable release is out, we have a series of cool features in mind that we want to add to the application, such as (in no particular order)
Proper SemVer :P
Workflows/Automation
Plugin system
OCR
Pet Detection
Federation
and more
We want to offer additional mechanisms and services built directly into Immich to help you with your 3-2-1 backup strategy. This will make self-hosting Immich even easier while allowing you to maintain peace of mind when dealing with your most precious memories.
Finally, the team will attend FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium, on February 1st and 2nd. If you are around, stop by and say āhi.ā We will have a stand there on Sunday (02-02), and we also registered for a lightning talk session. We're looking forward to seeing some of you there!
As always, if you find the project helpful, you can support us at https://buy.immich.app
Someday I would love to be able to share and receive shared photos / albums to and from users on different servers. Especially if it lets me sync the original files so that I can keep a copy in case their server goes down. It would also be neat if you could enable activitypub so that your account could show up as a fediverse user that people can follow for public or approved follower only posts, pixelfed compatibility would be super cool.
Immich is what got me into self hosting, an incredible piece of software (is that the right term?), and I can't wait to see where it goes into the future.
I think simpler deployment should be on top of the list for next year. The microservice architecture scares quite a lot of people away and makes it complicated. If it was me, I would make microservices optional, for people who wants to scale their immich components. Most will never have the need.
I too use the singular container from imagegenius and point it at a DB and redis. Usually their upgrade paths mention several components but I've only ever used the one.
Hi and thank you so much for the fantastic work on Immich! I'm hoping to get a chance to try it out soon, with the first stable release!
One question on the financial support page: is it not a donation? There is a per server and a per user purchase, but I thought immich was exclusively self hosted, is it not? Or is this more like a way to say thanks while giving some hints as to how immich is being used privately? Or is there a way to actually pay to have immich host a server for one?
I'm not saying it's not true, but nowhere on that page is there the word donation. And if it is, the fact that it is described and a license, tied to a server or a user causes a lot of confusion to me, especially when combined with the fact that there is no paywall but that it requires registration.
Why use the term license, server and user? Why not simply say donation and with the option of displaying the support by getting exclusive access to a badge like signal does?
Again, I'm very happy immich is free, it is great software and it deserves support but this is just super confusing to me and the buy.immich.app link does not clarify things nor does that blog post.