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
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
I tried the larger file size, but my internet is slow and google kept pulling the plug on my download. Even with a download manager it was un-resumable. Finally, I just re-exported at 2 GB and now I have to babysit the download of 23 different files.
This blog post taught me how to download directly to my NAS using curl. https://michelenasti.com/from-google-photos-to-synology-photos/
Oh dang. The applicable parts of that would’ve saved me a lot of headache. Thanks for sharing.
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.
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 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?
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.
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 :)
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 :)
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 :)
Anyone tried to install this on casaos?
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?
iOS is awful about how it handles photos. It doesn’t really permit other apps to manage them automatically. I’ve fought this issue lots.
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
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
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.








