Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. I can honestly say Immich is better in every way than Google Photos or whatever Apple calls it. The only thing is having to set it up yourself.
How does sharing an album with others work on Immich?
I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.
You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it.
Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser.
I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
If you want to share with family, you can permanently add them as users to your Immich instance. Otherwise, you can create a link that they can use.
Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple
I don't get the appeal of Tailscale for simple homelab use. I have OpenVPN and it's trivial. Hit the toggle and I'm connected, no fuss.
Tailscale uses wireguard, which is better in a lot of ways compared to OpenVPN. It's far more flexible, secure, configurable and efficient. That said, you probably won't notice a significant difference
I want to love Tailscale on mobile, but it conflicts with Adguard and regularly disconnects.
I keep Tailscale but switched over to Pangolin for access most of my self-hosted services.
Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.
Tailscale can give you domains + ssl for local services with basically no effort.
Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.
Even if you are self hosting in the cloud or on a rented box, Tailscale is still really nice from a security perspective. No need to expose anything to the internet, and you can easily mix and match remotely hosted and home servers since they all are on the same Tailnet.
In my words, I use Tailscale at home but not for this (yet). Tailscale is a simple mesh network that joins my home computers and phones while on separate networks. Like a VPN, but only the phone to PC traffic flows on that virtual private network.
Tailscale gives me access to my home network when I'm not at home. I can be on a train, in another country even, and watch shows streamed off the Raspberry Pi in my home office.
I adore Immich. I set it up a while ago, and I'm finally looking at my photos again. I was previously using Nextcloud for photos, but it was such a slog to find anything that I never took or looked at photos.
Immich put the joy back in photography for me, it's so easy to find anything, even with just searching with natural language.
Yeah I started with memories for nextcloud. But it was buggy/slow unfortunately.
Being able to scroll to dates with immich is golden. And the facial recognition is on device and works great.
I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed.
The project as a whole feels competent.
Stuff that should be fast is fast. E.g. upload a few tens of thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in the scroll bar - odds are very good that it'll have the thumbnails fully rendered in like a quarter of a second, and fuzzy ones practically instantly. It's transparently fast.
And the image folder structure is very nearly your full data, with metadata files along side the images, so 99% backups and "immich is gone, now what" failure modes are quite easy. And if you change the organization, it'll restructure the whole folder for you to match the new setup, quietly and correctly.
It's "this is like actually decent" levels that I haven't seen much in self-hosted stuff. Usually it's kinda janky but still technically functional in some core areas, or abysmally slow and weird like nextcloud, but nope. Just solid all around. Highly recommended.
I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just auto-managed cache, where everything you didn't access in the last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it itself, and if all the data is fully portable.
FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-maker.
It auto uploads all your photos to the cloud and you can delete them locally and still have them. The biggest feature is the AI search, you can type anything and it will find your pictures without you doing any work categorizing them. It can do objects or backgrounds or colors and it can even do faces so you can search by people's name. That and there's share links to albums and multiplayer albums.
It keeps the originals locally when it uploads forever unless you delete them. There's a one click "free up space on this device" button to delete the local files. It's actually somewhat annoying to export in bulk, you pretty much have to use takeout.
Key features that matter to me:
1) backup from android or iOS. This helps when I have switched phones over the years.
2) shared albums with family or friends where invited people can both see and contribute photos. Think kids albums, weddings, holidays.
3) ability to re-download at full resolution
You can back up to Immich using various methods, including dumb file copy into a dropbox folder. For a while, I was using PhotoSync that uploaded photos to my NAS with Immich using WebDAV.
Immich also has an app that can upload photos to your server automatically. You can store them there indefinitely. There are galleries, timelines, maps for geotagged photos, etc.
The app also allows you to browse your galleries from your phone, without downloading full-resolution pictures. It's wickedly fast, especially in your home network.
> Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc?
It preserves the information from sidecar files and the original RAW files. The RAW processing is a bit limited right now, and it doesn't support HDR properly. However, the information is not lost and once they polish the HDR support, you'll just need to regenerate the miniatures.
I'm running Immich on NanoPi R6C (arm64, even lower idle power usage, still plenty fast for running Immich).
I use Cloudflare tunnel to make it available outside the home network. I've set up two DNS names – one for accessing it directly in the local network, and and a second one that goes through the tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports internal/external connection settings – it uses the direct connection when connected to home wifi, and the tunnel when out and about.
For uploading photos taken with a camera I either use immich-go (https://github.com/simulot/immich-go) or upload them through the web UI. There's a "publish to Immich" plugin for Adobe Lightroom which was handy, but I've moved away from using Lightroom.
Are you also facing the the 100mb upload limit when using cloudflare tunnel?
Sometimes I want to upload a video from my phone will away from home but I can't and need to vpn
You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.
immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly, just because certain things I want to do are just not possible with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for that eventually too tho.
I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a family is way cheaper than the equivalent s3 storage assuming frequent access, even assuming a 50% discount. so that's nice.
One option is use immich just to browse photos. I back my photos up to various places, one of which is my NAS. You can set up immich to browse but not modify photos so you can still use it as a "front end".
Love Immich. Runs smoothly on an amd 4700u ($200) with minimum cpu/ram usage
I agree, and simple to me $200 new PC does this task just fine.
Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project.
I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do it in the moment and both have access.
I would probably estimate 90% Of my photos are junk, But I want to isolate and share the 10% that are really special.
My app failed, but I'm thinking about reviving it as an alternative front-end to immich, to build upon that.. But I feel like I'm the only one who wants this. Everyone else seems fine with bulk photo backup for everything.
I have a homegrown app too. It's too tinkery for anyone else. I throw whole iOS device backups at it so it can pluck out media from texts. Then the frontend has an efficient bulk sorting workflow with vi keys to navigate a grid of photos and tag with a few different tags or delete. I feel like this is not the same use case as immich, it's maybe a curation step before exporting a refined set of media.
I want something with a simpler backend than immich. I don't really want to host it because it needs lots of stuff to run. I would love one that can do sqlite and is a single binary go (or rust) program.
just disable auto-upload and then manually upload the ones you want to. There is a setting to share your immich library with someone else. Between those two features, you should get something close to what you want.
For me one of the killer things would be to click "share" on a photo I took, and then have the immich albums show up so I can put them in that specific place as like a 3 click process. That's basically what I was building my whole app around
Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. I can honestly say Immich is better in every way than Google Photos or whatever Apple calls it. The only thing is having to set it up yourself.
How does sharing an album with others work on Immich?
I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.
You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it.
Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser.
I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)
If you want to share with family, you can permanently add them as users to your Immich instance. Otherwise, you can create a link that they can use.
Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple
I don't get the appeal of Tailscale for simple homelab use. I have OpenVPN and it's trivial. Hit the toggle and I'm connected, no fuss.
Tailscale uses wireguard, which is better in a lot of ways compared to OpenVPN. It's far more flexible, secure, configurable and efficient. That said, you probably won't notice a significant difference
I want to love Tailscale on mobile, but it conflicts with Adguard and regularly disconnects.
I keep Tailscale but switched over to Pangolin for access most of my self-hosted services.
Can you elaborate? What role does Tailscale play? I selfhost and have heard about Tailscale but couldn't figure out how it's used.
Tailscale can give you domains + ssl for local services with basically no effort.
Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.
Even if you are self hosting in the cloud or on a rented box, Tailscale is still really nice from a security perspective. No need to expose anything to the internet, and you can easily mix and match remotely hosted and home servers since they all are on the same Tailnet.
In my words, I use Tailscale at home but not for this (yet). Tailscale is a simple mesh network that joins my home computers and phones while on separate networks. Like a VPN, but only the phone to PC traffic flows on that virtual private network.
Tailscale gives me access to my home network when I'm not at home. I can be on a train, in another country even, and watch shows streamed off the Raspberry Pi in my home office.
I adore Immich. I set it up a while ago, and I'm finally looking at my photos again. I was previously using Nextcloud for photos, but it was such a slog to find anything that I never took or looked at photos.
Immich put the joy back in photography for me, it's so easy to find anything, even with just searching with natural language.
Yeah I started with memories for nextcloud. But it was buggy/slow unfortunately.
Being able to scroll to dates with immich is golden. And the facial recognition is on device and works great.
I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed.
The project as a whole feels competent.
Stuff that should be fast is fast. E.g. upload a few tens of thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in the scroll bar - odds are very good that it'll have the thumbnails fully rendered in like a quarter of a second, and fuzzy ones practically instantly. It's transparently fast.
And the image folder structure is very nearly your full data, with metadata files along side the images, so 99% backups and "immich is gone, now what" failure modes are quite easy. And if you change the organization, it'll restructure the whole folder for you to match the new setup, quietly and correctly.
It's "this is like actually decent" levels that I haven't seen much in self-hosted stuff. Usually it's kinda janky but still technically functional in some core areas, or abysmally slow and weird like nextcloud, but nope. Just solid all around. Highly recommended.
I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just auto-managed cache, where everything you didn't access in the last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it itself, and if all the data is fully portable.
FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-maker.
It auto uploads all your photos to the cloud and you can delete them locally and still have them. The biggest feature is the AI search, you can type anything and it will find your pictures without you doing any work categorizing them. It can do objects or backgrounds or colors and it can even do faces so you can search by people's name. That and there's share links to albums and multiplayer albums.
It keeps the originals locally when it uploads forever unless you delete them. There's a one click "free up space on this device" button to delete the local files. It's actually somewhat annoying to export in bulk, you pretty much have to use takeout.
Key features that matter to me: 1) backup from android or iOS. This helps when I have switched phones over the years. 2) shared albums with family or friends where invited people can both see and contribute photos. Think kids albums, weddings, holidays. 3) ability to re-download at full resolution
You can back up to Immich using various methods, including dumb file copy into a dropbox folder. For a while, I was using PhotoSync that uploaded photos to my NAS with Immich using WebDAV.
Immich also has an app that can upload photos to your server automatically. You can store them there indefinitely. There are galleries, timelines, maps for geotagged photos, etc.
The app also allows you to browse your galleries from your phone, without downloading full-resolution pictures. It's wickedly fast, especially in your home network.
> Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc?
It preserves the information from sidecar files and the original RAW files. The RAW processing is a bit limited right now, and it doesn't support HDR properly. However, the information is not lost and once they polish the HDR support, you'll just need to regenerate the miniatures.
I'm running Immich on NanoPi R6C (arm64, even lower idle power usage, still plenty fast for running Immich).
I use Cloudflare tunnel to make it available outside the home network. I've set up two DNS names – one for accessing it directly in the local network, and and a second one that goes through the tunnel. The Immich mobile app supports internal/external connection settings – it uses the direct connection when connected to home wifi, and the tunnel when out and about.
For uploading photos taken with a camera I either use immich-go (https://github.com/simulot/immich-go) or upload them through the web UI. There's a "publish to Immich" plugin for Adobe Lightroom which was handy, but I've moved away from using Lightroom.
Are you also facing the the 100mb upload limit when using cloudflare tunnel? Sometimes I want to upload a video from my phone will away from home but I can't and need to vpn
You have to disable Cloudflare proxy which is not an option with tunnels. It's technically against TOS to proxy non-HTML media anyway. I just ended up exposing my public IP.
immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly, just because certain things I want to do are just not possible with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for that eventually too tho.
I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a family is way cheaper than the equivalent s3 storage assuming frequent access, even assuming a 50% discount. so that's nice.
One option is use immich just to browse photos. I back my photos up to various places, one of which is my NAS. You can set up immich to browse but not modify photos so you can still use it as a "front end".
Love Immich. Runs smoothly on an amd 4700u ($200) with minimum cpu/ram usage
I agree, and simple to me $200 new PC does this task just fine.
Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project.
I love the immich success story but it seems like it's missing a crucial use case in my view: I don't actually want a majority of the photos on my phone. I want something like a shared album that me and my wife both have access to, and so we can share photos specifically to that album (quickly and without hassle), so we can do it in the moment and both have access.
I would probably estimate 90% Of my photos are junk, But I want to isolate and share the 10% that are really special.
My app failed, but I'm thinking about reviving it as an alternative front-end to immich, to build upon that.. But I feel like I'm the only one who wants this. Everyone else seems fine with bulk photo backup for everything.
I have a homegrown app too. It's too tinkery for anyone else. I throw whole iOS device backups at it so it can pluck out media from texts. Then the frontend has an efficient bulk sorting workflow with vi keys to navigate a grid of photos and tag with a few different tags or delete. I feel like this is not the same use case as immich, it's maybe a curation step before exporting a refined set of media.
I want something with a simpler backend than immich. I don't really want to host it because it needs lots of stuff to run. I would love one that can do sqlite and is a single binary go (or rust) program.
just disable auto-upload and then manually upload the ones you want to. There is a setting to share your immich library with someone else. Between those two features, you should get something close to what you want.
For me one of the killer things would be to click "share" on a photo I took, and then have the immich albums show up so I can put them in that specific place as like a 3 click process. That's basically what I was building my whole app around
this is super cool.
[dead]