this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I know we had posts like this before, but Immich deserves πŸ‘

One more update, one less container, the best Google Photos alternative, its just amazing!!

Don't forget to edit your docker-compose before updating

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

the color scheme of that icon physically hurts to look at

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Time to use arcticons

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Noticed it stopped working yesterday, wasnt at home so I couldn't really get into it, just checked the docker logs via portainer on the go and was like "wtf is this error?!" Was relieved when I learned what the issue was and that it's just a restructuring of the containers.

While it can be unnerving that they don't shy away from breaking things in order to improve the service, it's actually a very good thing and keeps the app from getting bogged down in some "but backwards compatibility"legacy code hell (wonder what some people in Redmond would know about that). Let's just hope that they never publish an update that permanently breaks things when you haven't followed a very strict weird update procedure or something.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

They have mentioned that once out of dev/alpha status they will figure out proper release versioning so you can pin a major version and not get breaking changes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

you should exclude the immich stack from auto-updating and subscribe to immich releases.

most of the time will just be a docker compose pull && docker compose up -d && docker compose logs -f

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

And for the love of god don't go for latest, just stick to the release tags

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Do not have docker containers auto update.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Or, if you do have it auto-update (like I do) prepare for things to break every now and then. I auto-update just about all containers except those that would break either my home automation or my ability to login to my network and fix things. Everything else auto-updates, including Immich.

My Immich broke this weekend when they switched the stack over to pgvecto, to use vector searching in Postgres. Easily fixed, but took me a solid minute to figure out what had changed.

Which is kinda weird they didn't communicate this one so well. In the lead-up to v.1.88.0, Alex made an announcement on Github to let people know the breaking change was the removal of the web container from the stack, rolling the webserver into the main server container itself. That was a good move, as all I did was flip my Watchtower container on that host to monitor only.

Dunno why they didn't do something similar for the Postgres change. Was just as breaking.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Updating software that's in such early development without reading the release notes is foolish.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is it hard to breathe in that rarified air, up on your high horse?

I'll keep taking my calculated risks. You keep judging strangers on the internet. πŸ‘

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

roofuskit is right. Unless you use it as secondary method of backing up your memories - it is foolish. There are constant breaking changes that requires modification to Docker-Compose for Immich project. But you do you. :) I am not Google to tell you what to do. πŸ˜…

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Immich saves pictures on the filesystem, where they are easily picked up by all my backup solutions. My pictures also get uploaded on NextCloud before being moved to Immich's auto-upload folder.

... Where exactly is the risk for my precious memories? The bloody thing could rm -rf /* for all I care.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Immich's repo explicitly states not to rely on it as a primary backup of your photos and videos. Seems to me the more foolish thing would be to ignore that advice.

Β―\_(ツ)_/Β―

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Unless the container follows semver and only auto updates minor versions.

Edit : Which Immich isn't.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (3 children)

How do ppl think of immich Vs photoprism? I dislike photoprism because every action takes 10 seconds

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

For me Photoprism is unusable for the simple fact that they don't support multiple users. Also Photoprism doesn't have an official app which I can easily use on my phone to sync photos.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Photoprism has different approach. Last time I tried I wasn't impressed. Immich, on the other hand, gives me almost identical experience to Google Photos. I was heavily using Google Photos, so this is probably the reason why I am pro-immich.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I've just set up an Immich server and the UI is nice and uploading is quite fast. Waiting for Google takeout to finish so I can import my whole library....

Also your Lemmy account is marked as a bot btw. Some people block bot accounts.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Looks interesting, thanks for the rec!

Is there a way to semi-easily import my Google Photos archive?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can use Google Takeout to request all of your Google photos to be downloaded

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Installed it because of this thread to my homelab today. I never really managed my phone images in any way, never uploaded them anywhere. This was the first time. About 5 gigabytes of images and videos were synced to my NAS in a few minutes, now I can search them and all that. It's a pretty cool setup, although the installation is a bit tricky if you don't go to the path they give you. I run a Postgres server in Proxmox, and you have to install just the right version of pgvecto.rs for the system to work.

Browsing the issues I was able to figure out what went wrong, and after downgrading, no issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

But it's not that difficult to dedicate Docker compose file for an "immich project" and use exactly as developer suggests. You are not like going to have 100+ users, more like 1-10 users and even RPI would be enough. It's not an issue to have small database along immich project on the same host.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It just doesn't feel right to have multiple postgres databases running, if every other service uses the one in the network. Having already monitoring, disk space and backups set...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Think this way: postgress db is just part of immich. That's it - separate your services into logical units.

That's actually makes more sense to do at home lab. Bringing down your main DB breaks a lot of your services. By separating - only part would be broken.

My postgress db lives in the same docker compose file where immich is. If I decide to delete immich - it's very simple to run "docker compose down" and delete folders. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Ask yourself what your "job" in the homelab should be: do you want to manage what apps are available or do you want to be a DB admin? Because if you are sharing DB-containers between multiple applications, then you've basically signed up to checking the release notes of each release of each involved app closely to check for changes like this.

Treating "immich+postgres+redis+..." as a single unit that you deploy and upgrade together makes everything simpler at the (probably small) cost of requiring some more resources. But even on a 4GB-ram RPi that's unlikely to become the primary issue soon.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
NAS Network-Attached Storage
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC Single-Board Computer

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

[Thread #360 for this sub, first seen 17th Dec 2023, 14:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just a question - are you considering AWS unlimited S3 storage where you pay-as-you-use?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Any idea how it compares to Synology Photos?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have no idea, but I heard only good things about both of them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Playing with the demo, it lacks adding text/captions and reordering photos compared to Google Photos. Any other suggestions?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not only that, but Google Photos already pulled a huge bait-and-switch. It used to be free unlimited photo storage for compressed photos...until they just stopped.

I love immich!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I am not concerned about that. Business primary goal is to make money, and Google is business, so any free service is temporary, especially if not powered by ads.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

40+ years of photos already sorted into albums and sub albums make immich useless to me. I am using LibrePhoto which feels slower but works as well.

We will see what the future holds for both projects.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Immich supports external folders now. You can mount them as read only.

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