One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don’t know.
I dont get the “server” vs “individual” support levels? Im an individual and I have a server…but presumably everyone buying immich has a server? Otherwise it’s pointless? Or is it expected that I buy a server package, plus an individual package for each and every user?
I know it’s OSS and so any and all donations are voluntary - just the naming here confuses me.
Server is meant for all users of a single server.
So, you could buy 1-3 individual licenses or the server license for 4+ users.
It is just Donation Tiers I think. Maybe the per user thing only hides the “Buy Immich” button for only that specific user.
I really want to use (and support) this, but my case would be the server running on a windows pc with great hardware for all the ML/AI stuff and SSD database storage, but all my media on a NAS. (I’m a flight sim addict, Linux isn’t an option or I’d do it in a heartbeat) Last time I tried, I got the server running in docker pretty easily, but could not for the life of me get my media connected. Any chance that process has improved?
FWIW you’re probably looking for https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-machine-learning namely removing the demanding tasks from the NAS.
I know it’s not really adding anything to the conversation but I can’t not say thank you that’s dope.
Ooh, that’s really cool
I’m running it on in docker and I’ve connected it to my NAS mounted as a network drive. I set it up a few months ago, do it’s better since then.
Don’t even worry about the hardware, I’ve got it set up on a raspberry Pi 5. It’ll take a while to do all the classification on your existing library, but new photos get classified fast enough. You’re unlikely to need to do a smart search immediately after you’ve taken the pic.
For clarity, I’m not on Windows (obv, raspberry Pi), and I’m not using docker directly; I’m running HAOS on my pi, and I’m using the immich add-on. I know it uses docker, but I can’t tell you the exact command to run.
That’s amazing. I have a Pi 4 currently running home assistant and pihole. Sounds like my pi family might be growing soon. Had no idea the 5 could run those features. Appreciate you
If it weren’t Docker-dependant, I’d imagine this would be a good FreedomBox app.
Sounds more like a Freedombox problem for not supporting one of the best ways to run sevrer software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m still disappointed that tags are absent from the mobile app.
One thing I don’t get, if someone could explain it to me, is what’s the point of immich over e.g. Nextcloud? Immich is just for photo and video, right? Why not just have a cloud file drive instead? To me, I feel like it’s a waste to have both, since I use Nextcloud to both sync my PC and as a secondary backup, in which case I’d have two copies of my photos on my home server if I wanted to use Immich as well. Am I missing something or is it for people with different workflows?
Nextcloud is like Google drive, immich is like Google photos.
You’d typically prefer to look at your photo albums in Google photos instead of Google drive.Because it has a lot of photo specific features:
- face recognition: enables you to (mostly) automatic tagging of who’s in the photo
- map of images, e.g. look at all the images you have taken in Italy
- (local) AI to search images by keywords, e.g. “sunset at the beach”
- memories: what happened on this day in the previous years
These are just the ones on top of my head, but you’ll probably get the idea. If you just want to back up you photos then nextcloud is more than enough, but you’d probably enjoy the immich features once you used them.
Regarding the two copies: you can use immich on an external library, so you don’t have to have to copies.
It’s like asking why should I use paperless when I can just keep my documents as PDFs in my nextcloud.
The issue for me is that Nextcloud has these features as well with App add-ons. I have yet to try Immich because what’s more important for me is the actual backup\upload of my photos than actually browsing them. Maybe someday, but my self hosting initiatives typically involve me chasing a shiny red ball of a deployment, and Immich just isn’t shiny enough for me yet.
Sure, if you just want upload / backup it’s not worth it. If your currently happy with nextcloud then there is no reason to try immich.
But I highly recommend to sometimes view old photos to keep the memories alive.
I haven’t looked into the nextlcoud add-ons, but didn’t have a great experience with the ones I tried so far. In general I’m not really happy with nextlcoud even for file sync / share, but I haven’t found any replacement, every thing else is much worse.
The AI search is just crazy, especially when you adjust the model quality.
Seriously everyone pushes Immich so hard I’m a little suspicious of it now :D
Shhhh! No one can no we are all being played by the immich overlords.
The fediverse is small and the Immich dev is one of our own, not surprising that it’s super popular
83k Github stars in under 4 years is definitely indicative of an excellent project
Github stars are indicative of nothing
They are indicative of something. That something is just not always “this project is good”.
Correct: it’s like trying to equate “correct” with “popular”, and keeping in mind how the last US elections have turned out.
But it’s good to be in a big network of other users with the same product, nonetheless.
Thousands of them are indicative
You can just buy them, same way you can buy likes on any other platform. Don’t use them as any kind of metric.
You can but if you buy 80k people are gonna investigate and will easily find out you did. Stars are public. I have a folder on my computer with a dataset of 90% of all stars on github
It’s crazy good for something FREE. Like infinitely better than any major crop google apple etc because you KEEP your photos. Anything you upload to the cloud is being mined by them.
The only thing I tell people is that you need a cloud backup.
I have an automated nightly worker that zips all my photos encrypts them with a 32 character password and then uploads it to a bulk storage facility.
I do something similar using restic to encrypt, deduplicate, and backup my photos to backblaze every now and then. Out of curiosity, any particular reason you choose zip over something like restic?
I use restic too, just said zip since more people might understand it easier
Ah, got you!
and then uploads it to a bulk storage facility.
Any suggestions and estimate pricing?
I use backblaze, $6/TB/mo. i set it up with restic backups to get my storage usage so low, that I’ve used it for 4 months and haven’t paid yet.
Wasabi is a very affordable destination for backups. And it has the advantage of not being one of the big three.
I use backblaze it’s like $3 a month or something
Agree, backblaze has been great
Yeah. I just put the media location on my nas, and that is being mirrored to hetzner.
It’s just that good
I found it a couple of months ago without hearing about it before. I was in an ideal place for a Google Photos replacement.
There’s a couple of rough edges but it is, indeed, best-of-class.
Yeah :) Maybe give lychee a try :) it’s minimalist and does one thing, but it does it well !!!
im like maybe one of few people who barely take photos. its great because i dont need to worry about the costs of cloud storage
I mostly set it up for a few major albums like my wedding album. Other than that it’s like 90% dog pictures lmao
I am a supporter and ordered the retro demo disk. Itll be here soon :)
I got the supporter for free, because I donated to them before they joined FUTO. I donate frequently to opensource projects. This is a good way to say thanks to the devs 😊
Even small donations are fine, so please donate to projects you enjoy 👍🏻
They joined that open washing company? ughhhh
I didn’t know they were giving supporter status to people who donated before they joined FUTO
You needed to connect your Github account once, the app checked if you donated, then you got the supporter status
I’ll include mine to show that it’s not unusual to support them! it’s my favorite and most used self hosted project
So wait, we hate FUTO but love Immich?
I don’t hate FUTO, but I distrust them.
On one hand, their operation is creepy and suspicious.
The extent of the FUTO “grant program”, at least in the case of musl libc, involved ignoring musl’s established process for institutional sponsors, quietly sending a modest one-time donation to one maintainer, and then plastering the logo of a well-respected open source project on a list of “grant recipients” on their home page. Rich eventually posted on Mastodon to clarify that the use of the musl name and logo here was unauthorized.
On the other, I like the idea of licenses that allow unrestricted private use and modification but forbid commercial exploitation. Those two situations are not equivalent. I realize this is an unpopular opinion in many FOSS circles, but we are already being exploited to death by the rich and powerful and they must not be entitled to the value of our collective free and voluntary labor. If we ever realize a society in which wealth and power is effectively capped for such entities, then I would change my tune. Until then, fuck them. Our collective software is for the collective, not for wealth hoarders and despots.
Immich is actually open source.
May I ask why do we hate FUTO?
they’re wearing the clothes of “open source” but they run like a proverbial nazi bar: https://drewdevault.com/2025/10/22/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.html
Yeah, I read this article twice now, and the only identifiable wrongdoing on FUTO’s part is donating to FOSS projects without using their “institutional practice”… Which is a bizarre complaint.
The article is rife with “something ain’t right at FUTO”, but fails to wrap words around that statement.
Except the person who wrote that, regardless of the actual issues with FUTO, cannot be trusted and is an unreliable source.
I really would encourage people to not treat that guy as a real source, but use it as a starting point for evaluating his sources, such as they are, on their own merits.
The above post isn’t the first I’ve heard bad about FUTO. GrapheneOS has also spoken out against them
The founder and frontman of graphene, the person who “stepped away” but did no such thing, the man who insisted for years he wasn’t the only face of graphene but very very clearly was based on his social media posts, has had a long history of abusing both individuals and organizations within the broader privacy enthusiast community. You, like the article, need to stop looking at “he said and she said so they both seem bad” and look at what actually happened and judge for yourself. Graphene has post after post after post of circular logic pointing back at mythical attackers with no actual proof to show for it. People who want daniel @ graphene to get the help he needs have post after post after post of recorded abuse and several videos exist documenting that abuse. So it’s his word and circular logic vs a long record of incident after incident after incident of abuse.
Tldr graphene is run by someone who appears to be brilliant but also appears to suffer from undiagnosed mental health issues and nobody has been able to convince him to get the help he needs. In the meantime, he has spent large portions of the last 5 years ranting and abusing people on the internet. I have the advantage of having watched it play out in real time, but records and archives exist.
I think there could be more to it. Louis Rossmann had personal issues with the lead dev there a year or two ago due to how they interact in their forum, and I think he had some great reasons to be concerned. Since then the lead dev has stepped away as project lead, but I doubt the bad blood is completely gone.
I think it’s a bit suspicious that they don’t mention what feature(s) FUTO wanted. Given their interaction with other projects, I’m guessing they wanted a “supporter” badge for people who have bought the software (no change in functionality other than the badge). I’m guessing also that due to their interaction with Rossmann, they’re uninterested in clarifying, esp. if it would put FUTO in a better light if they did.
Then again, maybe FUTO is a bunch of scumbags. It just seems the slant against them is so much stronger than the actual negative impact from a handful of repos having source-available licenses instead of FOSS licenses.
There is 5+ more years to it than that
Thank you for linking this.
Why do you say they’re unreliable and can’t be trusted?
The short version is they take grapheneos’ abuse of others at face value and appear to take grapheneos’ side. Graphene is by all outward appearances a good product, but their founder has a great deal of untreated mental issues related to paranoia and has a long history of abusing other groups and encouraging his most loyal followers to do the same. As far as I’m aware I am not exaggerating this in any way and I hope the founder eventually admits he needs help.
So if one of your items is someone with paranoid delusions, and you don’t question that in any way and make it clear by your words you’ve taken that person’s side, I cannot take any other argument seriously without doing my own checking (which I have not done yet, hence my original phrasing).
They’ve been featuring projects on their page that they display their donations on, projects that did not know or outright refused, without their consent or understanding.
May I ask what the fuck FUTO is?
The company that employed the core Immich devs about a year ago to give them a full-time salary to keep working on Immich. Founded and funded by a millionaire whose stated goal is to try and make a viable business model out of software that doesn’t abuse its users
I find it wild in this day and age how questions like (“why do WE hate” such and such) are being asked in the first place, then answered through one person’s opinion piece mindlessly linked from all angles. Please, for gawd sake, stop listening to random fedditors/redditors about what opinions you should adopt!
IMHO (<- there’s a novel approach), the criticisms of FUTO are just as biased and political as FUTO themselves, and everyone should be sceptical of bias from all sides. Apparently, focusing on ‘privacy, decentralization, and right to repair’ - is being too political, and they’re not allowed to have a philosophical take on what they imagine successful open source to be. (Incidentally, I’m not necessarily on FUTOs side, just pissed off at the nature of social media to obviate the need of critical thinking and make everything black or white.)
I mean sure but… did you read the piece linked? It backs up it’s claims. Not gonna sit here and act like I verified every single thing linked in the piece but I checked a good handful and it seems pretty straightforward. FUTO is pretty sketchy at the very least, and there’s good reason to consider them a fascist org
I’m not sure what “piece linked” you’re talking about, since none of the parent comments of this comment actually have a link in them.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of FUTO, but I did read their statement about open source and it sounds pretty good to me. I actually think they’re capitulating a little bit too much by deciding not to call it open source anymore. As far as I’m concerned, if the source is available and anyone can contribute, that’s open source. I don’t particularly care whether or not it’s free for Google to incorporate it into their increasingly-enshitified products or not.
Creative Commons (an org to which FUTO says they have donated) doesn’t like their licences being used for software, presumably for finicky technical legal reasons. But if you imagine the broad spirit of their licences applying to software, all the main CC licences would be open source in my opinion. All combinations of Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike, and No Derivatives, as well as CC0 respect the important elements of open source.
Yes I read it when it first came out, and again after a recent update. It’s very opinionated and I remain unconvinced the criticisms amounts to very much. At the least, certainly not to the point where words like nazi and fascist should be thrown around!
For example, I dislike Yarin’s and Lunduke’s politics but I did at least watched Yarin’s interview. (Did you? It was boring, and entirely tech-oriented, nothing controversial at all.) But… trial by association I guess. And anyway, it’s not the article itself I have a problem with - it’s the borrowing of second-hand opinions as if they should be your own. Sometimes, it’s prudent to reserve judgement (until ‘verifying every single thing’), or criticise specific ideas, without leaping to ad hominem per consortium.
As far as I can tell the worst thing they did was call their source available license open source, which isn’t even that bad.
My read is that FUTO as a software movement is totally fine, it does what it claims on the tin. The people behind FUTO are a different story, and the main person bankrolling it seems to have friends with odd views (I think they’re blown out of proportion, but they’re still concerning).
You’ll never find a perfect movement. Here’s what FUTO seems to prioritize:
- local first alternatives to big tech
- source availability, but in a way big tech can’t use but home users can
- profitability for devs without coercion or feature gates
That sounds pretty good to me! I’d prefer it to be FOSS, but allowing me to distribute modifications for non-commercial use is probably good enough for most things.
I probably disagree with their founder politically, and I’d run FUTO differently, but I think their software is good and I could maintain it myself if needed, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters to me.
FUTO doesn’t seem interested in getting involved in politics, they’re merely musing philosophically, and their products aren’t profitable, so it doesn’t really matter to me what their political positions are.
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Software can’t be fascist, it’s just software. The makers or users can be fascist though. If that statement was true, Lemmy would be tankie.
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No, that’s not fascist. Facial recognition software can be used for a variety of reasons, like unlocking a phone or laptop, gaining access to secure areas, or home automation stuff.
It’s only fascist if used by a government to oppress minorities. The software itself cannot be fascist, but it can be used by fascists.
Hahah you mean like Lemmy itself?
- replace ‘fascist’ with ‘tankie’
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the criticisms of FUTO are just as biased and political as FUTO themselves,
oh so you’re STUPID stupid
Fantastic rebuttal kindergartener, you convinced everyone.
The duality of man.
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What is it and what does it do?
Immich: Image Backup* solution — like Google Photos or Ente Photos but self-hosted.
*Backup in the sense of uploading your photos to a server you own. You should backup the database as well as your library with 3-2-1 method.
Ente is also open source and can be self-hosted.
If it works then great. I find it pretty lacking compared to Immich.
I guess they fill different niches. I use Ente for the e2ee, that’s pretty important to me. Immich definitely seems more like a drop in Google Photos alternative, I just use software on my computer to do that instead.
E2EE is definitely important for uploads on someone else’s server. On my server? Ehhh, not so much. The entire drive is already encrypted. Another layer of encryption would just slow it down. Just my opinion.
I would think e2ee would be important if youre uploading files when away from your local network. If that isn’t enabled, then it’s far less important. At that point, it would only matter if there was a compromised client harvesting your wifi packets.
e2ee would be important if youre uploading files when away from your local network
Even without e2ee or a VPN, just plain old HTTPS should be enough to secure that part, or am I missing something?
If this is happening via a VPN you almost definitely already have transit encryption
Immich automatically uploads when I connect to wifi so that’s not really a problem. Nor am I personally concerned with someone MITMing my personal photos, I just want them out of corporate silos that use them to exploit me or hand them over to the gov in a dragnet.
Their auth is better than the tool itself (last time I evaluated options which was maybe a year ago)
Oh they update a lot. The clients have gotten really snappy, which is nice because browsing photos felt a bit cumbersome before. There’s now automatic albums and facial recognition, if you opt in to that. Was going to say that there’s no editing tool but there is. It’s quite basic though, three tabs, crop, transform (rotate, flip, resize), and colours (brightness, contrast, saturation, and blur for some reason lmao).
There’s also a bunch of sharing features. You could share images or albums directly, or even create embeds for if you have a portfolio website. I pretty much only use it as a backup service though.
What 2 different media types are you using for the “2” part?
Spinning and flash.
FLASH! AAAAAAAA
The world needs those two gifs combined so we can more easily (and awesomely!) answer this question in the future.
Why does it need to be two types? Can’t I have 2 spinning?
You can do two spinning but then you should at least use drives from different manufacturers to reduce the risk of them failing at (roughly) the same time.
if you have off-site backup, that could potentially count as the two types, but probably not in the spirit of the backup.
I have two spinning disks, a SATA SSD cache, and off-site backup
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Short: It is a second Hardrive using borg that backs up the primary Hardrive.
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Long: My Backup strategy:-
Databases and other imp files:
For databases the backup happens every night that gets saved on the server itself. Then when my laptop connects either to the home network or to the Internet, the backup zip files on my server syncs to my laptop via syncthing. Then my laptop’s data is backed up to OneDrive (encrypted) — this includes the immich database backups. I usually keep 7 days worth of backup files just incase some get corrupted and I can just go back to the previous day.
Library
Since my Immich Library is big, daily borg backups are not possible for 200 gigs. So I have scheduled them every Sunday morning when I rarely use the server. The hardrive is exclusively used only for Immich. That hardrive is then backed up to another hardrive using borg and also to my OneDrive using rclone. (All encrypted). So 3 copies of the data, 2 on 2 different hardives (1 is primary) and 1 offsite.
I do nightly borg backups of much more than 200gb. The idea of incremental backups is you’re only doing the changes, and photos don’t tend to change.
What challenge did you come across with a 200GB backup?
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I second this?
From the logo, it looks like immich
Immich! Photo management: https://immich.app/
Immich
Google photo self hosted alternative
As someone who only used the stock synology app and has always wanted to try something else, what features and things does this do better? I am close to trying it out just to see. Im sure it will solve my 1 big issue where I can’t control the location of photos that default to my application storage, which is pretty small, instead of my actual storage array.
Does everything Google photos does. Their app looks/feels exactly Google’s app, including sharing links. Assuming you’re running it on reasonably powerful hardware, it does all the same face recognition and ML based search that Google photos does.
You don’t even need reasonably powerful hardware, I do it on my raspberry Pi 5. It just takes a little longer, which isn’t usually a problem except for the first time you import your library.
Does it have an Android app that will automatically back up photos and videos that I take? Is there a way to do it without exposing a bunch of stuff from my home network?
Yes, and yes.
Their Android app feels like an exact clone of the Google Photos Android app.
To access it remotely, you can use Tailscale like someone else mentioned. But you need to have Tailscale installed on everyone’s phones.
You can also use a Cloudflare Tunnel to allow it to be accessed over the Internet without exposing anything from your home network directly to the Internet.
The latter is useful when I want to share a secret link to a photo album after hanging out with people so everybody can upload the photos they took to one place (something I used to do a lot with Google Photos)
Yes. I use it, no issues. Use tail scale to backup while away from the home network.
Buying my copy soon!
Thanks for the reminder, done as well :)
