Self-hosting my photos with Immich
by birdculture on 11/30/2025, 9:11:40 AM
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-11-29-self-hosting-photos-with-immich/
Comments
by: WD-42
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.
12/6/2025, 3:02:17 AM
by: nntwozz
Anyone used <a href="https://lycheeorg.dev" rel="nofollow">https://lycheeorg.dev</a> for a comparison?<p>I'm curious to know which one would suit me best.
12/6/2025, 5:29:12 AM
by: prh8
This is great timing, I'm just setting up a homelab and planning to run Immich on a mini PC server connected to a NAS. I did find icloudpd, which seems like a pretty reliable syncing tool for people in Apple ecosystem. <a href="https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...</a>
12/6/2025, 4:58:55 AM
by: krick
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 <i>backup</i> 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.<p>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.
12/6/2025, 3:30:56 AM
by: oliyoung
Docker + Immich + Tailscale is the killer replacement to Google & Apple Photos, it's simply that simple
12/6/2025, 3:14:20 AM
by: azuanrb
I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow. Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future.<p>I started looking for alternatives after Synology became more restrictive with their hardware. I'm curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.
12/6/2025, 4:07:03 AM
by: stavros
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.<p>Immich put the joy back in photography for me, it's so easy to find anything, even with just searching with natural language.
12/6/2025, 3:11:32 AM
by: subhajeet2107
I use ente which is also the same, a bit tricky to setup but the app looks great
12/6/2025, 5:34:01 AM
by: websiteapi
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.<p>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.
12/6/2025, 3:29:17 AM
by: Groxx
I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed.<p>The project as a whole feels <i>competent</i>.<p>Stuff that should be fast <i>is</i> 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 <i>transparently</i> fast.<p>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, <i>it'll restructure the whole folder for you</i> to match the new setup, quietly and correctly.<p>Image content searching is not perfect (is it ever?), but I can turn it on in a couple clicks, search for <i>the breed of my dog</i>, and get <i>hundreds</i> of correct matches before the first mistake. That's <i>more</i> than good enough to be useful, and dramatically better than anything self-hosted that I've tried before, and didn't take an hour of reading to enable.<p>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.
12/6/2025, 3:42:41 AM
by: cuu508
I'm running Immich on NanoPi R6C (arm64, even lower idle power usage, still plenty fast for running Immich).<p>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.<p>For uploading photos taken with a camera I either use immich-go (<a href="https://github.com/simulot/immich-go" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/simulot/immich-go</a>) 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.
11/30/2025, 9:39:29 AM
by: skittleson
One thing I really like is the performance... its smooth and fluid. The api is really useful as well: I wrote a small job to auto add descriptions and tags to the images.
12/6/2025, 5:13:35 AM
by: shadowpho
Love Immich. Runs smoothly on an amd 4700u ($200) with minimum cpu/ram usage
12/6/2025, 2:52:05 AM
by: drekipus
Immich started the same time and with the same backstory/reasoning to my (failed) project.<p>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.<p>I would probably estimate 90% Of my photos are junk, But I want to isolate and share the 10% that are really special.<p>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.
12/6/2025, 3:06:20 AM
by: hjaveed
this is super cool.
12/6/2025, 3:23:47 AM