by kevinsync | 2025-09-08 21:46:01+00:00
Immich is fantastic. I'm itching to reply but not 100% sure what I want to say, I've got like a bunch of immediate, parallel thought processes about it.

1. I've got 25 years of photos and video that I originally organized by folder (date + title of contents) but got very unwieldy once my wife and I both got smartphones back in mid-late-00's -- this archive has lived on external HDDs (spinning disk) and copied to new ones as capacities increased. In early-mid 2010's I got 2TB with Google and uploaded to Google Photos; it was great, but neither of us ever really utilized it, so I was just paying for cloud backup.

2. I am old-ish, have no concept of "home lab" (because everybody who had one or more computers and messed around with computers basically had what's now called home lab), and tend to keep/repurpose tech that goes out of service -- I've always hosted where it was appropriate (home, colo, cloud, whatever), and always have run many devices in a closet. Given the ~1TB of personal media, it was inevitable that I'd want some kind of self-run solution if only for speed + physical access.

3. I liked Google Photos interface; getting out of it was impossible. Add in 15+ years of unorganized iPhone photo/video backups (pulled out via iExplorer and other apps) in real folders on a real hard drive, and it really was a godsend in starting with a "normal" (yet dysfunctional) archive of original content. Once I set up Immich, I was able to upload all of it and at the bare minimum have a year/month-organized archive of stuff, written to an enterprise HDD (while keeping the old source hard drive(s)). The iOS app is pretty good (way more performant now with the beta timeline) and the CLI + API are great.

4. I have an Ubuntu server in the dusty closet; decent little piece of crap 8-core / 32gb that runs some websites and services. That's where I installed a refurb 12TB drive and Immich. I had an HP Z420 with 128gb ram that was my workstation for a few years, I upgraded to a Z640 dual-xeon with 256gb, and just had the old stuff sitting around -- I installed TrueNAS on that and threw in a bunch of cheap Ironwolf drives, set up a ZFS pool, run Immich on the Ubuntu box and then Syncthing all of it to the NAS for duplication. I recognize that having a bunch of equipment around is a luxury and a privilege, but I'm also a cheap POS and buy everything used/off-lease/refurbished/eBay/etc, and reuse what I can as it gets upgraded. That said, you can get massive local storage and compute if you look around, be patient, and don't impulse-buy.

5. Since Immich predated the NAS and I'm still running it on the Ubuntu box versus in a TrueNAS container, upgrades are less turnkey; for instance, I let mine sit idle from 1.29x to 1.41x, and there were three breaking upgrades in between. It took some fiddling and staggered upgrading on command line to get from where I was all the way to latest; I experienced no data loss though, everything moved over, but it wasn't one-click/one-command. Syncthing backups from machine A to B aren't exactly invisible either, because if A shits the bed it would probably corrupt B, and even if it didn't, while I do have the files duplicated, I'd have to more or less replicate the original install and copy the files from B->A to get the interface running again.

6. The mobile app + features are very seamless and good at this point; my wife hates computers but can find what she needs on her phone super easily. And the beta timeline is very performant with regards to handling a quarter million photos and videos. I haven't fully vetted the latest app-initiated from-phone automated backups, but did notice mine were flowing from my phone to server without even realizing it. That helps a LOT with the inevitable couple-times-a-decade phone upgrade since the main "backup bottleneck" is getting all that personal media out of there. The rest just goes easily with iCloud backups and device-to-device restorations.

7. I don't back any of this up to cloud; I thought about maybe Backblaze or something, but haven't pulled the trigger on anything. Syncing to and restoring from sounds like a nightmare. Since 1998 I think I've only had 2 or 3 drives actually die on me; one was recently (the NOT important one) which prompted the TrueNAS box. I ended up with multiple 2xMIRROR pairs striped in a VDEV pool and feel pretty OK about that for now, which the Immich archive also syncs to. End of the day, anything is better than being imprisoned by Google Photos or iCloud Photos.

8. I also don't expose any of this stuff to the internet; outside of the home network, we have to VPN in to get access. Also don't have external contributors or anything. YMMV because I know a lot of people like to share out to family, or set extended family up to archive with them.

End of the day, fiddly upgrade annoyances aside, it's the only Franken-solution I've found thus far that gives easy access to a giant archive, and spreads itself out enough to where I'm not terrified of losing everything. Really well-done stuff!