After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.
Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...
My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.
Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.
Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.
I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance
There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).
I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this
> not accessible to my family
My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Still worth it, imo.
Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.
For the nerds...https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.
Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.
Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.
Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.
Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The impetus to finally set up Immich came from my wife pushing past that. Even at fifty cents a GB forever, it’s not going to scale as well as essentially 0, though that depends on considering the drive as a sunk cost.
And now I finally have to suck it up and establish an off-site backup plan to make my scenario like for like. Damn you!
pavel_lishin•46m ago
I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.
toomuchtodo•44m ago
https://github.com/immich-app/immich
_blk•29m ago
tclancy•22m ago