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- Hacker News
- It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index.
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
by skrtskrt - I believe that's a setting, you can have it store the files in a more predictable directory hierarchy. Though it's better to make that choice early on before doing a lot of imports.by rootusrootus
- For this exact reason, I'm using Immich by pointing it to my folder structure as an "external library" https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/by zvr
- https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ is their best attempt to address your concern, but honestly I'm fine with navigating my photos solely using immich. (with annual backup copy stored in cold cloud storage)by blmarket
- What do you mean opaquely named directories? It’s yyyy/yyyy-MM-dd/originalFileName. Those opaquely named files are the thumbnails.
Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.
by drdexebtjl - Immich is wonderful, but if you're mostly looking for a solution to take your mind off the problem and don't want to self-host, try Ente photos.by ochronus
- > The ability to upload photos from your device automatically
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.
by pavel_lishin - Easy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..by _blk
- It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.by tclancy
- Docs for context: https://docs.immich.app/features/mobile-backup/by toomuchtodo
- It’s data privacy. You won’t save any money, google is dirt cheap when it comes to storage, because of their scale. (I’m talking storage you can use for Immich pictures)
In hindsight I am baffled that I accepted for google to have all my pictures, scan all the faces, etc. Insane.
But when everyone is doing it, it turns something off in the brain. I attended a seminar where the explanation was: We don’t have the cognitive resource to do a deep analysis (or any analysis) of every single decision every minute, which is why, evolutionary, we relied on crowd wisdom to move such decisions from CPU to ASIC, the ASIC being “is everyone else doing it?”.
I am still angry at myself that I gave them my pictures for years, the pictures of my relatives’ kids, etc.
@Immich team: pleeeeease add the horizon straightening feature.
by illiac786 - I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free.
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.
- One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account. It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.by krupan
- Immich is such a wonderful piece of OSS software. I've replaced Google Photos with it. And then some.
For the nerds...https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
by jmathai - I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.by cdrnsf
- Any info on your public proxy setup?by bix6
- I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.
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.
by ValtteriL - My primary use case for Immich is not as a Google Photos replacement, but as a backup of my photos that are on Google Photos. With all the horror stories in the past of folks getting locked out of their Google accounts (and this all Google services) for misunderstandings without a successful appeal, I don't want to risk losing all of my memories just because Google decided that they needed to lock my account for some reason or another. I'll trust that Google won't lose my data but I don't trust that they will continue to let me access it indefinitely.by nilleo
- I don’t get that. Why isn’t google takeout easier, simpler, faster? Am I missing something?by illiac786
- I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me:``` NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192 VIPS_DISC_THRESHOLD=750m VIPS_CONCURRENCY=1 MAGICK_MEMORY_LIMIT=8G MAGICK_MAP_LIMIT=4G ```
Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)```yaml logging: driver: "json-file" options: max-size: "10m" max-file: "3" ```by Helmut10001 - I use Immich, but saved me money it has not.
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.
by drdexebtjl - Once a year I go through my photos and select my favourites and have them printed to paper. Using Google's print service (as an example) you can spend about $80 to have 150 photos printed into a book. If you do this once a year you will soon have a lovely shelf of paper photos you can easily store, easily look at and show to other people and hand down to your kids and their kids, etc. Long term I suspect my collection of books is far more likely to survive than my google account.by fanatic2pope
- I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years.
Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.
by Noaidi - I jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...by kqr
- In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)
There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).
Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive
by odo1242 - Had gazillion copies of folders and iphoto libraries in various backups, but since i moved to linux as daily driver was on the hunt for a good photo archiver. Just recently started using Immich. Tried Photoprism too which would have also fit my need well, but somehow Immich won the coin toss ! (After many years was able to pull that one pic my wife was after from my archive !). My all those duplicates have been now been pulled and deduped and condensed into an immich library.
I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged).
Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i need my own local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data).
Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !
by hakcermani - Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.
I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
by bilalq - People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.
This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
by altmanaltman - Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.
But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
by pkulak