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[return to "Self-hosting my photos with Immich"]
1. Groxx+JBj[view] [source] 2025-12-06 03:42:41
>>birdcu+(OP)
I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed.

The project as a whole feels competent.

Stuff that should be fast is 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 transparently fast.

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, it'll restructure the whole folder for you to match the new setup, quietly and correctly.

Image content searching is not perfect (is it ever?), but I can turn it on in a couple clicks, search for the breed of my dog, and get hundreds of correct matches before the first mistake. That's more 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.

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.

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2. lucb1e+XPk[view] [source] 2025-12-06 17:53:13
>>Groxx+JBj
> the image folder structure is very nearly your full data, with metadata files along side the images

Wait, other comments were saying that one of Immich's weak points is backups. Someone else replied that the postgres structure is sane so you can run sql queries to get your data out if needed. Now you're saying it's plain old files. I'm confused

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3. Groxx+sVk[view] [source] 2025-12-06 18:38:14
>>lucb1e+XPk
Some minor data is in postgres, but to test it I just fed it a previous install's library folder (images and metadata files). Worked fine, restored all my albums and tags, though perhaps not "people" iirc. And not e.g. ML image content search, of course, you need to re-generate that. And the metadata files were more than obvious enough to satisfy my "I can do this by hand if I really need to" bar, and recreating the accounts by hand is trivial.

The main "weak point" is probably that it doesn't have S3 integration, which is entirely fair. But for my purposes, rcloning the library folder (or e.g. rsync to a btrfs for free deduplication if you reorganize) is more than good enough, because that folder provides enough data for it to restore everything I care about.

For DB backups for keeping everything, there are configurable auto-backups, but it's only a snapshot to a local filesystem. So you'd need to mirror that out somehow, but syncthing/rclone/etc exist and there are plenty of options.

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