@neil it's been pretty solid for me as a backup. Although its AI isn't a solid as Google's yet. I did like the fact that I can run it on my nas and temporarily spin up the AI indexer in a container on a more powerful machine to speed up the initial indexing after import though.
Tangentially, ImmichFrame make a great Immich-based screensaver for Android TVs, if you're into that kinda thing.
@neil You don't hang around. 👏
@neil if they're local I just did a bind mount and told it to use that folder as a source
@neil I’m currently testing Ente for photo backup (also with docker).
The documentation for Ente self hosters needs improving, especially how to backup the server, but managed to get it working pretty well now.
@neil I tried to install immach and got stuck with no obvious error message somewhere in the docker part. I was quite sure it wasn't even trying to run immach.
I suspect my processor lacks some needed virtualisation feature.
@neil Podman has its quirks, but I very much like it over Docker. Especially the Quadlets feature that integrates with SystemD.
I've been running Immich and a bunch of other stuff on Podman for a while now. Its pretty smooth once I figure out what the container wants.
@neil i gave it direct filesystem access to the photos. It still took over a day to index them. No regrets.
@chrisgerhard @neil For how much data and how many photos? I've 2.3TB and like 100,000 photos to index...
@neil immich-go worked fantastically for me. Everything loaded super fast, but immich itself took quite a while to churn through everything.
@neil I e been using it for a year or so now. Failed at postman initially so ended up with docker but should give it a go someday. Really like Immich
@bewilderbeast23 With the luxury of time, sure!
@neil Yeah, probly a bad idea. Best to get a human - you - to go thru your own stuff, IMO.
@neil I've got 151,510 photos from the past 20 or so years. 1023GB according to Immich. Still got 10k or so duplicates to sort after merging libraries.
Some from mapping for OpenStreetMap, plus having kids automatically means more photos.
@neil My dad used to get a chunk of photos printed annually, then make a sort of collage with them on the kitchen wall.
There's something about physically cutting up prints and sticking them in an ever-changing design that's really compelling to look at.
He did it with a printing service, but for small scale the Canon Selphy is pretty good too.
@neil Though I do not have more than maybe 1000 pics, I am now thinking of either ente or immich for my family as well. My spouse has more than 30K (how???), anyways, I guess it will be better that way. Your post is now motivating me to do that.
@neil ohh, you're gonna love that.
Each day, Immich will show images from the same day, but multiple years old. I've been reminded of great and ... Not so great memories.
And yes, the same concept as Google Photos does.
What you also get: query for "similar photos".
I hope both are new to you as it's been new to me when I started with Immich.
@neil Good - that's the point of photos!
You will love yourself past self if you just set an arbitrary number of pages and do it.
One key point: do not skimp on the binding and archival print quality. I have a couple of boxes of disintegrating photo books.
@neil Every year my wife selects photos for an annual photo book based on favourites from the year :)
@neil I have 27, 800 but I guess that does go back to about 2001 and I def took a lot on cameras back then. Actually would love to gets stats by year, I wonder if I'm worse with a phone than I was with an slr...
@neil Annually, me wife and I got throuhh the past eyar's photos mannually, and lovingly craft a 30 page photobook as a summary.
Photos have always been a pain in the arse to manage, but having a heavly curated document to browse is nice.
@neil like a million years ago I used a service and would literally print the entire Instagram timeline. It was kind of fun. (Sorry for the “moody” camera lens.. making buttercream icing) thy eventually changed models and doubled the price before closing down.
@neil Yes, with my dad being a geek, too, I got access to digital cameras and camcorders pretty early on. Later came things like the SonyEricsson T68 with the camera add-on and I started to take pictures of various everyday things no normal person would take photos of. 😉
Also, to be fair, my wife tends to take like 10 photos of the same scene to then select the best one later. And I have a few of her "sets" in my library which I haven't "deduplicated" yet. But these duplicates are only a small fraction.
@neil I make it a daily task to delete a minimum of 15 pictures. I go to a random place in my timeline. It serves several purposes... 1) I get to see some of my pictures around that date 2) in one year I delete around 4.000 pictures (~ 15% in my case) and 3) it prevents decision fatigue. Earlier I would go sit two hours and delete pictures all the time, it is extremely tiring and boring.
@neil Makes sense 👍
@neil These are rookie numbers. 😂
About 25 years of digital photos and videos. Plus a few from the 90s that were digitised (i.e. scanned or captured from slides or VHS).
@neil I thought Syncthing was easier.
@neil If there is & it's anything like the Google Photos or MS OneDrive features that show you a photo from "today 2 years ago" or collections of similar photos, I'd end up with a physical book of photos of my gas meter. 🙃
@neil its the old ones that are the best. Immich and the ilk are great for organising them and putting faces to photos.
@neil I hope so too. Especially if they go back 20 years looking through them again with friends and family is probably going to be an emotional experience ^^
@neil wait, what's the "design" argument for this? 
@neil That's the conclusion we came to as well when importing into Immich. We're slowly paring them down now.
@neil as long as not more than half are selfies you're good!
@neil If you're keeping them safe I don't think there's such a thing as “too many” photos. They're a good way to keep memories, and that's definitely something valuable in itself ^^
@neil Immich support Oauth authentification, so you can use Keycloak as workaround 🙂
And as bonus, you can benefit from centralised authentication across all your other self-hosted tools.
@neil I haven't installed immich yet myself, but it seems it supports using external identity provider. Some of them can be configured to support mfa. https://docs.immich.app/administration/oauth/
@neil I ran some 87k photos and 6k short videos from my Google Photos backup into a dockerized Immich running on a 15-year-old laptop. You should be good.
I especially loved the text-based immich-go progress page. I love a good text UI.
