Hi fellow self-hoster.
Almost one year ago i did experiment with Immich and found, at the time, that it was not up to pair to what i was expecting from it. Basically my use case was slightly different from the Immich user experience.
After all this time i decided to give it another go and i am amazed! It has grown a lot, it now has all the features i need and where lacking at the time.
So, in just a few hours i set it up and configured my external libraries, backup, storage template and OIDC authentication with authelia. All works.
Great kudos to the devs which are doing an amazing work.
I have documented all the steps of the process with the link on top of this post, hope it can be useful for someone.
I’m not looking to become a sysadmin, thanks. I just want somewhere to safely store and organize my private photos.
I don’t know how to access the filesystem and copying the library folders would not back up the metadata.
A great backup solution would be what I mentioned elsewhere. Just put a button to export it to a flash drive or an encrypted file server.
And that’s fine and understandable. But I don’t think that Immich is for you. It’s not consumer-grade software. It’s a piece of Linux server software that requires occasional maintenance and administration. We haven’t seen a breaking update in a while but Immich does occasionally release updates where things will break if you don’t dig in to the config files and reconfigure it.
If they implemented a proper backup system I wouldn’t have to worry about it breaking. That’s why I want it.
There’s nothing else I need to access the backend for.
@Ulrich @bdonvr It will indeed be hard to use Immich without some technical knowledge at the moment. The documentation explicitly warns that the software is changing fast and might break a few things.
I’m sure that some day they will have a paid hosted tier that will de-risk the technical aspects such as backups and resilience but thats not here yet.
Perhaps you could take a look at Ente Photos for a non-Google, privacy friendly (and encrypted) photo hosting solution.
https://ente.io/
@Ulrich @bdonvr Another alternative I could recommend that balances self-hosting and ease-of-use would be to perhaps acquire a Synology NAS.
I find that their OS is super user friendly and they have built-in alternatives to a lot of Google apps (email, docs, photos, drive, etc).
You still have to worry about potentially having an off-site backup, but they also have solutions for that in their OS’s app store (for duplicating an entire NAS to a remote one for example).
@Ulrich @bdonvr I use a Synology DS220+ myself with a few TBs of hard disks. I regret not having bought another model with more disk bays but thats another story. :)
Although I’m a developer and I could handle it all myself, I also don’t want to complexify my setup more than it needs to.
Partly because I have other things to do but also because there is a pretty big risk factor that’s not entirely clear when you’re in charge of your own infrastructure and backups and all that.