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’ve been trialing some similar apps and none of them really fully satisfy me, including immich. Mostly because they all make it clunky to exclude some photos from showing up, or indexing being slow as hell and not particularly good at removing photos I recently ignored, deleted or moved. Immich in particular is bad with the ignore part. I wish I could edit a text block that defined ignore rules like a gitignore, but instead you have to add each rule separately in the UI. Then it feels very slow to add thumbnails for raw files and slow to index period. So many of these apps seem to me like they fumbled the ball just short of a touchdown because otherwise the featuresets seem nice.
I have tried damselfly, immich, libre photos, photo prism, and I tried to configure nextcloud memories but I could not even get it running. It seemed pretty complicated and picky about its setup.
I went trough them all and probably a few more (photoview) and Immich is by far the best. Also at that pace of development it will be perfect soon.
Its by far the fastest for thumbnails and indexing so far at least on my hardware.