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 using immich for half a year or so now. There only problem is that it did not chunked uploads. So one large video just never uploaded, and I had to use nextcloud to upload it instead. Otherwise, it’s great.
I’m curious;
Which ML CLIP model did you go with, and how accurate are you finding the search results?
I found the default kinda sub-par, particularly when it came to text in images.
Switched to “immich-app/XLM-Roberta-Large-Vit-B-16Plus” and it’s improved a bit; but I still find the search somewhat lacking.
The best one I have found was one of the newer ones that was added a few months ago. ViT-B-16-SigLIP__webli
Really impressed with the accuracy even with multi word search like “espresso machine”
- backup - noun
- back up - verb
I quit as soon as I saw it still has a docker crutch. Fails security reqs due to the validation issue.
Thanks, though. Sounds like it’s gonna work well for you.
Pedantics
Your website hasa banner that says it uses cookies and that by using it I acknowledge having read the privacy policy, but if I click More Information it takes me to a page the wiki says want created yet.
Never noticed. I don’t do anything with the cookies anyway, its just a docuwiki self hosted, no ads, no data collection, nothing. I don’t even store logs.
I might need to write the privacy policy… Will do tomorrow.
Im not familiar with doku wiki but here’s a few thoughts
- privacy policy is good to have regardless of what you do with rest of my comments
- your site is creating a cookie “dokuwiki” for user tracking.
- cookie is created regardless of user agreement, rather than waiting for acceptance (implied or explicit agreement). As in i visit the page, i click nothing and i already have the dokuwiki cookie.
- i like umami analytics for a cookieless google analytics alternative. They have a generous free cloud option for hobby users and umami is also self hostable. Then you can get rid of any banner.
The dokuwiki cookie is not for user tracking but for functional use. You don’t need user consent for functional use. OP should remove the useless cookie banner altogether
Nice comment
How did you do external backups?
I used to use a docker container that makes db dumps of the database and drops it into the same persistent storage folder the main application uses. I use this for everything in docker that had a db.
Immich as recently integrated this into the app itself so its no longer needed.
All my docker persistent data is in a top level folder called dockerdata.
In that I have sub folders like immich which get mounted as volumes in the docker apps.
So now I have only 1 folder to backup for everything. I use zfs snapshots to backup locally (zfs auto shot) and borgmatic for remote backups (borgbase).
All my dockers all compose files that are in git.
I can restore he entire server by restoring 1 data folder and 1 compose file per stack.
I don’t understand how that’s helpful. If something is corrupted or my house burns down, a local backup is going to go with it. That’s why I asked for external backups.
I backup with restic the database backups done by immich, not the database itself, and the Library/library folder which contains the actual images and videos.
Did you read the whole post? If so, did you go to his/her website?
Yeah I just didn’t understand it.
If anyone’s interested, here’s my Immich backup script. You setup rclone to use an S3 storage service like BackBlaze which is quite cheap. I also use a crypt which means RClone will encrypt and decrypt all files to/from the server. S3 configuration and crypt setup.
Then set this up as a cron job. With the “BACKUP_DIR” option when you delete a photo it will get moved to the “deleted” folder. You can go into your S3 provider’s lifecycle settings and have these get deleted after a number of days. I do 10 days. Or you can skip that and they’ll be gone forever.
#!/bin/bash SRC_PATH="/path/to/immich/library" DEST_REMOTE="b2crypt:immich-photos/backup" BACKUP_DIR="b2crypt:immich-photos/deleted" RCLONE_OPTIONS="--copy-links --update --delete-during --backup-dir=$BACKUP_DIR --suffix `TZ='America/New_York' date +%Y-%m-%d`.bak --verbose" rclone sync $SRC_PATH $DEST_REMOTE $RCLONE_OPTIONSYeah, I don’t know what any of these words mean. I just want to click “export” and back all the data up to a flash drive. Is that too much to ask?
Well yeah you could go on the site and select whatever photos and hit download I suppose.
There’s no way to do that for your entire library. Also I assume that would not retain the Immich-specific metadata like the ML object tags and the “people” tagged in the photos.
You should have a backup solution for your server that should cover this, without that you should probably stick with managed photo backup services.
One rclone command isn’t much more complicated than one button.
Reading the comment I replied to, it appears to be much much more complicated. And I don’t understand how anyone can claim otherwise.
Key word is “appears”. Choose your source and destination, run rclone. That’s it. No harder than going to the page, clicking export, picking a folder, save. It’s really not hard at all, give it a try.
Thank you for this. I plan to look at the authentication part more closely, but that’s the part I can’t quite figure out (being an amateur at this stuff but still trying), since I’m nervous with just a password accessing it remotely or from the phone.
Authelia, NGINX, there is so much that’s confusing to me, but this might help.
I’d recommend setting up a VPN, like tailscale. The internet is an evil place where everyone hates you and a single tiny mistake will mess you up. Remove risk and enjoy the hobby more.
Some people will argue that serving stuff on open ports to the public internet is fine. They are not wrong, but don’t do it until you know, understand and accept the risks.(’normal_distribution_meme.pbm’)
Remember, risk is ’probability’ times ’shitshow’, and other people can, in general, only help you determine the probability.
good general advice until you have to try to explain to your SO the VPN is required on their smart TV to access Jellyfin.
Then you expose your service on your local network as well. You can even do fancy stuff to get DNS and certs working if you want to bother. If the SO lives elsewhere, you get to deploy a raspberry to project services into their local network.
Feel free to ask, even in pm, if I can help. Not a guru myself, but getting a bit more experience overtime.
I love immich. I just wish for two things:
- synchronised deletes on client server
- the edit tools on mobile to actually work on the photo at hand instead of creating a new photo with new metadata. May as well not have the tools, tbh.
What is synchronized deletes on client server?
I assume that server-side asset deletions are applied to client libraries. I.e. If I take a picture on my phone, but then later delete the picture from immich on another device, it will then also remove the original copy on the client (phone) that took it.
Yes, more control over what happens between server/client. Sorry, that wasnt clear.
Immich aims to be a google photos replacement, which has this function built in.
Now, I don’t care if it works only one way, but it should be clear.
Is it still free and open-source? Didn’t they change the license to “free unlimited trial” a while ago?
As far as I know the license doesn’t “do” anything. It’s just supporting the dev:
- Will there be any paywalled features? No, there will never be any paywalled features.
Oh, thanks. That’s very uplifting!
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.
I have a problem generating thumbnails for photos taken from summer 2023 until now (using my iPhone 12 Pro). It’s like a format problem or something. I don’t know ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You might want to submit a bug report. Their pace of development is insane for OSS.
