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> My favorite feature is being able to setup a container on my Linux desktop that has a GPU access and can run ML workloads for image processing whenever I turn the computer on, as my NAS (where Immich resides) is a low power machine without a dedicated GPU

Okay, sold. This is also my setup and I was being held back by thinking that the experience would be bad due to it. But this will work for me!

Interesting. How did it work getting your photos off of iCloud? Does Apple give you a good way to get an archive of all of your photos? That is, the original quality photos, without manually downloading them individually? (I currently have 446 GB of photos in iCloud…)

How does selecting or uploading photos work on iOS if you don't have any in Apple Photos? Not all apps let you choose to upload from the files app where you can select the provider, e.g. uploading an image to Facebook in Safari always opens the picker for Apple Photos.

Edit: wait I'm dumb, I just checked mobile Facebook and the upload button shows a pop up with choices for "Photo Library", "Take a Photo", or "Files".

I have a PiKVM attached to my PC at home, so at some point I'm thinking of setting up a crazy demand-scaling scheme where when my underpowered homelab nodes can power up the PC when they need to run a heavy workload.

Can you explain how you’re able to run ML workloads on another computer? Setting up Immich this weekend on a mini Pc and would love to throw my GPU in my larger PC at the problem.

any pointers on how it works with immich on the NAS and your desktop “contributing” processing power?

What about doing the opposite ? I have my phone auto upload to Apple photos (iCloud) in full quality - downloading for backup can be a pain

People are really sleeping on nc memories, does all the good things but none of the "I decide how your images are stored and nothing else should touch them" that immich does.

When I checked half a year ago memories (with the nc ecosystem) was still ahead in terms of features (gallery specific), albeit object tagging is rather crap in nc (faces better)

I'm very happy with Memories.

I store my pictures on a NAS jail. That directory is mounted read-only on another jail with NC and Memories. I like the guarantee that my gallery app cannot alter my files.

Also, many gallery apps don't allow browsing a directory tree. You have one level of "albums" and that's it. Memories support it. I have pictures 5-6 directories deep, following a system that makes sense to me.

I used memories for a while but Immich is much better. I use an external library because I export images from Lightroom Classic and that's where I throw them in YYYY/MM directories. I could import them directly into Immich but I had problems with the Lightroom plugin I used. Especially when exporting hundreds of images at once.

> Have you tried nextcloud + memories app? Every metadata is stored in EXIF and the directory structure on disk defines the directory structure in the app (and vice versa).

Ouch. One feature I love with Immich is that I can run it as Docker containers (I think it requires four containers) and pass the drive/volume with my photos as read-only, so I'm sure Immich cannot possibly modify my files.

The last thing I want is the latest solution du jour modifying my files.

Agree with this strongly. It's nice to have thousands of photos, but if what you're trying to do is preserve memories, you do that best by interacting with the photos.

Choosing the photos to include, plus doing the scrapbooking bits to decorate the photos, and including all the bits and bobs you might have acquired from whatever even you're memorializing, this locks the memories in far better than a carefully architected storage system that, in the end, is just a giant wad of binary data.

This goes double (or triple) when you have young children.

By all means maintain some kind of digital storage, but make your primary physical.

Lovely idea. You got a photo printer model you like? I've been meaning to get a photo printer, but I'm scarred by experiences with inkjets back in the day.

I use Google Photos, Apple Photos, and also print to Walmart through the excellent workflow Google Photos has setup. Obviously there has to be a printer in your town.

Make an album, print to Walmart on their pro printer, grab it a little later for a few bucks.

What kind of photo printer technology? Inkjet is expensive and fades. Dye sub and laser are usually better.

how much did that cost?

I solved the "one photo in multiple albums" EXIF problem by using Keywords. Each album is a Keyword.

But yes, there are some other limitations that would be much harder to solve. But it's a tradeoff I've decided to make - if I can't figure out an EXIF-based solution then I'm not going to invest time using it because it will likely be lost in 5-10 years.

> Aperture used to handle it pretty well, but Apple dropped it.

If you still miss it, note that Nitro (macOS, iPad, iPhone) is Aperture's spiritual successor, created by its former Sr. Director of Engineering. https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/

What are you currently using?

Presumably you take your photos on your phone, so can you sync from there?

You could manually do it with Google Takeout -> <S3 backed service> before letting your phone sync handle it going forward if that’s a big backlog.

For example, I use Apple and Google on my phone to do this, I think you’d just need to find some app/service combo.

I went down the same rabbit hole recently, and there are basically no good options except to periodically do a full Google Takeout of your images. There were tools that used to work, but Google broke them.

One of the many reasons I finally moved off Google Photos.

Google ripped away the functionality to access your original Google Photos files via any programmatic method vs the manual Google takeout.

This was the biggest reason I also had to move away from Google Photos when all I really wanted was protection from getting my account accidentally G-structed with zero way to contact a human to get my files back.

rclone. https://rclone.org/

What kind of indexing and searching can you do ? I've found Google sometimes struggles with certain things (surprisingly) like searching for a date range if I don't specify the date in the ideal format. For other stuff like "stars over trees" or similar it can work quite well.

What board

Manual photo structure like this is highly underrated.

Use sidecar files instead. I believe the professional tools all use them as well.

You mean because the hash of the photo changes?

I've solved that by materializing every photo to a deterministic folder path. So it's not possible to have the same exact photo in my library.

Our family Immich server has a few hundred thousand photos running in Docker and never gets close to 8GB memory. Maybe submit a bug report if you have the inclination.

Check you don’t have a circular import on your NAS. I had similar issues because I had my photos at /nas/photos and my Immich metadata folder configured as a subfolder of that. So it kept reindexing its own metadata.

Very strange. I've got roughly 40k photos and Immich runs just fine on i5-6xxx old minipc with 8 gigs of ram. Migrated to Immich a couple of years ago from Photoprism (which was fine as well, I just prefer the UI of Immich).

I host immich inside a Linux VM on FreeBSD, with 6 GB of RAM. Fourth generation Intel processor. The initial jobs to parse metadata took a day or two, but now it’s perfectly snappy and useable.

Is it persistent? Thumbnail generation can bog down the server after a giant upload. Mine was frozen after I first set it up but eventually caught up and now works very smoothly.

Do you have WebGL disabled or is WebGL not working?

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/24581

That's cool, but when a friend died last summer, Immich allowed me to find all the digital photos I had of him, even out of focus in the background. I get many requests from friends for old pictures, "do you remember that night when we all did a group photo, etc etc?" and the search facility in Immich allowed me to in a minute what sometimes took years to find, when scouring folders in spare time.

For me, there's nothing like being able to search for "brown dog" and get all the photos of my dog back. Not to mention all the other things Immich has that make managing a library pleasant.

I not only urge you to try it, but to buy the "supporter" pack, Immich really deserves it.

Same here, although one thing that's difficult with this is things like finding "that one photo we took 5 years ago which grandma used as a phone background". So now I gotta find the right external hard drive to plug in and fortunately the folders are by date but still it's a drag. So I'm considering looking into immich if it can just function as a server that shows thumbnails on some terabytes of date-sorted photos and videoes, no need for the machine learning stuff. Though I feel like there must be a less "heavy" solution than immich for this.

Immich stores images in a configurable folder structure. That you can _change_ at any moment, and Immich will happily rearrange the files accordingly.

Mine is something like "Album_Name/YEAR/MONTH/day-hour-minute-sec.jpg".

You can keep your file current structure/workflow and just use immich as a viewer and search engine, read only.

There is no need to replace it, certain changes can be additive. Immich falls into that category - you can still just see/use them as ordinary files. It just makes finding/viewing/sharing/processing them easier on top.

I'm like you, and a big fan of Pigallery2 precisely for its simplicity. But it turns out that Immich does support external libraries, so you can keep your manual file management in your filesystem and still use Immich for efficient indexing, face recognition, quick picture retrieval by year, location, people etc...

I'd recommend you try Immich (there's a docker compose version) and if you don't like it, you can just remove it and move on.

> After going through 25 years of changing software every few years on this front I can’t be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.

I've got the solution to this. I'm like you: files on disk. But I also use Immich: and here's the kicker... I pass the drive/volume with my photos to Immich as read-only (I use containers so it's easy: the drive itself is read-write, but Immich only has read-only access to it).

When I'm pissed off by Immich or something better comes along, I destroy the Immich containers and it's gone.

And I still my files on disk (with checksums as part of the filenames, moreover, seen that family JPG pictures aren't files that happen to change a lot and if they change, they can be renamed).

but $240 per year

I wrote some tips and tricks that I've found to help coax Google Takeouts into working: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/

Also: you should try out the latest build! https://photostructure.com/about/v2026.1/

FWIW all of these projects rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!) and my open-source node.js wrapper (that adds concurrency, does a ton of extra parsing work, and makes things a bit more ergonomic to live with): https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js

For what is worth, google takeout can export in 50GB tgz.

Downloading the takeout files is miserable through, the download link is only valid when being downloaded via human interaction in a web browser.

There is a silly trick. Start the download, pause it. Get the cookies from the page (only need to do that once for the session). Then copy the download link. Now you can curl on your server. When the file is downloaded, you can then cancel the download in your web browser. And do the same for the next file. One at a time.

Warning: google will cancel downloads if you run more than one or two at a time. After 3 download (failed or not) of a file google will delete the whole takeout.

The amount of engineering they must have deployed to purposefully crimple takeout with plausible deniability must be significant.

Check out icloudpd. It’s a bit fiddly but it definitely does work once you have it set up.

You can grab a data export from privacy.apple.com

do you mean it loses the original fps rate, or just that you can’t easily view it?

Personally I've avoided using any Synology-specific functionality. It's not as transparent and seems kind of brittle. I feel like that's going to pay off because after a couple of years I'm pretty sure I'm going to switch to an open source solution instead, and I won't have to look for alternatives to systems I'm already using.

I found Immich to be significantly higher quality. Nothing prevents you from running Immich in a newer synology which support containers.

Mine is so old that it doesn’t and it’s also under powered - else I’d be running Immich on it.

link?

There's a `--trash` option for the import command. It's not the default behavior though. I recommend deleting the source photos once you've verified Elodie has organized the photos how you'd like.

I did say it was robust…

I include video [1] and audio (.m4a) [2] files via EXIF.

For text files [3], I add a JSON block at the top to mimic EXIF.

I don’t want to deal with an additional sidecar file per asset. The risk of losing one during a transfer between systems is too high. It’s a conscious decision and not an oversight.

[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/2645bf25b81c63f65d6f1...

[2] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/a...

[3] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/t...

This specific plugin was purely written by Claude Code, correct. The prior 10k lines of python were not.

Without Claude Code, the plugin would probably only exist in my imagination.

I don’t personally care who writes the code. There’s plenty of contributors already.