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Ente Auth is also the best, because it works on any device, including the one you're trying to access (maybe it defeats the purpose of 2FA but sometimes I don't care).

for people wondering:

"Ente Photos is a paid service, but we offer 10GB of free storage. You can also >>clone this repository and choose to self-host<<."

So both forms...

https://github.com/ente/ente

I got into Ente because I wanted to create photo upload links on a per-even basis - I can tell all my friends, if you take pics or video tonight, upload it at this URL - and it just works. No app necessary, very simple, very cheap. Then from there, I got the photo backup / archive service because why not.

They really are pretty much just what they appear to be. Im a fan.

Are there any side effects of leaving Immich public? I think people overestimate the risks. Just update your stuff regularly, follow simple rules, and set up something like CrowdSec. I know it's simpler to just use Tailscale and similar tools, but recently I see the trend that people don't even consider that.

Beware that migrating back from Immich to iCloud/Google is not something Immich cares about. There is no "download all" anywhere, best way is to go to the server and get raw files from there.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/14365

I only wish it would support nested albums (or albums in folders) so it could be an easy replacement for lightroom cloud as well.

I have all of my photos organized like this: `events -> year/month - holiday -> (album_1, ...)`. and: `home town -> year -> (album_1, ...)`. Photos will be in multiple albums, and there will be edits as well. And I need to track the picked/rejected state as well (and filter on it).

Only reason I haven't moved over to Immich yet is because I am struggling to map my photo organization onto it's way of doing things in a way that's nice. So far my attempts have been unwieldy.

Is there any side effects of leaving the phone connected to Tailscale VPN all day?

Large file uploads are non-resumable. That is, if you have any videos at a decent bitrate and resolution, you need to be able to upload the whole file in a single session. iOS doesn't make this easy to do via background uploads. I uploaded everything by keeping the app open overnight.

I have synced ~9000 photos from my phone in february. That worked pretty well. I was done in about 10 hours. I don't remember whether the originals were downloaded, or whether they were deleted automatically afterwards. Felt like a smooth process though.

Likely more of an IOS issue than Immich issue. Apple doesn't care for apps that make it easier to exit iCloud.

Man, I wish my experience was as nice. I used the proxmox lxc for it and after a 2 months of organizing I had some corruption and didn't have the fortitude to get through the debugging. It might have been related to a big version migration if I remember correctly. It turned me off the stack. The upgrading wasn't as turnkey as I wanted it to be and I dont think the case is different today.

I just want to be able to organize my folders outside of some dumb library system and immich at the time fought that as well.

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If you can get all the images into a filesystem (on a NAS or similar server share), you can use the External Libraries feature in Immich (https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/). This allows it to crunch through the media files via an async import job (a bit more reliable than having to directly upload via the web api).

In my setup, I exclusively use the external libraries feature, pointed at a read-only share from my NAS mounted onto my Immich server. (The external libraries are set to resynchronize to the database every few hours). This means I can manage all my media assets myself without worrying about Immich accidentally corrupting them, and if I eventually move off Immich, I just have a single folder of media files organized by date to port around.

The only downside is that I don't directly upload any media files directly to Immich, but that's okay. I have Syncopoli sync files from my phones (on a scheduled cadence) to an intermediary server which organizes and cleans exif data from media files before dropping it into its permanent home on my NAS share. No manual steps to get photos from my phone to my Immich instance!

Likely not the best approach:

I had ~200GiB. I selected below 10k files at a time to upload in the web UI (selected all 2014, then 2015). It was fine. More than that many and the UI became unusable.

External Libraries seem like a good option.

They have also recently improved the background import in the Android app so I have heard so that might be worth a try.

You can use this tool to get them into Immich, it will parse all the metadata and recreate albums as you have in GPhotos https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

Just a quick note that native windows extract is 32bit and dies on archives gt 4gb. Use 7zip or something to extract in case you happen to be using that one.

immich-go has what you need

Yes, at least for a year. There is a ”external library” feature, I think that does what you want.

Yes, using external libraries. It's been a feature for several years. Make it read-only by mounting docker compose read only

What do you mean Immich is not end-to-end encrypted? You control both ends, you can encrypt it any way you want…

Okay? So don't use it, use a managed service like Google Photos, Apple Photos, Dropbox, etc where your photos and files might be arbitrarily removed or your access to them limited while they are scanned for disavowed content.

You can also just use a secure transport layer (like WireGuard or a VPN) instead of relying on every project to implement end-to-end encryption.

So if you don't want a self hosted service there are tons of cloud providers. Google photos, iCloud, etc. Some people don't want to pay a monthly fee to store their photos or don't want to risk losing something with sentimental value just because a company decides to ban you

it's really not much to manage assuming you are already doing backups. you ~ pay the energy cost either way.

> I don't want yet another self hosted service to manage

Isn't system administration a solved problem now with LLMs? At least for these simple problem domains?

You can use https://ente.com/ (it's open-source). It also makes the seemingly much better decision of storing photos in S3.

You can have immich on truenas that has the whole pool encrypted, same goes with opencloud for other docs/files. Plus all nas backup features, I think it’s a better approach than dealing with each app encryption.

Edit: regarding cloud based backup, besides the usual privacy and security concerns, you can’t guarantee the fixed price, you might subscribe now and pay for a year, next year you have the typical “oops, operation cost are high we have to raise the prices or shutdown” blog post and now you’re stuck again, download, find another, upload, etc.

VPN (or other) Tunnel.

That's the objective answer. There's no mystery here. That's exactly how you get what you want and it's not too hard. Not trying to dunk on you or anyone one but this is an easily solved problem, and I think I want to highlight it like this to make sure everyone understands.

Anything web/internet/network service thing, you can add this on. This composability is important to remember in software, this even goes back to "The Unix Way" type stuff.

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