I migrated from Apple Photos to Immich a couple of months ago, removing the iCloud subscription, and couldn’t be happier. It was the most hassle free piece of self-hosted software I’ve had so far. Very easy to install and everything just works. Context and OCR search are amazing. Mobile apps could be better, but they are constantly being improved.
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. They even have ROCM support, so it works even without an Nvidia GPU. Being able to spread such workloads over your local network feels like a magic that has been forgotten in an era of blackbox cloud providers.
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.
This sounds like a fun idea to explore!
Habe 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). When you want to move your tooling or just do things manual again, grab the disk and your are ready.
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)
Elodie makes a copy of all my images initially? Is the recommenddd route then to delete the files in original location? Seems unclear at first read.
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.
If someone wants something I email it to them or upload it to a directory on a web server and send them the link. If I want something on my phone I’ll zap it over with localsend.
Photography is a hobby for me and I have a large family so I have a lot of photos. And a lot of editing to do. Currently moving from Lightroom to Darktable because again Lightroom tries to hammer me with library management and lock me into things.
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.
I had a bunch of photos in Apple Photos which did that sort of thing. As a library management tool it's probably the best out there.
But when you search for brown dog it'll bring back different coloured goats, horses and cows too. This is a problem in a large library.
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.
We really need an OS with a metadata capture and indexing system that isn't crap. Exif is metadata.
"give me all files with a location in Chicago"
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.
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".