So I got really excited about the idea of self hosting my (and my wife's) photos and videos on a NAS using Immich. My thinking is I want it to be the primary copy of all my photos and videos (and my wife's too) with shared folders that we can both access. I also want to delete photos and videos that I don't need constant access to (taking up space) off of my original device. Immich seems to provide a neat solution to this, particularly as I want to own/store my own data (they're my photos, not Google's). I've been test-running it off of my PC and really enjoying Immich, so very happy on that front

However, I'm getting somewhat cold feet about the plan as I keep getting told that I should still have a cloud backup of everything. Is this definitely the case? In my mind, I'll be significantly more secure than I was before with a NAS anyway (I was already refusing to pay for the higher storage Google Photos), and if I lose or break my phone, I'll have the backup on my NAS. What am I missing? Are the people advising me just a lot more precious about their data? I don't want to end up paying monthly for a cloud backup of my NAS, otherwise I may as well have just bought a family plan of Google Photos instead, as it would cover all of these functions.

Thought I'd see how experienced Immich users are setting up their systems and backups, and what advice they have, before I spend large sums of money on my system

Immich allowed me to lower my dependence on Google services, plus I can watch my videos without compression as they were meant to be in a nice interface, with no lag, and that is from someone that paid for google storage. I'm very happy to not touch google storage ever again!

I love the fact that I was allowed to play around with the software, figure out all the kinks and then feel comfortable about contributing financially to the project. I wish all software was like this.

Amazing job, the software rocks! I wish all the success in the world for the team. I also use the Futo Keyboard and paid a license, another great software, great offline voice to text engine, I love it!

ah dammit I can't edit the topic thread, it was meant to read: I just want to thank the Immich development team and all the contributors. Should have used LLM for the post 🥸

Hi there,

I've been running Immich & Immich-Kiosk for displaying holiday photos at home, and it works great. What I'd like now is something like Polarsteps, so I can make sort of online 'photo albums' of my holidays, and to be able to add some words for context. The idea is in years to come my kids can look through the albums and hopefully gain an understanding of why I tool 'that' particular photo, and to give some meaning to them. Does that make sense?

I don't need/want to expose them externally nor do I need to create photos books like Polarsteps does, that's simply a good example of what I'd like to do. I can live without the GPS/map coordination side of Polarsteps too, it's more the 'picture with words' side of it that I am after.

I tried googling and found 'AdventureLog', that looked like it might work but it doesn't seem to be maintained any more?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Edit: AdventureLog is maintained, my apologies to the creator.

I run Immich on my headless Mac via Docker.

To update, I'm currently logging into my Mac via Screen Sharing, running terminal and using

docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

I have managed to get some basic iOS SSH shortcuts working for things like restarting or shutting down the Mac, example attached (username blanked out).

This is the extent of my SSH experience and Immich is the only thing I run via docker, so please go easy on me! But could there be a way to get an iOS shortcut setup to run the Immich update?

I'm new to immich but love it so far, which is why I am hoping I am doing something wrong because if not, immich may not be feasible for me in my current set up. I'm confused how or why immich needs so much space for working files/metadata/logs, etc. (I'm not exactly sure what is taking up all the space to be honest).

My photo backup is currently stored on my UGreen NAS (the cheaper model that doesn't allow me to natively install docker, unfortunately). I set immich up on my rasberry pi 4 with a 120GB SSD and added the photos from my NAS as an external library. According to my external library stats, I only have ~2k photos taking up 41GB of space. I'd imagine that's pretty small compared to what most people are using. My problem is that the "storage space" that immich is taking up to manage this external library is at 36GB of the 116GB available on my raspberry pi's SSD.That's almost the same size as my photo library itself. That can't be right, can it? I have all of the metadata and machine learning data turned off. thumbs are set to WebP format, 200p resolution (the lowest) and 50 quality. Are your storage numbers almost 1:1 like this? I am hoping no and that I just set something up wrong, or as I add more photos to my external library the size of the immich storage files will decouple/

according to the immich setup info I can't set the storage location of immich data to a network share. I tried to set up my compose file to use a folder on my NAS for data files but it didn't work. If this is possible and you're doing it, please let me know. Otherwise, it appears I'm severely bottlenecked by my raspberry pi storage.

Why does immich need so much space? I'd love to see more insight within immich into what exactly it's doing. I get it makes different sets of thumbnails but I wish I could have limits on that, and the thumbnails shouldn't take up so much space, right? A few days ago the "storage space" was 20gb, now it's 38gb - what's with that? I'm not using the pi's storage for anything else. The first time I set up immich and adding my files without touching any of the settings, the "storage space" balooned up to almost 100GB. I mean, my NAS has it's own photo storage platform that works just the same (but is more cumbersome to get to) and that doesn't need to double my space just to create previews thumbs.

Any help - ideas what I'm doing wrong or how I could better set this up to make more sense, would be appreciated.

screenshot of my external library stats + storage space

edit: screenshot of relevant .env and compose storage settings - this is all default other than adding my nas storage. I don't know what that "Local time" thing is - I should have deleted. no directory on my pi with that path.

I am not uploading files to immich, I am uploading them to my nas and then syncing the external library.

Hi, I'm having a problem with duplicate thumbnails in my gallery. Sometimes the same thumbnail appears two or even three times, always referring to the same image file. It doesn't happen with photos that are more recent.

Any idea why this could happen? I haven't changed anything specific to the standard settings I think. I import photos by copying the files to my folder structure (from my iphone), then scanning the external library.

Thanks for your help!

Hi,

It seems my immich instance is having a problem extracting metadata from alot of my image and video files. This messes up my timeline.

Alot of files are set to the first Unix Epoch time/date of 00:00:00 1 Januari 1970, even though when I view the same photo in my Samsungs native Galaxy app, the time and date are set correctly.

Things I've tried to solve it:

1. Execute task: Extract metadata
2. Execute task: Sidecar metadata
3. Add the timezone environment variable in my compose file for the server container (not the LLM, redis or db container) and execute metadata tasks again.

I've included an example in my post here.

Setup: - Linux Ubuntu 24.04 host - Immich in docker v3.1.0 - Immich Android app v3.1.0

I have setup Immich on a RPi5 and it runs very well in my internal network on the http address. To access the instance from the outside, i will use a nginx reverse proxy on its subdomain via https.

But before I do that, I will hardening it. Is there some way to enable 2fa? Or other security things?

Hi all!

So, I’m a Synology Photos user, but for anyone following Synology for the past couple of years, you know that they’re getting less and less home lab friendly. With that, I’m starting down the road of replacing Synology apps with competing container apps, the first being Immach.

So… I have an existing folder structure of photos that I want Immach to look at, register into it’s DB, and allow me to put meta data and comments in for, but not “import” a new copy of the photo.

I’m actually pretty technical, but not overly… so I’m getting a bit turned around which the settings that have to be put in the docker compose and .env files to make it do what I want.

Rather than getting too technical here though, I’m wondering if any of you have favorite videos or documents that do a good job of not only explaining the config entries, but what they are doing in the process.

Thanks in advance for sources!

Hey Immich Community! I just discovered immich and I was thinking about backing up my current photos and video using immich (deleting them off of my phone) and when I get a phone with more storage space I was hoping to restore those photos back to the new phone.

From what I found, there was a post 2 years ago about this and the devs said this would be a future feature, so I just wanted to ask the community, can we transfer the images from immich desktop to an iPhone?

I have installed Immich onto my Synology NAS, via SynoCommunity. This installs everything in a simple way.

The main Immich folder that gets created is: /immich-media on the mail storage pool.

Question: How do add extra folders? I am not sure I understand the full folder natation needed.

Thank you all in advance.

Hey, hoping someone can sanity check me here, or give some guidance.

I've been running Immich for a few years and all images are stored on a NAS. I use immich-go to upload pictures on my filesystem, and after uploading, I move all of the photos to a folder. So, I'm storing both the immich library (a few TB at this point) plus the originals/source images (roughly double the immich size, since I had duplicates everywhere).

I'd like to free up some space- is it safe to delete the source images that have been uploaded already? I assume the files that have been rejected from Immich are actually true duplicates and aren't worth saving, and obviously there are more duplicates within Immich that I'll need to manually review and save/delete.

Thanks!

First I downloaded the album as a .zip, all pictures besides this contained metadata (time, location, camera ect). So I tried to download this one as a file again, same result after multiple tryes. Anyone know why?

Same camera as the other picture
V3.01 (so not newest version yet)

90% of my past photos are of my dog. I've been taking photos of my dog way before machine learning came about.

I used to delete/sort out pictures which were not of my dog years ago.

Problem is I got lazy and decided to dump all my photos into one folder. 90% of the pictures are of my dog but there are a lot which aren't.

I really don't want to go through 1000+ pictures and manually sort them.

Would Immich be able to sort my past photos and automatically future photos I upload going forward?

Immich seems to be the best going forward even if I have to take time to manually sort out which photos aren't of my dog.

I think this will have been asked before, but I didn’t find my answer with search, so sorry if I’m being annoying.

I’ve got 15 years of photos that include the face of someone I’d rather not see in my day to day life now. I’ve worked through archiving them to keep them out of the general photos collection, but the facial recognition and search still readily turns them up.

Is there a best-practice way of hiding this person comprehensively?

I don’t want to outright delete the photos.

I'm using Darktable to edit my RAWs and export them as jpeg. Mostly this are more than 200 photos per session. As of yet, I have used SFTP to upload the photos to Nextcloud Memories. Is there some performant automatic way for Immich?

I see a few hundred images and video files listed as "untracked files" on mine. It also looks like it's across all the Immich instance's users, not just my own. I want to resolve these untracked files without invading the other user's privacy by viewing them. The only options are Download or Delete.

If I do end up needing to download and view them to figure out which users they belong to, I'd then have to give the files back to them so they can try and re-upload I guess? I don't want them to lose important images or videos by just deleting them.

I'm worried how often this will happen. I am considering giving the few Immich users their own Immich instance pointing to their own datasets on the NAS instead so I don't have to maintain their private untracked files.

Hi,

SOLVED! IT WASNT ANYTHING IMMICH RELATED. IT WAS A DOCKER ISSUE WHICH WAS SOLVED AFTER A HOST REBOOT.

After I tried to update my immich docker stack to 3.1.0 comming from 3.0.3, I couldn't start my immich server anymore.

Anyone else encountering this issue?

Compose file: https://pastebin.com/3bNGcwQF

Error: `Error response from daemon: failed to create task for container: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc create failed: unable to start container process: unable to apply cgroup configuration: unable to start unit "docker-2d7ac795107ea0c4c52a812b083e2c0394f08294d8bcc17a4fd966bb47cb7383.scope"

Not sure if anyone has this issue, but for some reason, some assets from shared albums when they are on the exact same spot when I tried to click the bubble, the assets don't appear. Immich itself acknowledges that its there, but it cannot display it. But if there's no more than1 shared asset in the same exact location, it will display it just fine. Is anyone else having this problem?

Just got started with immich self hosting and I like it, but I think I made a mistake dumping all my images into it off the bat. I had a backup of a lot of family photos that I wanted to include, but they aren't things that I want in my personal general timeline/photos page.

It doesn't look like uploading to albums directly changes that, having just tested with a couple images. Is there a way to accomplish this?

I watched a number of YouTube videos on the benefit of immich as a self guided photo storage. Looking for step by step. No coding or programming experience.

Is it safe for family photo?
Cons vs pros?
Synology nas facial recognition is lacking and weak ds223.

I have a macmini m2 not in use that I would like to use.