Comment by bicepjai
1 day ago
Thanks for this project. Our family generates about 2TB of media a year, and it’s been like that for a while, so we’re sitting at roughly 12TB total. That’s very much the long tail of personal media.
I’m not ready to pay $60/month, but I do like iCloud’s memories and other photo features. My compromise is simple:
- I use docker-icloudpd to download our iCloud Photos to local storage over time. It’s been the most practical way I’ve found to back up multiple accounts into one place, though it does require occasional re-auth every so often. - I keep only the last ~2 years of media in iCloud and delete older ones after they’re archived locally. - For browsing and searching the older archive, I use Immich, which has been a great self-hosted personal photo cloud experience with a modern app feel.
For storage, I’ve found fast local disk matters a lot once you’re digging up photos from 5+ years ago. Something like an OWC 4M2 with M.2 drives keeps the experience snappy; a typical HDD-based NAS can feel sluggish when you just want to quickly pull up an old memory.
Does Photos have features you use that Immich doesn't? I've switched to the latter fully and love it (though I have an Android).
How much work is it to maintain an Immich instance? I'm trying to keep my digital setup lean, but I can't find a simple way to get photos off my iPhone and onto my home server. One way synchronization is my only goal. Extra features are not desired.
If all you want is a 1-way sync from phone to server, then just go with PhotoSync. You can set up a simple SFTP connection so you don't even need anything on the server.
Immich is great if you want to be able to delete things from your phone to save space and still have access to all your content served from Immich on your server though.
1 reply →
I change a line in the Dockerfile to upgrade it every few months, that's it. Otherwise it's zero.
Music and AI features are still lagging in Immich, and I can understand why. Immich machine learning is not flushed out yet. If Immich has plans for creating marketplace for extensibility like plugins, in the current era of Claude code, I am sure we will end up with many options or features.
Music? Like a music library? Wouldn't Subsonic be miles better for that?
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Encryption at rest. If someone breaks into my house and steals my server I'd rather they not be able to get data. I can do LUKS but I really want the data to only ever be decrypted client side.