Comment by makeitdouble
8 hours ago
At the same time buying compute is more expensive than ever, and the gap between homemade projects and what's available online in term of speed, functionality and LLM capacity is bigger than ever.
Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues. Trying to do the same today will cost two arms and leg and require a lot more overall knowledge of what to compose to get the same result.
The dust will settle and we should go back to a nearer gap in I hope a few years, until the. it might be a glacier age for self-hosting.
> Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues.
You could argue it’s much easier on the software side, because self hosting Immich is much easier thanks for AI assistance with setting it up. If you can live without the built in facial recognition feature you don’t need particularly beefy hardware.
I find myself taking on far more ambitious self hosted projects thanks to Claude. Extending home assistant in various ways, deploying a “self hosted Spotify”, making sure everything is fully accessible via Tailscale out of the range of the wifi and so on. Of course the general population isn’t really aware or interested in most of this.
It's about 3~4 years I haven't used Immich so it might have evolved a lot since then, but looking at their current roadmap there is a ton of features I use everyday in Photos that won't be there.
And it's not to fault Immich, on the contrary, Photos is one of the rare Google property where the team is constantly pushing the envelope.
I could combine it with a bunch of external tools to make do, but it would be crazy clunky or would need full sync with Adobe Cloud for instance for the editing part, while doing all the scanning and categorizing locally.
On AI assist...I'm still pausing a lot when t comes to home projects that will be constantly talking to the outside and hold the stuff that is the most private to me and my whole family and friends. It helps me as a research tool, but due to my own restrictions it won't be magic.
> On AI assist...I'm still pausing a lot when t comes to home projects that will be constantly talking to the outside and hold the stuff that is the most private to me and my whole family and friends.
Totally understand this part. I didn’t mean to give Claude code full access to locally hosted environments but rather copy back and forth in your local shell with help from Claude (error messages, helping to plan out the installation etc.)
for self hosted and personal use, compute lasts a good while though. and in the time you would've been waiting to time the compute market, you get to benefit by being less a part of the AI data dragnet.