Immich is a feature rich and privacy respecting solution for self-hosting photos and videos. It is very capable and meets all the required criteria for recommendation. Please check it out at the link below.
Immich looks great (speaking generally, not specifically in the context of privacy) its been a project I have been interested in for some time as a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos. I don’t believe it is especially privacy-focused, but by being (1) open source, and (2) self-hosted / locally hosted, it has a lot of privacy attributes by default.
Do you use it personally? If so what do you like most about it, and what privacy/security related features do you like, or do you wish it had?
Unless things have changed significantly within the last half year, immich imho is still too immature and frequently introducing breaking changes…
I recently replaced PhotoPrism for Immich. In the past it lacked features or implementation was not good enough, but fast development made it job, Immich is absolutly brilliant now. It is ways, like WAYS, better than PhotoPrism, it is faster, UI is easy and beatiful, mobile client is amazing, photos are backed up by themselves and you can even share them between multiple users. And PhotoPrism development is stuck, nothing changed during a year I used it.
Edit. Yes, braking changes. I use it maybe a month and it happened. Took me less than a minute to change some settings and now I have super advanced search, even Google Photos do not have anything similar lol.
I think that this is still the case (at least in the eyes of the developers):
Disclaimer
- The project is under very active development.
- Expect bugs and breaking changes.
- Do not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos.
- Always follow 3-2-1 backup plan for your precious photos and videos!
With that said, many early-ish adopters in the self-hosting community seem to be using it successfully.
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Yes you’re right, but it probably still need to mature a bit before it’s ready to be recommended by PG.
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No, it is opposite now. PhotoPrism still has no multi-user support, I think no OAuth support (I dont use it, I run both locally, not via VPS), geo-scratching is behind a paywall, ai face generation is not very good, no proper mobile app to backup photo (it has WebDAV support, it works, but not user-friendly way) and so on. If you would use both you will see so many difference. I am very surprised Immich could overcome PhotiPrism in such a short timeframe, I remember installing Immich less than a year ago and it was not even on par with PhotoPrism, now it is superior.
“The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!”
Doesn’t seem quite ready yet. So it doesn’t meet the requirements as of yet.
Thats good 
Thats normal thing; can live with this.
This is so obvious that there is no need to mention it. I mean, every serious IT person would know this.
As of project itself: very interesting. Worth keeping an eye on.
I don’t disagree. But it seems like they don’t sell it as a ready project.
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Of course not, there will always be someone who will suggest improvement/bugfix…
Though Id say this project is usable…
Hi everybody. Glad to see this post got some attention.
I have been using it for several months now and am very content. It is extremely feature rich, and it has a stated focus on privacy as a mission of the project. And it is of course self-hosted and open source so no trust is needed and makes it inherently have some great privacy characteristics by default, just as you mentioned.
Immich does sometimes introduce breaking changes but the documentation is always excellent. Here is an example of a recent breaking changes and how they clearly delineate what you need to do to update: Release v1.95.0 · immich-app/immich · GitHub
A simple change of one line in the docker compose file and you are good to go. I think anybody interested in self-hosting must become comfortable with these kind of minor adjustments anyway. So, recommending a self-hosted application (which Privacy Guides does do) means that there is some inherent level of technical skill required for using those recommendations, and I really believe that the great documentation and support (Discord) that Immich offers makes it easy to recommend, despite some occasional breaking changes.
Overall, I think there will always be some technical complexity with a self-hosted solution, and despite that the Immich developers say it may have some bugs from time to time (I personally have noticed zero), I have found it to be an exceedingly polished piece of software that the PG community could benefit from.
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Doesn’t it store pictures unencrypted ? Last time I self hosted it, on the server I could see the files
Yes, but consider that Immich is intended to be self-hosted. If you control the hardware, and it is on your local network, e2e encryption seems substantially less necessary in most scenarios.
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I’m a big fan of Immich and have been using it for the better part of a year. I don’t think any other self hosted photo solutions come close.
It definitely under active development, but that’s better than inactive development ;). They push updates frequently and sometimes there’s breaking changes, but it’s all well documented and I’ve never had an issue moving from one version to the next.
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Sounds a hack lot like testing in production…
Recently saw some podcast show with Louis Rossman and the FUTO investor whom name i forgot. Now I mostly like the guy for his efforts but they claimed that it’s not possible to have the features with e2ee in Immich which I am pretty sure that Ente has proved them wrong. It seems more sensible to recommend something that has e2ee than something that does not.
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I think Immich was recommended because Ente couldn’t be self hosted. Now that Ente has this option I also agree that probably Immich should be removed from the recommendantions unless they work on the e2ee.
It’s not listed tho. But photoprism which is also similar is.
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I couldn’t get Ente to work with self-hosting. The Android App just wouldn’t sync, even though it was connected to the server. Documentation is lacking. For some client platforms you need to compile the binary yourself with your server address hard coded. I don’t think it is really suitable for self-hosting as is without too much hassle.
It definitely is. Immich devs don’t seem to be very experienced in software development. A lot of small indications, for example version numbers above 1 are used even though it’s not stable yet. Nevertheless I think it’s a good choice, if you mount the image folder read-only and sync via some other app, because the experience is really good, including face recognition, object search and so on, better than Photoprism or Nextcloud Moments.
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