Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face recognition and context/object search to be miles better than Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people.

Almost all my Google Photos "people" are mix-and-matched similar looking faces, so it's borderline useless. Immich isn't perfect, but it gives me the control to rerun face recognition and reassign faces when I want, even on my ancient GTX 1060.

That's something that should be possible with the upcoming Workflow feature. Some details can be found in the November Recap blog post.

https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap

I'm waiting for that first point to. The good news is that they just started work on workflows, which should allow for that.

The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me, is that not what you are talking about?

Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.

The sync really is quite good. On wifi it's basically seamless. If I had 30k new images though it would be much faster to use the immich-go tool mentioned in the blog post.

Offline support is alright, though I haven't worried about this much. I think it doesn't do any local deletion, so whatever stays in your DCIM folder is still on device.

The offline sync was a bit problematic in the past but this year they finally got it working properly.

I’d gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a fee forever for essentially… storing files on drives.

We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.

Are you on the latest version?

I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.

You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it.

Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser.

I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)

If you want to share with family, you can permanently add them as users to your Immich instance. Otherwise, you can create a link that they can use.

I plan to set up Immich so that I can have a central photo storage.

Apple Photos play poorly when you want to put the library on an external drive (and even more poorly when you want to put it on a networked drive).

I don't think it would add any value for you. For me, it adds value because I only have to turn my head to the left to see the computer that contains all my photos since I started taking pictures with a smartphone.

Supporting someone who is not TooBigTech is a valid concern, IMO.

The selling point for me is that it is NOT TooBigTech. It doesn't have to be as good as TooBigTech, but it has to be reliable enough. In my case it means that it should be able to sync from iOS/Android, in the background, even if the user never opens the app, and it should never get out of sync and require setting up everything again. Nextcloud fails at that.

For once iCloud have a terrible sync speed. Even 500GB of photos / videos take forever to sync like a week and I can't imagine what it will take for someone with multi-TB archives.