Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.

But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.

Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.

I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.

Had gazillion copies of folders and iphoto libraries in various backups, but since i moved to linux as daily driver was on the hunt for a good photo archiver. Just recently started using Immich. Tried Photoprism too which would have also fit my need well, but somehow Immich won the coin toss ! (After many years was able to pull that one pic my wife was after from my archive !). My all those duplicates have been now been pulled and deduped and condensed into an immich library.

I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged).

Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i need my own local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data).

Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !

I don't think cost is the main reason you should move. Things like photos, gmail are definitely subsided by google so it's not a fair comparison. It's getting pretty easy to add backup for self hosting so that is becoming the smallest problem. Agree with you, still worth it

In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)

There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).

Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive

Once a year I go through my photos and select my favourites and have them printed to paper. Using Google's print service (as an example) you can spend about $80 to have 150 photos printed into a book. If you do this once a year you will soon have a lovely shelf of paper photos you can easily store, easily look at and show to other people and hand down to your kids and their kids, etc. Long term I suspect my collection of books is far more likely to survive than my google account.

I jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...

People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.

This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.

What's the math for the cost of getting banned from Google for some stupid AI reason?

Google takeout is pretty good with exporting photos.

I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years.

Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.

“You _will_ lose them”, as in, somehow Immich will do something to lose them (like making a mistake in a dedupe process which deletes the wrong things), or are you just saying you also need to keep backups?

is nas + backup to amazon glacier a good solution?

I don’t get that. Why isn’t google takeout easier, simpler, faster? Am I missing something?

Any info on your public proxy setup?

It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.

Docs for context: https://docs.immich.app/features/mobile-backup/

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Easy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..

What do you mean opaquely named directories? It’s yyyy/yyyy-MM-dd/originalFileName. Those opaquely named files are the thumbnails.

Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.

For this exact reason, I'm using Immich by pointing it to my folder structure as an "external library" https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/

https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ is their best attempt to address your concern, but honestly I'm fine with navigating my photos solely using immich. (with annual backup copy stored in cold cloud storage)

I believe that's a setting, you can have it store the files in a more predictable directory hierarchy. Though it's better to make that choice early on before doing a lot of imports.

Yeah, sharing is one of the big problems with Immich. You either need to expose your whole instance to make share links publicly accessible (and there's no way to secure user accounts with 2FA), or create user accounts for the people you want to share with and/or invite them and set up your VPN for them to access the shares.

There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).

Open Noodle is a fork of Immich which addresses the lack of Sharing: https://opennoodle.de/features/?category=sharing

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If a thousand people ask an AI for a generic photo app, that's not only a huge waste of time and money, a lot of them are going to experience data loss because of it. And only a couple will know how to use docker.

Everyone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most.

The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N.

I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI.

The amount of code produced will remain significantly higher than before AI, but it will go down a bit, compared to the peak (and I’m not sure we’ve reached peak)

Google Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium. If you count your phone as another copy/medium you still need a 3rd copy somewhere if you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy.

> not accessible to my family

My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.

Why would it not be accessible to your family? Immich allows sharing links

> I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.

It’s less than you think! Consider that Apple’s image recognition happens on your phone. Also, it doesn’t matter if indexing is slow, as long as the photos are indexed before you need to search for them.

I used to run Immich on a 2nd gen Core i3.

Shotwell is great, but it's a single-machine photo organizer; I don't think you can really compare it to Immich on level ground.

I made the switch from photoprism to immich a couple years ago and the app is far better. Sad to hear it hasn't improved in the mean time.

> By default, Immich will only upload photos and videos when connected to Wi-Fi. You can change this behavior in the backup settings page.

That's me in a nutshell. I have close to 300GiB in Google Photos, mostly photos and videos of my children. I take a lot of photographs because getting a good shot, for me, is mostly a matter of luck. I don't delete that many photos because it's active work and I don't really care to spend the time. I do curate an album of decent ones, just so the few people who care can see new photos and videos every now and then. I pay a relatively small fee for 2 TiB of space.

[self promo warning] Setting up self hosting alternatives like immich is still the biggest adoption barrier out there. Most people are not technical. I had the same problem even as a technical personal.

I built malmo to solve that. 1 click install for immich malmo.network/store/immich

Underlying OS fully open source, install it on your own box or use a hosting provider

Horses for courses, but you’re comparing your best-case scenario to a worst-case Immich scenario. Admittedly I had a home lab box for it and am technical, but my effort was essentially pointing Claude at the Docker image and remembering a port number for setting up my phone.

Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The impetus to finally set up Immich came from my wife pushing past that. Even at fifty cents a GB forever, it’s not going to scale as well as essentially 0, though that depends on considering the drive as a sunk cost.

And now I finally have to suck it up and establish an off-site backup plan to make my scenario like for like. Damn you!

Neither of your proposed solutions are really similar to Immich, the first is certainly private and secure, but you don't get many of the conviniences like location-based search, automatic face/object tagging, automatic OCR, etc.

Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.

I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance

Use claude code or any other llm to set this up for you then

I have Syncthing on my android phone, my laptop and my always-on nuc at home. There's a folder where I keep anything I want to backup.

Or you can use this and pay no dollar per month for an accessible indexed search of 12+ months of photos, not used to train AI models.