"it’s now easier than ever"

Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...

My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.

Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.

[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.