Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment and use cases

  • Many commenters run Immich in production for family archives (hundreds of GB to multiple TB, decades of photos) and describe it as “drop‑in” or near drop‑in replacements for Google Photos, iCloud, Synology Photos, and Nextcloud Photos.
  • Strong praise for the Google Photos–like UX, multi‑user support, shared albums, mobile apps, and CLI; several mention it passed the “spouse test.”
  • Some still keep Google/iCloud as a parallel backup until Immich is declared “stable.”

Stability, updates, and supply chain

  • Several report years of “zero maintenance” aside from updating containers; others hit breaking changes during upgrades (e.g., backup re‑do, component image changes).
  • Pain points: tight app–server version compatibility (mobile apps stop working if server lags), frequent updates, and lack of an official “stable” label.
  • One thread worries about fast‑moving dependencies and Docker‑only deployment, preferring distro‑packaged software; others see active dependency management as a positive.

Features and limitations

  • Strengths: multi‑user accounts, shared/public albums, CLIP semantic search, face recognition (reported as excellent, even on kids), external libraries, OIDC/SSO, CLI integration.
  • Weaknesses: no built‑in editing (not even rotate), no encryption, search sorting is relevance‑only and can’t be ordered by date, no OCR/text search yet, no image compression pipeline, tagging not available in mobile apps.
  • Compared to PhotoPrism/Nextcloud Photos: Immich praised for better UI, people/semantic search, multi‑user support; some found PhotoPrism’s recognition and UI quirks frustrating.

Performance and hardware

  • Runs acceptably on low‑end hardware (Raspberry Pi 4, mini PCs, old NAS with no GPU), though initial ML classification can take days on large libraries.
  • GPU acceleration speeds ML tasks but is described as optional; search latency is generally fast once indexing finishes.
  • Beta timeline dramatically improves mobile performance for many, but a few report worse thumbnail loading or flaky uploads on certain versions/devices.

Self‑hosting, storage, and backups

  • Common setups: home NAS + Docker + offsite backup (Backblaze/B2, restic, rsync to USB), or VPS + attached storage/Hetzner box.
  • Several are blocked by bus‑factor and recoverability concerns for non‑technical family members; some keep iCloud as the “family‑understandable” backup and use Immich as a secondary archive.
  • Many want first‑class S3/object storage and at‑rest encryption; current object‑store/FUSE experiments are seen as slow or costly.