Chapters
00:00 What Is Immich?
01:12 Is Immich Free and Open Source?
01:55 History and Roadmap
02:26 Mobile Apps
02:32 System Requirements & Performance
04:45 Do You Need A GPU For Immich?
05:36 Sharing Photos
07:43 Importing Photos
08:52 Mobile App Options
09:34 Command Line Bulk Import
10:07 Google Photos Import
10:44 External Photo Library
11:48 Geolocation Data
12:35 People and Places
13:05 Search and Object Recognition
13:50 Advance Search Options
15:09 Immich VS Google VS Synology Photos
Quick question. In your Docker/Non-TrueNAS setup for Immich what did you do for photo storage? Did you attach local storage to your Docker VM or are you NFS-ing it back to TrueNas?
I have Immich on TrueNAS and it’s been working great. I’ll admit, I am not comfortable with it being the sole source of my photos collection. The fam would have no clue how to access or troubleshoot if the server became unavailable and for whatever reason (hit by a bus, lost in the jungle) I couldn’t fix it. I also started an Ente photos subscription, but it is not gaining traction with my teen kids. It’s tough to shake big tech.
I prefer Immich. Much nicer interface and gallery/presentation. Ente does have image editing which is big. Honestly, all I really care about is crop and rotate, so it’s a bummer that basic functionality doesn’t exist in Immich.
As I mentioned above, really my biggest concern with Immich is the fact that it’s self hosted, and if the self (me) has problems, so does the rest of the family. This is really my biggest concern with all my self hosted / homelab stuff. The only real benefit of Ente is there is theoretically support for the average citizen.
I set up Immich about 6 months ago. I had tried several times and never quite got it right. I have it running as docker containers on my Synology DS920+. The biggest issue I had with the initial setup was the performance hit it took oh my NAS. I have decades worth of pics that I added as external libraries. I ended up having to chunk it up into years in order for the initial ingest to work. I have libraries by decade and individual folders within each of the decade libraries for the years. It took me about a week to get everything ingested and indexed by adding year by year. It has been working great once I got it all set up. So for anyone who has a large video and photo library that has run into similar issues with adding external libraries, you may want to try this approach.
I saw in the video you mentioned the library to pull Google Photos into Immich. I have all of my Google Photos takeout files downloaded and am trying to sort through all of that. I’ll definitely check that library out. Appreciate the info on that!
One thing I noticed with commercial NAS appliances for consumers is that they use very low-end CPUs. I noticed that even under very basic traffic (ie, unencrypted snapshot replication or 1gbps SMB), my Synology boxes and ix Systems boxes would max out on CPU.
Your particular box has a Celeron processor in it, so I looked it up on Geekbench. It’s faster than a raspberry pi 4, but not a raspberry pi 5 (mind you, the jump from 4 → 5 is pretty noticeable in geekbench). My personal take is that if it’s not faster than a raspi 5, I lower my expectations for what the box can do. My ix Systems boxes are now just used for backups, and they’re happy being “pure storage” boxes (with tailscale, because offsite replication).
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