Self-hosting my photos with Immich
a day ago
- The author wanted a local backup for Google Photos after the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 due to OAuth restrictions, leading them to set up Immich, a self-hostable photo manager.
- Immich was installed on a Ryzen 7 Mini PC running Proxmox and NixOS, configured with 500 GB disk, 4 CPU cores, and 4 GB RAM, accessible via Tailscale VPN using tailscale serve to forward localhost:2283.
- For initial photo import, the official Immich CLI had issues with timeouts and ignoring Google Takeout metadata; the third-party tool immich-go was used successfully, as it pauses background tasks and handles Google Takeout archives.
- The Immich iPhone app was installed for automatic backup of new photos via Tailscale URL, with notifications disabled to avoid alerts during background uploads.
- Backups are set up via a systemd timer using rsync to copy /var/lib/immich to the author's PC, which follows a 3-2-1 backup scheme.
- Immich lacks photo editing features (e.g., rotate, crop), requiring manual download and use of GIMP, and sharing is still done via Google Photos.
- The author chose Immich over Ente because Immich is more popular in their network, and Ente's end-to-end encryption platform was deemed unnecessary given existing encryption at transit (Tailscale) and disk (LUKS) layers.
- The author finds Immich delightful and fast, but notes areas for improvement: the official immich-cli needs better reliability and Google Takeout support, and iPhone auto backup configuration is too complex.