Immich is a really nice photo management application that you can host yourself. I’m currently running it on my JankyNAS via the TrueNAS Apps Market. That’s a discussion for another post, but TrueNAS makes it really easy to try out a bunch of open source applications with minimal configuration.
I originally found Immich while looking to say Goodbye Google. Though I haven’t fully gotten out of the big G’s clutches (Google Maps + Android are the 2 remaining sticking points) I am happy to say that Immich is a good alternative to Google Photos.
Immich comes with a webapp that runs on the server machine, as well as iOS and Android apps that you can install on your phone. Any photos you take on your phone get synced with the server, and you can view your complete library on your phone or the browser. If you have multiple devices, you can sync all your photos and then view them on any device.
Immich does all the things you’d expect from a photo manager (well, most of the things… it doesn’t currently let you edit photos).
The main features I appreciate are:
I can configure all my (and my families) devices to save their photos to Immich. Once place to store and view everyone’s photos. This also enables the next point.
I can easily backup all the photos stored on the server. The family’s photo history is probably the main digital asset I care about preserving, so it’s nice to be able to have everyone’s photos in one place.
Each family member has their own account, and I can share my photo library with them (or vice-versa) via “Partner Link.” You can setup partner link between as many accounts as you want, and they can also re-link back to you if they choose.
The search functionality works really well. Last week my daughter couldn’t remember which leg she had broken several years ago, so I searched for “purple cast” (she had a purple cast) and the photos I had taken of her with her cast came right up (a bunch of non cast purple photos came up too, but… 🤷).
The person detection works pretty well. Like most face detection it has a hard time with young kids faces (under 2 years old or so) but it lets you specify a person’s birthday and then will use that to help distinguish one sibling from another for example. This was very helpful when first classifying the photos of my kids, because before doing that Immich was sure that both my kids were the same person.
It pulls all the exif data as well as geolocation information from the photos and gives you a nice map of where all your photos were taken as well as allowing you to find photos based on any of the exif data.
It’s pretty fast. I have ~60k photos and 3k videos and the application feels snappy. I can jump to any year, or search for some obscure thing and so far I haven’t been frustrated waiting for the application to do it’s thing.
Immich also generates a basic, but nice, “memories” header that shows you a sampling of pictures you took on today’s date over the years. Not sure how far it will go back, but so far I’ve seen photos from 20 years ago there. It’s nice to see those memories, and remember that 20 years ago today I was in Armenia checking out this scorpion in a teacup.
