Big shocker, I’m not a huge fan of cloud-storage solutions for keeping my photos. And I’ve been trying to take a lot of photos. I think there’s a lot of good reasons for self-hosting your own image server. Privacy, cost-to-storage ratio, accessibility, etc. All of my pictures, from what I take on my phone and ripped from digital cameras, get uploaded to this server.
This is a basic outline of my immich server and how this all runs in the background.
notable features
- Automatic upload from mobile devices with the immich app
- Facial recognition (“In this picture: Kevbot”)
- Auto sorts uploads into local files
- “On this day” memories kinda deal
- Multi-user support
- Map view
- Locked folders
- Free software
List can go on. I’ve never been an avid user of the iCloud/Google Photo platform, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any major features that don’t cross over.
infrastructure
Like everything else in the lab, it’s hosted on my Dell PowerEdge as a Proxmox VM. It’s heavy, I won’t lie, but pretty feature complete. The biggest advantage, in my opinion, is that this just acts as a very fancy front-end for a locally stored image library. Everything added to immich lives in a single directory tree on the server. This means that everything, at any time, can be freely backed up and moved around. I have backups laying all over, both local and off-site. The risk of major data loss is essentially zero, and I’d argue that it’s lower than using a typical cloud service for storing photos.
installation
Installing immich is mad easy. I spun up an Ubuntu box and installed the immich packages from their github. Once you get the service started, everything can be configured from the webui. Stupid simple stuff.
cost
Now, immich is free. The kind of “free if you don’t value you your time” kind of free. Meaning there’s no software license or subscription. But, I think it’d be pretty dishonest of me to imply that it costs nothing to setup and run. Yes, you could probably get a decently capable setup with a moderate amount of storage going with an old laptop and $50 external drive.
My girlfriend could probably fill a 2TB HDD with her snapchat memories alone. With the size of modern digital photos and the absolute bonkers amount of images some people store, it’s very likely that you wouldn’t be able to make this a feasible solution without some upfront cost. But I would still argue this is a cheaper solution than an ongoing iCloud/Google Photos subscription.
Shown is the iCloud monthly pricing tiers. 2TB for $10 a month. $120/year. Cheaper than I expected, honestly.
So in a little over a year, you’re paying more than the cost of a basic external 2TB drive. For computing, you can run immich on any old machine laying around, or even have it as a background service on your main PC.
I’m not going to fully dive into the cloud-vs-hosted conversation, but from a pure pricing standpoint, I think you see what I’m getting at.
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