Any users here mind sharing their experience?
Immich is great. The iPhone app is not trustworthy with syncing photos and always freezes. It will get there eventually, if you have the patience for crashes on the iOS app. In fact, for the last week the app just hangs on open, which usually means I need to re-install the app and all that. I have a large library of over 60k photos/videos and an older phone, which doesn’t help. Despite these issues, it’s still great. Every other feature works flawlessly. I haven’t tried this new update but I am hopeful and glad they are pushing forward with cleaning up syncing!
So far, so good? The initial rollout was rough, and the app kept reuploading my whole album and then realizing it was already there.
But since the flurry of hotfixes, its been smoother sailing
Can’t really comment on the older versions since I recently deployed the server. However from the past couple of updates, the background syncing has improved on the Android version. Before I had to open the app for it to sync but recent updates now upload media without me having to open the app.
For the app itself, works pretty well. There still seems to be bugs or weird UI changes like adding to albums disappeared when you click a photo or video but its there on the grid view if you hold the file.
Overall it seems pretty stable and it has a dedicated app in both iOS and Android. Use to use nextcloud with memories before.
My use case:
I use a Synology NAS to backup my photos/videos. On mobile, I use the Synology Photos app for 100% of the backups, because it’s been 100% reliable for me over the years.
I basically run Immich in read-only mode, and specifically for searches. The contextual search is incredible, and after putting it side-by-side with a very expensive Windows software that uses local AI search, it came out on top… no contest.
So in that sense, I’m very happy!
Silly question, how does immich read from NAS? Is that a native functionality or do you mount it in docker?
Yes, when you mount the external library (when setting up docker), you can set it as read-only. 👌
Same here. Their recent antics has made me nervous about staying with them. But their photo software is great.
I run it on a VPS. Works great across oceans. Biggest gripe is that it doesn’t load local content first. It checks online and then pulls from those thumbnails. So if you have a weak or slow connection, then you’ll get a spinning wheel of death or assets that don’t load properly.
That’s a setting
Client side or server side?
Client side, under advanced:
Well after reading this I just went to open the app and it now things none of my tens of thousands of photos are synced to the server, yet the sync icon at the top says there’s nothing to sync. So… not great today lol.
Overall it’s been a very buggy experience for a long time and evidently that’s not about to change anytime soon.
You might have to sign out and then in again. There was a bug with the initial release that caused this kind of behavior
The Android app finally works the way you’d expect it. The UI no longer lags due to syncing. Syncing is much faster and more reliable.
Running minipc with immich pointed to NAS drive with photos. I had issues with uploading files in the background on previous version but it seems to be fixed right now.
I’m on version 1.143.1 I skipped all the beta timeline stages and updated from 1.135 I think.
About 30k photos and 2k videos
The web interface was great, the android app (pixel 8) was very slow. Even local assets were slow.
Since update, its way faster. Feels really good, responsive, low latency. Sync and backups have been no issue at all.
Sync on android turned itself off after updating, but I turned it back on, selected the same folders to watch and it processed for a few mins and then everything continued to work with no issues.
On the previous version, sync was pretty good. Sometimes it didn’t trigger as a background process and i had to manually open the app but it worked. New sync also works well though haven’t yet uploaded a large number of things.
As long as you keep the apps up to date both on your devices and the server, I’ve had zero issues with it!
I just wanted something similar to Google photos which i could set and forget, other than being a bit lazy with managing my NAS, it’s been flawless! Plus it’s the benefit that my data is staying with me 🥰
I’ve tried 3 or 4 times to set it up but I just can’t mount a folder within the same drive for immich to recognize. My next plan is install mint and immich on a separate drive and connect my photo drive as external to upload to immich.
I’ve never had any issues with the old setup oddly enough, they talk like it barely functions lol
The app can be basically unresponsive (my experience) as it’s checking to make sure everything is synced. It’s gotten much better over the last few months and the beta experience was wonderful it just broke (app side) a few times and told me an asset wasn’t uploaded even though it was.
I had issues uploading big files to it due to it stopping uploading once app is minimized. As long as app is open on screen, it would upload files with no interruption. New version seems to fix this issue for me.
Interesting, background sync was completely broken on the new beta timeline for me. I had to open the app, and disable then reenable sync every time I had new photos.
I’m back on the old version because it’s basically 100% reliable.
I had same issue gut relog helped to fix it
Question for the Immich users: if I have two users A and B, who share all pictures. Can user A create an album with pictures from user B? That doesn’t work with Nextcloud and is grinding my gears!
Yes, you can. You can share an album and collaboratively each add to it or you can share the entire library and take photos directly out of theirs and add to a new album. So I believe you can accomplish what you want. Just tested it with my wife and I’s accounts.
Awesome, thank you. Then I’ll give it a try, that would solve a headache of several years.
Does the app clear storage space on your phone ever? Last I looked, it only mirrored pictures to Immich, so everyone’s phone eventually fills up storage. Had to stick with Nextcloud because it deletes after uploading.
You can, manually. Sounds worse than it is.
It doesn’t actively delete but there’s an option to delete from device
Happy to share my experience. Pros: capable replacement for Google photos, Face recognition, location map, etc Support for albums and sharing. Support for reading folders from local network
Roll the dice on these, YMMV ( there are not really cons to me but I work in tech and deal with far worse things)
Actively being developed. Good- things are fixed, new features added. Bad, have to update the server regularly , multiple times some weeks.
Cost: free. You get what you pay for. There’s a donation cost, and I’ve been meaning to do that, but for free you may not get the help like for something you pay for. They do have an active community on Discord, so there’s that.
Editing in mobile client only.
Exposing to the Internet seems a bit tricky if you plan on doing it right ( securely) but you can use tail scale for external access, works fine.
I’ve been happy enough with it to turn off my google photo backup . Oh they do warn you to not to use this as your main backup since it’s under active development. Something what to consider. Hope this helps, happy to answer questions
Edit: cleaned up grammar for clarity
The only caveat I see is updating the server/app regularly.
Updating is definitely recommended for sure but I find myself waiting between updates. I’m still running 1.134.0 and have been for a while just because I’m not having any issues and haven’t gotten around to it.
I agree with everything else here as I have had the same experience.
Edit: This recent update I will likely update to though.
If you’re just interested in the synch part, I’ve been using it without any issues for several months. Worked in a pixel 6a, upgraded to a pixel 8 pro and continued right where I left off
What’s tricky about exposing it to the internet?
Depends, if you’re ok exposing an open port to the Internet then its not tricky at all, assuming you know how to port forward and are not double natted. They warn you to not do this though. I second that warning.
This page explains the 3 main options https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-access/
Ideally you’d just do a reverse proxy, which is the most complex option. Tasks include getting a host, cert, and setting it up.
I went with tail scale, it was easy but requires an additional client component on every device and one in the server.
I have a cheap VPS which is facing the internet and runs a reverse proxy. It’s connected to my home server via Tailscale and routes everything to the services on my homeserver. So I only expose http ports and also rely on the DDoS protection of the VPS provider.
I’m really happy to see this post acknowledge speed issues where there are many items, 100k+. I have around this and have always found Immich to be laggy, while others say how it’s the fastest ever.
I will have to give it another go.
I don’t think this feature is live yet, looks like it still needs some internal refinement. At least nothing like this was mentioned in the last few changelogs.
I think you might be right. Others are talking about a rocky start but reading through the recent release notes it seems like a potentially unrelated issue with a release of a new timeline.
I’m using immich and really like it, but I’m not using the Android app. I have synthing on my phone, and I let syncthing send the photos to my server. Then Immich detects the files in the syncthing folder.
Is there any benefit to using the app? Or would using the app be basically the same thing that I’m doing now?
The app let’s you see/search all your photos, I have a ton of photos not on my phone.
Ah, gotcha. That’s a use case I hadn’t thought of. Mine is just the photo backup for my current phone, so when I have my phone with me, I can see all of the photos on the phone itself.
Yeah in that case the app is just handy for searching or viewing photos by face.
The app is pretty similar to Google Photos. You can search locations, people, etc. It’s cool and works well enough, but I just use it as a secondary backup. Google Photos is still primary for me for now. I’d recommend giving it a try though. You can use the app without syncing anything just to see what it looks like first.
Oops wrong thread