What are you using as a Google photos alternative? Currently I’m using Nextcloud but I’m thinking of switching to a more dedicated solution.
I mainly need to upload photos from my device automatically, have an UI to see and classify them, albuns and sharing.
Immich: https://github.com/immich-app/immich
Definitely Immich.
There’s a lot of these kinds of services, hosted or self-hosted that are labeled as a “Google Photos replacement”
But very few of said services have features like face matching and object recognition alongside automatic backups.
IMO it’s not a legitimate replacement for Google Photos without those features and Immich really delivers on that without compromising your privacy.
Hi is there a guide for Complete Newbie like me , right from how to download this software(I could not find link or anything resembling.exe for installation,) upptill how doninput it on my zorin os laptop and setup my and my familys phone to upload photos to our own laptops via immich. Like a a book idiots guide to xyz… Kind of thing
I think this is hard to answer because there’s no “one way” to do this.
Do you want it accessible only in your house, and you’re running something like a raspberry pi? That’s one set of instructions.
Do you want it accessible from anywhere in the world, with proper TLS? That’s a little more complicated, and there are a million ways to do this — do you want to self host and expose public IP? Self host using a VPN as the entry point? Host on a VPS?
I would recommend playing around with it first. This is easiest if you can get a well-supported environment, so something like a raspberry pi is best IMHO if you want to play around with minimal frustration.
Hi thanks for your reply. I have laptop with external drive that i use as server at home. Ideally as easy part1 i would only upload pictures home, and would access them home only. This is not a public intelltual property, it’s our photos so no public IP needed.
What i am looking is
My and familys phones are getting full of pics and videos, so instead of using Google Photos can we upload it our own server at home easily and wirelessly. If need be we can watch them on tv . That’s it.
“IP” in this context means “internet protocol address”. A public IP is one that can be accessed from outside your home (what you see when you go to https://whatismyipaddress.com/). A non-public, or internal, IP is the one your router gives your computer, frequently starting with 192.168. This can be accessed by other computers on your network but not from outside your network.
It’s not a Windows app.
You can run it on Windows with Docker, but I would suggest a Linux server and a reverse proxy for the best experience (like most self-host solutions)
The installation documentation is here
And here
Hi Thanks for reply, I would be putting it in zorin os laptop (that is linux) , What do I reserve proxy för ?
Probably gonna get downvoted for this but there’s a very easy way to get this running.
curl -fsSL https://get.casaos.io | sudo bash
When it’s finished, copy and paste the IP address at the bottom into your browser. This will take you to CasaOS. Don’t ask me why they call it that because it’s not an OS.
Open the App Store and on the right side there’s a button to add a repository. Paste the following in there:
https://github.com/bigbeartechworld/big-bear-casaos/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
Done.
It is great, but the mobile app becomes slow AF when I import all my google photos which are thousands of them. Even after indexing has finished.
Edit: Scratch what I said! Just gave Immich another shot, and the slow mobile app was due to the initial background sync running.
How many photos? It’s a very good user experience for me, with 123GB library (23k+ photos, 1k+ videos). Fairly entry-level Samsung phone and iPhone 13, both work great.
Running on an Orange Pi 5 Plus.
Absolutely love Immich. Was previously running on an RPi 4 w/4GB RAM, but with the other services I had on there I needed to disable ML. Orange Pi 5 Plus (16GB RAM) and it’s just a dream. Kicked off ML/facial recognition before bed and it was done in the morning. Migration from RPi to OPi was straightforward.
What is different about an Orange Pi compared to a Raspberry Pi? Thinking about taking the plunge into self hosting and I’m looking for something easy and powerful.
Big difference for me between the RPi 5 and orange pi 5 Plus is more RAM and m.2 NVME support on board. It also has four additional efficiency cores and dual 2.5G NICs, but that’s less important to me.
Downside is it has a less polished ecosystem.
Overall though I’ve been happy! But I also love my collection of raspberry pis, so it’s a matter of taste I guess.
Thank you!
Looks interesting. Just wondering if anyone has tried Mylio which also looks promising and has many tools for de-duplication and tagging which I quite like in Google Photos.
In this community anything that isn’t open source is not going to be relevant to the majority. It sure does look like a competent product though but I question it as an alternative to Google since it’s going to be tough to survive when one is pre-installed and automatic without any user intervention on pretty much every android phone and the other I hadn’t even heard about until now and I’ve researched alternatives…
I think they’d be smart to make their free version open source to assuage the concerns about risking that the product dies and all tagging etc becoming useless / wasted effort. Even though I understand the reluctance because the primary motivators for going premium aren’t really open source compatible (pay for more devices etc.)
I get what you’re saying and usually I would prefer open source myself. However, Mylio has self hosting facility as well as end to end encrypted cloud storage option too. Does seem like a good product.
Yep, Immich is tha bomb! Able to completely clear out google photos!
Holy shit, this is incredible.
It really is. I absolutely love the shared link functionality, with the ability to easily set an expiration date and manage existing shared links.
It’s made taking pictures a lot more fun for me.
It even recognizes my Pixel “Top Shots!”. It’s like I just drag and dropped Google Photos into my server! 🤯
Anyone has a working nixos config for immich? I don’t get the containers to communicate with the host database.
https://kressle.in/articles/2023/immich-on-docker-with-nixos.php This works for me
Why docker though?
Because it’s easy. For other services I use nixos containers, but for immich Docker was just so simple
For virtualization.
Pleased that I came to this thread looking for a good answer, clicked this link and opened in my preferred browser for project tracking and saw it was already starred in GitHub. Guess I need to actually deploy an image finally and stop lurking for an answer. Lol
I’ve been on my 3rd install of linux mint and immich. I can’t seem to make it work. I can’t mount my second hard drive so immich can see it. I’m gathering up a strength for the 4th install.
Hey, not sure how in depth your linux/docker knowledge is. Please disregard if irrelevant. I would recommend you pick a fixed mountpoint for the drive and set up a systemd service to mount the drive for you (systemd .mount file). Then you add an extra line “RequiredBy=docker.service” (look for systemd RequiredBy) This way the drive always has to be mounted by the system before docker is started and should always be visible before you start a container.
Hope this helps :)