Selfhosted

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.

Local storage on a VPS is expensive, and I've never been happy with a lower powered server serving media. Personally I self-host and send a backup to Backblaze B2 for offsite (using Rclone).

I use Borgmatic for incremental, deduplicated backups but make sure you save your encryption key somewhere you can access it if your house burns down.

If you're fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That's what I do.

For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc.. would work just fine. For images, since they're just static files and you don't really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.

For remote storage, I'd first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc... I'd just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.

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.

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

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.

You can, manually. Sounds worse than it is.

It doesn't actively delete but there's an option to delete from device

The app let's you see/search all your photos, I have a ton of photos not on my phone.

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.