Immich is solid, you can play with the models used for face recognition and search too.
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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I tried out Immich, but I prefer Nextcloud Memories.
Nextcloud also replaces a lot of other Google services like Docs, Drive etc.
And it's very stable and solid.
You can host it yourself, but you can also pay for it there are many hosts like Hetzner for 4$ per month + tax
I've seen them recommended before and had been wondering about finding a trusted server to have it hosted. I'll check out Hetzner, thx!
Not stable yet according to the devs but there is Immich.Lot of folks seem to think it’s stable enough though.
Only a sample size of one here, but I've used it for quite a while now and it's definitely one of the more stable and reliable apps I self host. It's a delight.
One of these days I'll have the bandwidth to learn about self-hosting. It seems like there's some real benefits and cool stuff out there. For now, I have a toddler taking up most of said bandwidth as well as copious amounts of photo space 😅
I installed immich on a rasperry pi 4 with docker a few days ago. Works quite well. The context search option really impressed me. I didn't expect it to work at all on a pi.
Immich is a "one click app" on caprover, probably on coolify and the like too
I had little issues with ente facial recognition myself and you should be able to search with keywords such as dog, cat or even maybe pet. To me it works well enough but it is indeed inferior to cloud based google AI for sure
Immich is the best alternative I can think of. It runs about 2 years now on my raspberry pi.
And there is even a OpenSource Companion App which syncs Photos Automatically to the Server (https://droidify.eu.org/app/?id=app.alextran.immich&repo_address=https%3A%2F%2Ff-droid.org%2Frepo .
The Search is so good that I host another sever just for my meme-Collection! It even recognise Tags like NSFW out of the Box. And all that on your own hardware! You can search by people, cities, countries Dates, Devices and so on
You can selhost it on your own Hardware. Its pretty simple. You just have to install docker and docker-compose and follow the instructions on their site.
If you followed and learned that, you can pretty much host ANY other App just like that. Its pretty much always the same steps.
@GeraltvonNVIDIA @JustOneMoreCat a dedicated server for memes, what a great idea!!!
Thank you! Gone are the days were I said "Wait! I have a meme for that!" -> Since Immich it is just "Here is a meme for that!"
@GeraltvonNVIDIA I'm going to have to look into this. My meme and GIF management is atrocious. Does Immich handle GIFs? That would be a huge plus.
Does the app you listed have the ability to sync one folder to one server and another to the other? That would be cool
Is raspberry pi pretty easy to set up? Or if you were starting over would you go with something else? I have a windows laptop and an android phone, so that's the extent of what I'm familiar with so far. But Immich does look so promising!
I would say it is, but to be fair, i work as a programmer and with Linux on a daily basis.
But there are plenty of tutorials which teach you to flash some OS to your Pi or even complete guides to build immich on top of a pi:( https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-immich/ )
The raspberry pi is the famoust single board Computer and therefore there are tons of projects and things you can do with it.
Link looks awesome, thanks! Do you also keep a separate cloud backup of your photos in case your server is damaged (like in a disaster or something)?
I should do that, but i dont do it at the Moment.
Maybe in the future. It should be pretty simple by running my attached drives as a RAID 1-Cluster or something.
They're running on NAS 24/7 online-Drives. At the Moment I'm pretty confident that I am safe.
If you have a local copy of the photos, you can use DigiKam, which has a really strong facial recognition capability
It can also write the face data in to the keywords and EXIF data, so the will be searchable by tags in other apps.
Sadly, all that glitz of Google comes at a price, basically selling your soul and your data bits. I use a linux desktop as my photo storage, so open source Syncthing backs up my photo folder to my PC, which in turn I have backed up to a hard drive in case of PC failure. Syncthing (open source) backs up any file or folder to any device via your wifi, used it for years. You can also use a Window$ PC as well, works on every platform. However, on Linux, I then use Digikam (open source) which has face recognition and a lot of the bells and whistles of photo storage and viewing, awesome program. Just my two cents.
It's a bit unfortunate that there are options for tagging photos automatically and even on-device (Ente is a third, which will run on your local phone or any synced device, propagating data across other devices)... But nothing that runs exclusively on-device without syncing.
There's no apparent reason an app couldn't do the tagging on-device to device-exclusive photos.
Digikam?
That looks like a really interesting project, but the scope appears to be outside of what I was looking for. I think people here are looking for something more like Google Photos or Ente, something that operates more like a gallery app with extra features on top.
. You can contact their support to see report this, they answer pretty quickly. This will also help others potentially