Most active commenters

    ←back to thread

    Self-hosting my photos with Immich

    (michael.stapelberg.ch)
    659 points birdculture | 11 comments | 30 Nov 25 09:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
    Show context
    WD-42 ◴[06 Dec 25 03:02 UTC] No.46170203[source]▶
    Self hosting used to mean conceding on something. I can honestly say Immich is better in every way than Google Photos or whatever Apple calls it. The only thing is having to set it up yourself.
    replies(8): >>46170508 #>>46170879 #>>46171072 #>>46171096 #>>46171210 #>>46171919 #>>46172322 #>>46175671 #
    1. euleriancon ◴[06 Dec 25 05:04 UTC] No.46170879[source]▶
    There are still some features that a miss from Google photos. There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated.

    Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google Photos.

    It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back, but it isn't perfect yet.

    replies(4): >>46171312 #>>46171444 #>>46171976 #>>46173613 #
    2. WD-42 ◴[06 Dec 25 07:00 UTC] No.46171312[source]▶
    The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me, is that not what you are talking about?
    replies(2): >>46171391 #>>46173557 #
    3. j_bum ◴[06 Dec 25 07:21 UTC] No.46171391[source]▶
    It seems like he’s saying that he could create an album and add a rule saying “add all pictures of John and Jan”
    4. Vinnl ◴[06 Dec 25 07:38 UTC] No.46171444[source]▶
    I'm waiting for that first point to. The good news is that they just started work on workflows, which should allow for that.
    5. piquadrat ◴[06 Dec 25 09:43 UTC] No.46171976[source]▶
    That's something that should be possible with the upcoming Workflow feature. Some details can be found in the November Recap blog post.

    https://immich.app/blog/2025-november-recap

    6. zeendo ◴[06 Dec 25 14:20 UTC] No.46173557[source]▶
    Not who you're replying to, but no - this isn't the same. You can't share that album with others. Or have others collaborate on it.

    You can do this with a few scripts and the Immich API - but that's not something the average user will do.

    7. Liftyee ◴[06 Dec 25 14:28 UTC] No.46173613[source]▶
    Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face recognition and context/object search to be miles better than Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people.

    Almost all my Google Photos "people" are mix-and-matched similar looking faces, so it's borderline useless. Immich isn't perfect, but it gives me the control to rerun face recognition and reassign faces when I want, even on my ancient GTX 1060.

    replies(2): >>46173648 #>>46175560 #
    8. fijiaarone ◴[06 Dec 25 14:33 UTC] No.46173648[source]▶
    Don’t all non-European people look alike?
    9. euleriancon ◴[06 Dec 25 18:41 UTC] No.46175560[source]▶
    The main issues I see are immich identifying things like statues or paintings as people, and not dealing with people (especially kids) aging.

    Google photos isn't perfect either but I never saw these kind of issues when I was still using it.

    replies(2): >>46176583 #>>46176596 #
    10. dsvf ◴[06 Dec 25 21:05 UTC] No.46176583{3}[source]▶
    Immich manages to detect my kids faces much better than expected. I only have two years, but it is spot on with kid #1 from newborn to 2yo, and it manages to not mix up the new baby photos of #2 with the baby photos of #1. In my 44k photos there are zero statues face detected, the only flukes are a few photos from a restaurant with a celebrity picture wall.
    11. Duralias ◴[06 Dec 25 21:07 UTC] No.46176596{3}[source]▶
    My google photos doesn't even seem to support facial recognition, maybe I turned it off somehow at some point, but it doesn't seem like google photos supports manually selecting a face (a face that isn't detected), which is something I use a ton with Immich, it is very convenient, even if a bit tedious if going through a backlog.

    Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with immich, but that's where digikam helps.