Self-hosting my photos with Immich

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.

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.

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.

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.