Self-hosting my photos with Immich

I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow. Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future.

I started looking for alternatives after Synology became more restrictive with their hardware. I'm curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.

Long time synology user. Switched 3 weeks ago to ugreen. They rolled back their fiasco decision about drives (synology), but I wanted some good hardware in 2025. Everything that synology offers is outdated and slow.

Got myself a 6800 pro. It chewed through 98k photos, many of which are raw, within 24h AFAIK. Then came face recognition, text recognition etc. Within 2-3 days all was done.

The performance is night and day. Photos and movies load instantly. Finally can watch home movies on my TV without stuttering (4k footage straight from a nikon).

The photos app is similar to the synology one. Face recognition was better for me. Have compared the amount of photos tagged to a few people and ugreen found 15% more. Have seen photos of my grandma which I didn't see for years!

There's much more positive i could say. For the negatives: no native drive app (nextcloud which supposedly was an alternative doesn't sync folders on android), no native security cam app.

I am running now 10 docker containers without a sweat. My ds920+ was so slow, that I gave up on docker entirely after a few attempts.

The photos app has some nice features which synology didn't have. Conditional albums. Baby albums.