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Comment by bovem | Hacker News Reader

The UI looks great. Couldn't find any info about self hosting but I did find a feature request in GitHub Issues [1].

I guess I'll stick with Immich [2] for now.

Edit: Found a Reddit AMA [3] from the CEO and I'm happy to know that self hosting is a goal in the long run.

[1] https://github.com/ente-io/ente/issues/141 [2] https://immich.app/ [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/116fx9v/ama_im_vi...

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They today open sourced their server which can now be selfhosted https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/

It's not clear from downloading the mobile app how one would point it to the self-hosted server.

I would gladly pay $10-20/mo for Ente apps to use my own backend. Unfortunately I have around 8TB of photos so paying for a storage plan is out of the question.

This is my question. I don’t actually see any statements from the company here or in the post that you can actually self-host and point the app at your server. The app dumps you in a mandatory sign-up flow with no server url setting possible.

It seems more likely this is only open source for audit/transparency purposes.

It’s absolutely their right to do this, but they should make it clear.

This is currently only supported via build flags.

Addition of an option in-app is being discussed @ https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504

I'm really happy with immich. It's amazing how well everything works and how feature-complete it is given how relatively young the project is and fast-moving development is going. I self-host an instance and do a nightly backup with duplicati to cloud storage.

The only downside for me is that there's a new release almost every couple of days, with a message that the backend is out of date. Which is both a pro and a con, but for me it's anxiety inducing because there's breaking changes sometimes and you can't just auto-update. A pace like Home Assistant feels more comfortable.

I've been looking at immich and seen similar concerns about the update regularity, but that is due to it being a relatively young project. That it has come so far quickly is a good sign, as long as the release cycle becomes slower and more regimented as it approaches a certain level of maturity.

Me too. It is frustrating to see an update to the app and then have the app indicate it is out of date. But generally it still works, and upgrading the server has always been nothing more than changing the docker image tag and restarting. It's an incredible project.

Perhaps you have not noticed release notes. There were bunch of releases where you had to change the docker compose file, and you can't just apply updates automatically to immich.

does it, by any chance, do search by any keywords and grouping the same face together, like Google Photos?

Yes, it does. You can also search for terms like "pizza" or "beach with palms"

Manual action is needed for an update? Why not let the computer do this instead?

I can confirm there is a breaking change literally every single week, check here: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/7405#discus...

It's a great software but I would not recommend it at all because of this and the answer from the authors about the issue

I have 600GB of data with 70K+ photos and videos in Immich.

I have been using it for some time now, and none of the "breaking changes" broke anything because they have excellent release notes.

Worst case - you can restore your postgre backup (which you make, right?) and try again, reading release notes. I make backups and I read release notes, luckily didn't need to do a restore yet.

I have 5TB with a few hundred thousand pics in immich, and unfortunately opening the mobile app is slow (it loads some state from the server and that takes forever...)

> Worst case - you can restore your postgre backup (which you make, right?) and try again, reading release notes. I make backups and I read release notes, luckily didn't need to do a restore yet.

That sounds pretty horrible tbh. Yeah you should make backups and read release note but if the software regularly needs some manual action then that becomes tiring pretty quickly when you host enough different services. Backups and manual intervention for upgrades should be for exceptional cases.

Been running immich for a while but haven't dropped my Google photos just to make sure I can manage immich and not lose everything. Updated from 1.8.something to 1.9something which includes a big db rework and lost all my user accounts. I imagine the photos are still in there somewhere but i haven't dug in yet so they're effectively gone. Lost a lot of trust for me with that even though it was probably my fault.

This one got me too - check out: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/5907

Running REINDEX TABLE USERS; on the DB solved the issue for me.

Immich is definitely fast moving - it is awesome, but has been a challenge to keep it current.

Yeah I think immich recommends keeping a separate archive for anything you care about.

It most definitely does. There's a big banner at the top of their website:

The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos

I keep seeing immich mentioned a lot in selfhosting community. Is there a mobile app that can connect to the selfhosted backend server?

yes. And even an Android TV app in dev, too.

I self-host on my own local server on my LAN (an RK3588 ARM SoC board running in a cigar box...) and expose it to the app via Tailscale when I'm out and about. Works great

Though I still back up to Google Photos as well

come here to say Immich is absolutely great, the advanced search that landed recently is a game changer combined with semantic search: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/tag/v1.96.0

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