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Comment by avtolik | Hacker News Reader

I haven't heard of this app before, so I looked around their site and docs. I was mildly interested in trying it out until I saw the requirements: "A system with at least 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores.", but recommended 6 GB of RAM. Why does an image storage solution needs so much RAM?

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Because it is written in Node, it uses several other softwares (i.e. Postgresql), it runs image/video processing on the fly (transcoding to various formats depending on what you upload and who views), it does face/object recognition running a local model and a few other nice features that yeah, require more power. It's not a static HTML of your photos.

The last time I tried Immich (a year ago or so), my impression was that Immich tries to imitate Google Photos as much as possible. This includes features such as searching by a person or by "cat", which requires some machine learning sophistication, which is done locally (you can also disable these features). This would be my guess, but I'm not entirely sure.

Because it's not just an "image storage solution". A thumb drive would be an image storage solution. If you're indexing, making geo queries, serving over the network, categorize, transcode video and everything else that's needed to create a google photos competitor, you're going to need the hardware to back it up.

If you just need an image storage solution: no, but then you don't need Immich. If you want the feature Immich offers: yes

You can turn off AI features. You won't need as much RAM, then.

Because it wants to recognize objects in you images.

I hope you slept well in your cryo-chamber, Austin Powers. It’s the year 2025, 6GB of RAM is not a lot. A stick of 32GB of RAM costs about $50. Most simple telephones come with 8GB of RAM.

Are you going to host this app on a simple telephone?

You get my point. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that replacing a massively scaled $100+/year photo/video hosting service offered by the biggest multinational companies in the world will consume compute resources.

You are either consuming your own server’s % cloc . 81808 text files. 51415 unique files. Language files ------------------------------------------ JavaScript 25050 TypeScript 14997 JSON 2238 Perl 233 Markdown 1977 Dart 1257 Svelte 678 HTML 128 ... ------------------------------------------ SUM: 51415 In comparison, qemu does emulation of 58961 text files. 43347 unique files. Language files ------------------------------------------ C 18063 C/C++ Header Assembly 1370 Python 1345 SUM: 43347 ------------------------------------------ resources or you’re paying Apple/Google/someone else to handle it for you.

Your mistaken point is easy to get, but you don't get the counter argument that the relevant pricing here is that of, for example, VPS, which haven't scaled as much in memory availability as your cited consumer examples, so the constraints are still there.

> will consume compute resources

This is an empty statement, the argument here is about the amount of resources and how it relates to the underlying technology.

And all this "biggest multinational scale" is just as meaningless, no specific resource requirement follows from that (maybe a big part of that $100 is exactly because of "big multi scale")

> News flash, when you query ChatGPT,

News flash, this is not chatGPT. Another news is that different models have very different memory requirements. Also, do you know that those requirements are only due to the models?

So again, your example doesn't help provide any justification.

It comes as a surprise because there's products that do the same with massively lower resources.

Synology Photos runs on NASes with 2GB still.

It is ridiculous bloat of "high level technobabble"

    npm install for web/ server/ blank        comment           code --------------------------------------------- 453101         913671        4436663 85346         630503         831318 168              0         457435 10541          34463         293957 89859           1551         234399 24152          14748         229937 5917            190          51223 16361             90          31719 --------------------------------------------- 713200        1617503        6726009 literally every hardware that there is and it is only 1/3 more code, and it is without counting code required to run nodejs, docker, postgresql, redis that is dependencies of this image catalogue software.
    qemu-10.1.0 % cloc . blank        comment           code --------------------------------------------- 1068616        1312988        5590243 13980         366138         907350        1774239 42839          55872         320027 67483          89294         255732 1789003        2759752        9220521 ---------------------------------------------

You're counting a lot of generated code.

QEMU has been in development for decades.I'll take the high level language developed solution that I can use now over a low level language version that would reach feature parity with this 10 years from now.
Speed of development is a feature.

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