My ridiculously robust photo management system (Immich edition)
jaisenmathai.com
jaisenmathai.com
My favorite feature is being able to setup a container on my Linux desktop that has a GPU access and can run ML workloads for image processing whenever I turn the computer on, as my NAS (where Immich resides) is a low power machine without a dedicated GPU. They even have ROCM support, so it works even without an Nvidia GPU. Being able to spread such workloads over your local network feels like a magic that has been forgotten in an era of blackbox cloud providers.
Okay, sold. This is also my setup and I was being held back by thinking that the experience would be bad due to it. But this will work for me!
Some people have instead set Photos app on a Mac to download original photos from the iCloud library and then moved the files directly into the server. I have not personally tried this method though.
wait that is just crazy!!! Dang my dad is going to flip out when I tell him about this. He's got like 1.5 TB of photos in iCloud and has been searching for a way to get them off. And we're so close to our family storage limit that he gets mad at me when I text him pictures hahaha
I had to request again with 2G and I was able to download files finally. But only one by one. And after download 3~5 files, I had to login again as their login expires so frequently.
I had to do that for days and the download got expired. Oh my god. I had to request it again. And you know what? Their file list wasn't deterministic. I had to download from the beginning. lol
I finally made it and I swear I will never use any cloud service from apple.
Edit: wait I'm dumb, I just checked mobile Facebook and the upload button shows a pop up with choices for "Photo Library", "Take a Photo", or "Files".
Obviously you need to setup the ml client on the other computer
I've stumbled on Immibridge which solved my exact problem perfectly, and uploaded the images overnight
When I checked half a year ago memories (with the nc ecosystem) was still ahead in terms of features (gallery specific), albeit object tagging is rather crap in nc (faces better)
I store my pictures on a NAS jail. That directory is mounted read-only on another jail with NC and Memories. I like the guarantee that my gallery app cannot alter my files.
Also, many gallery apps don't allow browsing a directory tree. You have one level of "albums" and that's it. Memories support it. I have pictures 5-6 directories deep, following a system that makes sense to me.
Ouch. One feature I love with Immich is that I can run it as Docker containers (I think it requires four containers) and pass the drive/volume with my photos as read-only, so I'm sure Immich cannot possibly modify my files.
The last thing I want is the latest solution du jour modifying my files.
I lose no sleep.
The funnest part of coming home is what everyone prints when we get back.
Choosing the photos to include, plus doing the scrapbooking bits to decorate the photos, and including all the bits and bobs you might have acquired from whatever even you're memorializing, this locks the memories in far better than a carefully architected storage system that, in the end, is just a giant wad of binary data.
This goes double (or triple) when you have young children.
By all means maintain some kind of digital storage, but make your primary physical.
It doesn't do great with bw photos, but colour pictures are good enough.
Make an album, print to Walmart on their pro printer, grab it a little later for a few bucks.
All turned out to be essential in my photo archives, especially as I started scanning old pictures. You get the front and back side of a photo, or you scan a large-format drawing in 16 scans and store them alongside the merged one, etc.
Aperture used to handle it pretty well, but Apple dropped it. I learned my lesson, and now I'll be doing things differently.
But yes, there are some other limitations that would be much harder to solve. But it's a tradeoff I've decided to make - if I can't figure out an EXIF-based solution then I'm not going to invest time using it because it will likely be lost in 5-10 years.
If you still miss it, note that Nitro (macOS, iPad, iPhone) is Aperture's spiritual successor, created by its former Sr. Director of Engineering. https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/
I have not found any way to do that until today.
In addition, my local network is slow and I don't have much storage I am limited to solutions that are cloud-to-cloud.
If anyone has any idea, please help me out
You could manually do it with Google Takeout -> <S3 backed service> before letting your phone sync handle it going forward if that’s a big backlog.
For example, I use Apple and Google on my phone to do this, I think you’d just need to find some app/service combo.
One of the many reasons I finally moved off Google Photos.
This was the biggest reason I also had to move away from Google Photos when all I really wanted was protection from getting my account accidentally G-structed with zero way to contact a human to get my files back.
Also, it still requires to use my bandwidth or to have a VPS running and using it's own bandwidth
I run it on a credit sized intel N100 board with a few spinning disks. There was nothing to do, it all just worked right away.
Everything is fast and smooth. The AI indexing and search just work™ and it is faster than google photo ever was. And there is no censorship on the AI search terms.
I also like that I can configure the filesystem hierarchy I prefer.
Maaaybe AI-based searches like "cat on a red car" are better on Google (but I wouldn't bet my life on it), but Immich applies the exact filters that I want (Google is too fuzzy).
Also, unlike Google, Immich doesn't censor your searches, so I can look up for naked pictures or photos of gorillas, and actually see the results.
It's a weird Chinese board with a silly gen1x1 pcie link to a 4 port sata controller on a daughter board. I bet it was designed for the 2 port version of the controller and two bays. And some lhow they sold a 4 bays version. So I only have half the bandwidth required to drive the 4xHDDs. Sucks for linux raid.
Interestingly this tiny mobo also has two full speed sata ports on it, that are completely inaccessible, I am not even sure a low profile and thin sata cable can even fit in there. Maybe one day I will try to solder in place from the mobo to the daughter board.
Doesn't solve fancy things like facial recognition, etc, though of course.
I've solved that by materializing every photo to a deterministic folder path. So it's not possible to have the same exact photo in my library.
If someone wants something I email it to them or upload it to a directory on a web server and send them the link. If I want something on my phone I’ll zap it over with localsend.
Photography is a hobby for me and I have a large family so I have a lot of photos. And a lot of editing to do. Currently moving from Lightroom to Darktable because again Lightroom tries to hammer me with library management and lock me into things.
I not only urge you to try it, but to buy the "supporter" pack, Immich really deserves it.
But when you search for brown dog it'll bring back different coloured goats, horses and cows too. This is a problem in a large library.
I think these manual tools tend to prefer recall (“make sure you return all the photos asked for”) over precision (make sure you only return photos asked for”) because of that.
(Likely with exceptions for search terms such as “gorilla”, where surfacing photos of people with black skin is a big no-no)
"give me all files with a location in Chicago"
Mine is something like "Album_Name/YEAR/MONTH/day-hour-minute-sec.jpg".
I'd recommend you try Immich (there's a docker compose version) and if you don't like it, you can just remove it and move on.
I've got the solution to this. I'm like you: files on disk. But I also use Immich: and here's the kicker... I pass the drive/volume with my photos to Immich as read-only (I use containers so it's easy: the drive itself is read-write, but Immich only has read-only access to it).
When I'm pissed off by Immich or something better comes along, I destroy the Immich containers and it's gone.
And I still my files on disk (with checksums as part of the filenames, moreover, seen that family JPG pictures aren't files that happen to change a lot and if they change, they can be renamed).
For me $60 is worth not having the hassle of self hosting, but if you'd have to pay $240 then maybe a self hosted Immich instance is the better option.
Also: you should try out the latest build! https://photostructure.com/about/v2026.1/
FWIW all of these projects rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!) and my open-source node.js wrapper (that adds concurrency, does a ton of extra parsing work, and makes things a bit more ergonomic to live with): https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js
Downloading the takeout files is miserable through, the download link is only valid when being downloaded via human interaction in a web browser.
There is a silly trick. Start the download, pause it. Get the cookies from the page (only need to do that once for the session). Then copy the download link. Now you can curl on your server. When the file is downloaded, you can then cancel the download in your web browser. And do the same for the next file. One at a time.
Warning: google will cancel downloads if you run more than one or two at a time. After 3 download (failed or not) of a file google will delete the whole takeout.
The amount of engineering they must have deployed to purposefully crimple takeout with plausible deniability must be significant.
It is so absolutely terrible that I think it is purposeful. But if I could get it all, I could consolidate into something else. Either way, it’s frustrating enough that I’ve stopped buying apple.
Also do they include all the variants in that export like the edits, filters, etc? I get the feeling those may be a proprietary Apple only thing.
It has botched slow motion uploading. It uploads an export at 30fps instead of maintaining 120/240fps.
I don’t use immich (yet) but this is the kind of stuff I worry about. I’m planning to use it in read only mode though and sync my photos using PhotoSync rather than rely on the app.
Anyone have info on this vs Immich? I just got my Syn so been trying their native app which seems fine so far but not sure what I’m missing.
Mine is so old that it doesn’t and it’s also under powered - else I’d be running Immich on it.
I include video [1] and audio (.m4a) [2] files via EXIF.
For text files [3], I add a JSON block at the top to mimic EXIF.
I don’t want to deal with an additional sidecar file per asset. The risk of losing one during a transfer between systems is too high. It’s a conscious decision and not an oversight.
[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/2645bf25b81c63f65d6f1...
[2] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/a...
[3] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/t...
Without Claude Code, the plugin would probably only exist in my imagination.
I don’t personally care who writes the code. There’s plenty of contributors already.