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Comment by dgxyz | Hacker News Reader

After going through 25 years of changing software every few years on this front I can’t be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.

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.

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That's cool, but when a friend died last summer, Immich allowed me to find all the digital photos I had of him, even out of focus in the background. I get many requests from friends for old pictures, "do you remember that night when we all did a group photo, etc etc?" and the search facility in Immich allowed me to in a minute what sometimes took years to find, when scouring folders in spare time.

For me, there's nothing like being able to search for "brown dog" and get all the photos of my dog back. Not to mention all the other things Immich has that make managing a library pleasant.

I not only urge you to try it, but to buy the "supporter" pack, Immich really deserves it.

I had a bunch of photos in Apple Photos which did that sort of thing. As a library management tool it's probably the best out there.

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.

A problem, but also way better than the solution “just look at every photo” you had without that image search feature.

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)

I found Google Photos much better for this comparatively to Apple

digikam does this as well, supposedly.

Same here, although one thing that's difficult with this is things like finding "that one photo we took 5 years ago which grandma used as a phone background". So now I gotta find the right external hard drive to plug in and fortunately the folders are by date but still it's a drag. So I'm considering looking into immich if it can just function as a server that shows thumbnails on some terabytes of date-sorted photos and videoes, no need for the machine learning stuff. Though I feel like there must be a less "heavy" solution than immich for this.

We really need an OS with a metadata capture and indexing system that isn't crap. Exif is metadata.

"give me all files with a location in Chicago"

Immich stores images in a configurable folder structure. That you can _change_ at any moment, and Immich will happily rearrange the files accordingly.

Mine is something like "Album_Name/YEAR/MONTH/day-hour-minute-sec.jpg".

Between storage templates and external libraries, Immich covers so many bases.

You can keep your file current structure/workflow and just use immich as a viewer and search engine, read only.

This is exactly what I do. I have Immich as just a viewer and keep everything in external libraries. This is the major failure of Immich as far as I am concerned. I really don't like "black box" style of photomanagement. I also find that NextCloud has a very good photo viewer as well, which is almost as good as immich.

There is no need to replace it, certain changes can be additive. Immich falls into that category - you can still just see/use them as ordinary files. It just makes finding/viewing/sharing/processing them easier on top.

I'm like you, and a big fan of Pigallery2 precisely for its simplicity. But it turns out that Immich does support external libraries, so you can keep your manual file management in your filesystem and still use Immich for efficient indexing, face recognition, quick picture retrieval by year, location, people etc...

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.

> After going through 25 years of changing software every few years on this front I can’t be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.

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).

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