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Comment by shantara | Hacker News Reader

I migrated from Apple Photos to Immich a couple of months ago, removing the iCloud subscription, and couldn’t be happier. It was the most hassle free piece of self-hosted software I’ve had so far. Very easy to install and everything just works. Context and OCR search are amazing. Mobile apps could be better, but they are constantly being improved.

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.

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> 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

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!

Interesting. How did it work getting your photos off of iCloud? Does Apple give you a good way to get an archive of all of your photos? That is, the original quality photos, without manually downloading them individually? (I currently have 446 GB of photos in iCloud…)

Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from iCloud in original resolution, with the all EXIF data included. I had 230 GB of photos myself, and I left the phone on the charger overnight with the app running in the foreground and screen locking disabled. In the morning everything was imported.

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.

> Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from iCloud in original resolution

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

There is a community-supported CLI program called immich-go that directly supports reading in iCloud and Google takeout archives, as well as local directories. It works great, and has gobs of import options to set up albums and tags. [ https://github.com/simulot/immich-go ]

i havent seen anyone else mention it so i will. privacy.apple.com lets you export your apple data similar to google takeout

That's the worst service I've ever seen. It asks you the size of each zip file and I said 50G at first. And I couldn't download it because the connection was so unstable. No way to resume it and every 20~30 mins, it failed in the middle. Chrome, firefox, safari were all the same. I tried from a GCE VM as well to see if that's my network problem but didn't help.

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.

Same issue has been going on for me with just about any big download from apple serves. Could be icloud. Could be xcode. Doesn’t matter. It will randomly fail in the transfer and require manual intervention to restart. Been this way for years.

iCloud Photos Downloader isn’t user friendly or pretty, but I finally managed to rip my entire collection without having to install any apple software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578921

How does selecting or uploading photos work on iOS if you don't have any in Apple Photos? Not all apps let you choose to upload from the files app where you can select the provider, e.g. uploading an image to Facebook in Safari always opens the picker for Apple Photos.

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".

Additionally, there‘s a difference between Apple Photos the app and Apple Photos the system component (in lack of a better name, maybe someone knows the correct one). Even if you uninstall Apple Photos the app, iOS still retains its basic functionality, for example when viewing photos in the Camera app. The folders where photos are stored don’t change. You just use a different app to view and sync them.

I have a PiKVM attached to my PC at home, so at some point I'm thinking of setting up a crazy demand-scaling scheme where when my underpowered homelab nodes can power up the PC when they need to run a heavy workload.

You can do this easier with Wake on LAN. See https://danielpgross.github.io/friendly_neighbor/howto-sleep... for prior art.

WoL is easier if it works. My experience has been that with consumer hardware it usually doesn't. Debugging it is more hassle than it's worth IMO. I think if you don't have a proper mobo with a BMC then just throwing in a KVM is easier on average.

WoL is reliable when waking from sleep/suspend. I have yet to see consumer HW that can do it from poweroff. But if suspend is fine, all you have to do is configure your firmware to turn on after power loss (so you always boot into your OS) and in your OS enable WoL and configure suspend on inactivity as you wish. It should be reliable and failures would default to "on", not off.

This sounds like a fun idea to explore!

Can you explain how you’re able to run ML workloads on another computer? Setting up Immich this weekend on a mini Pc and would love to throw my GPU in my larger PC at the problem.

Check out the guide on their website:

https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-machine-learning/

https://docs.immich.app/features/ml-hardware-acceleration/

It's just a feature of immich. Administration > Settings > Machine Learning Setting and set the remote ML address.

Obviously you need to setup the ml client on the other computer

You run a Docker container on another machine and configure Immich to point to its IP address. I do that when I have to add a lot of photos or reingest all the photos with a different model, so I point to the "gaming" that has a 3060.

any pointers on how it works with immich on the NAS and your desktop “contributing” processing power?

I found this page: https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-machine-learning

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