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Comment by cromka | Hacker News Reader

I have a different bash with them than the lack of E2EE: they do not make it easy to import from other servicesvlike Google Photos or iCloud, which should be a priority.

They rely on immich-go project, which is ridden with bugs and basically abandonware by now. Their own iOS app, which can also be used for syncing iCloud gallery, has outstanding, 2 y/o or so bugs that will fail to upload the Live Motion photos.

My photos exported to Immigh have some 9000 broken, half imported Live Photos and I just don't have time to fix that.

The fact that THIS is not their priority, the most comprehensively A-B tested feature is beyond me. Who cares about OCR if you can't trust that they didn't butcher your imported memories? I just don't get it!

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> I just don't get it!

This is open source, volunteer developers often focus on doing things that are fun to them, or that scratch their own itch. I can't imagine dealing with Google Photos semi-broken exports is fun to anybody, and you only deal with the pain of the import once, afterwards there's no itch to scratch.

They make money on that, it's not just a hobby project

Their business model is basically donations, it's not a for-profit operation. Maybe if you consider yourself less of a customer and more the beneficiary of a community effort, it'll be easier to "get"

Don't patronize me, my arguments still stand: they offer all bells and whistles while completely dropping the ball at making you feel those photos are well taken care of. The core employees live off of Immich so spare me the spiel.

In the same universe, I took a google takeout last week to migrate to immich, 12k photos/videos.

I set up immich backed by ceph last week and I got everything migrated via immich-go, with all metadata albums and all.

Had to change some parallelization option, but otherwise it was a breeze.

It seemed like that for me, too, until I realized my photos were botched. The only way to know that was looking into the logs: I have some 9000 photos which it silently fails to extract metadata from. The only sign in the UI that something is off is the fact those 9k photos never get processed, you can try in perpetuity. The logs reveal they were botched either by immich-go or iOS app, ffmpeg freaks out when processing them. After checking in the gallery they're indeed messed up.

Besides, having to use external tool you check out from GitHub is the exact opposite of what should be the priority I am talking about. Immich gives you that clean, very easy UX/UI, targeting every regular user as a real alternative to Google or Apple offerings, yet you can't easily and safely import your photos. That's inconsistent at best. Misleading.

> mmich gives you that clean, very easy UX/UI, targeting every regular user as a real alternative to Google or Apple offerings, yet you can't easily and safely import your photos. That's inconsistent at best. Misleading.

How do you imagine this wold work, given that there are no APIs for Google Photos or iCloud Photos to batch import them into a different service while preserving all data. At best you can work with the Gallery/Photos access on your phone.

> How do you imagine this wold work

The way it CURRENTLY already works. Through Google/iCloud takouts, or the Android/iOS apps if user chooses to do so.

You can't provide an easy UX-friendly alternative to takeout, and it already backups photos through Android/iOS apps if user choses so.

The amount of entitlement on display here is astounding.

What entitlement? Did I say I DEMAND something? DID I? You can't criticize a free project because God forbid that makes you entitled?

And how do you know I haven't donated and don't regularly do so?

If I had to guess, the last paragraph of your original comment comes across as very harsh.

I don't see it. I made a remark that nice-to-haves are less important than the bare essentials. And I don't get how this quasi-commercial product doesn't have this locked in, despite them making an every effort to come off as polished.

> they do not make it easy to import from other servicesvlike Google Photos or iCloud

Because those services are closed black boxes that don't really let you access them except in a very roundabout way?

No. They're not. You export photos using Google Takeout, iCloud has something similar. And their own iOS app also has unresolved bugs because of which I can't fully import my gallery.

There's no "black box" magic here. Sure, there are some edge cases that need to be handled when importing the exported dataset, but it's all documented.

> No. They're not. You export photos using Google Takeout, iCloud has something similar.

So, they are black boxes that don't make things easy or convenient for people. E.g. Google Takeout separates images and their metadata. With people running into issues like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/1lqx331/googl... (as comments point out, Google just randomly changes file names as well, which breaks import tools)

> Sure, there are some edge cases that need to be handled when importing the exported dataset, but it's all documented.

As in: it's not really documented. Those takeouts, iCloud and Google shenanigans etc. have been reverse engineered by people to work. Meanwhile for closest friends only Apple, Google and some of their closes friends provide a way to transfer libraries directly, without "takeouts" and workarounds: https://portmap.dtinit.org/

This is why I said A-B testing would be important.

BUT, that's irrelevant: their own iOS app butchers Live Photos and there's unresolved bugs that get hardly any traction. This isn't rocket science here, no wild-guessing, they get access to the Photo library like any other app using their SDK. They just lose those Live Photos when backing up to immich and no one got to the bottom of it.

WHY do you keep ignoring that aspect that I have mentioned like 3 times by now?

> WHY do you keep ignoring that aspect that I have mentioned like 3 times by now?

Which aspect? The only "aspect" you're talking about is, basically, "immich should make this fully documented easily and trivially implemented batch backup from iCloud Photos/Google Photos".

I mean, even live photos isn't documented anywhere, and Apple changes how it's implemented from time to time (e.g. moving from JPEG + MOV to HEIC + H.265).

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