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While this is a great idea to tell people to self host and I self host myself. I think it needs to also be mentioned how laborious backups are.

Photos aren’t something that is only inconvenient like movies to lose WHEN your drives die. They can be devastating because you will likely not get them back.

Backups are a lot of work to maintain, it’s not just simply copying the data to another array but also testing the backup regularly and making sure that they work and continue working. Backups are almost like a secondary job and many that self host are probably not interested in how much thought goes into it. Sure the web applications like Google Photos are annoying but they take away all of this that most people don’t think about.

The vast majority of people that read this will set up a server and have no backup. Many of them will eventually lose their data if they didn’t also keep a cloud service.

All very true! Immich, unlike a lot of apps, does have a pretty friendly UI for managing/restoring backups, though: https://docs.immich.app/administration/backup-and-restore/

It's definitely still a lot more than the zero work required for Google Photos, but I feel like even even a semi-technical user can test an Immich backup without a ton of hassle. Start a new/empty immich instance in an empty directory, and follow the wizard for restoring a backup (and copy of your photos folder) taken from the non-empty instance.

> the web applications like Google Photos are annoying but they take away all of this

They minimize it but don't take it away. A content creator must personally place their creation into multiple storage solutions, regardless of whether those solutions are cloud apps or local disks or anything else. In a world where disk failure is the only failure mode, sure, you can outsource the work of disk redundancy to a company, but it's not. The person you outsource to could decide to deny you access! Losing your cloud account (credential theft, alleged ToS violation, bankruptcy, etc.) is also a very real failure mode, albeit far less frequent than disk issues I suppose.

The creator must be the fork in the road.

I moved my 565GB photo library to immich about a year ago and haven't looked back. Unfortunately, convincing my wife has been a bit harder, as she has real network effects of many shared albums across a large family (30+) that all aren't going to switch the immich app so they can join her album and sync the photos.

Nonetheless, a positive move in the right direction!

What's your setup like? Do you host it on your own hardware or the cloud? Is it exposed to the internet?

I have a homelab setup with my media server stuff and frigate (for security cameras), and they're only accessible via tailscale if I'm not at home. It would theoretically be easy enough to throw immich in there as well but I don't know how the app will behave when it can't reach the server half the time

I run a 5 node kubernetes cluster as my homelab. It has both public and private DNS for local upload (faster) and for remote access and sharing (via a Cloudflare tunnel).

> I don't know how the app will behave when it can't reach the server half the time

Immich has automatic URL switching, so it detects which network it's on and select between the internal and external URLs. When I'm not on my home WiFi it switches to the Tailscale URL. Tailscale must be connected for this to work obviously.

If you run DNS at home (even just dnsmasq) and you bridge your home 192.whatever to tailscale, you can make the same domain name resolve both at home and via tailscale.

> my 565GB photo library

I always wonder what people do with these photos. For me photos are utilitarian. I take a photo and immediately send it to my wife or friend, or upload it to my website for an article, or post it on Instagram or whatever, and then I no longer have any use for the photo on my devices. Once a year or so whenever my storage gets full, I just bulk-delete anything older than 6 months and if it hasn't been saved elsewhere for a specific purpose, then it's just gone forever. I don't miss it, because I already did what I wanted with it, so there's no need for me to keep it around.

What do you actually do with half a terabyte of photos?

I was the same til I had kids.

Now I'm trapped just like most everyone else. Every photo is just "okay" in the moment but .. five years later the difference is so big.

99.999% of these "precious" photos are dumped in a hole and never looked at again. It feels silly to bother keeping it when I know I'm not going to sift through it.

All those hour-long videos of little-tyke sporting events shot from a million miles away... hahaha... still can't delete'm.

I am the designated family photographer. Many of those are raw files (30MB each), so admittedly a portion of them will never be seen again. Storage is cheap though, especially local storage I don't pay a cloud subscription for, so it hasn't bothered me.

And as the other child comment mentions, my rate of photo production has increased exponentially since having kids.

> What do you actually do with half a terabyte of photos?

Reminisce when you get old(er). Especially if you have children.

I just installed Immich this weekend to try it out - it is pretty good! Face grouping, semantic search all seem to work well.

I find it better than google photos already in some ways. For example, to add photos to an album google forces you to scroll slowly through all of them so the thumbnails load, before you can multi select them all. Immich just let me select the top picture, go straight to the bottom and select all of them. Makes a difference when adding over a thousand photos!

I use immich too, on my home cluster. I did it as a "backup" to google, in case my account gets flagged by an AI with no immediate recourse.

PS: I used to be an employee, and there was a time i needed an account help for an old account who was clearly definitely mine, and they were of no help. Good for security, terrible if you get flagged.

You know what I wish I could ditch but cannot due to their firm grip on it, Google Wallet.

Every other time I open it, it shows a pop-up asking "Can we use your payment data to show you more relevant ads?" which is annoying but what's more aggravating is the choices: "Yes", "Remind me Later".

I mean, is it that much of a hassle to carry a debit card with you?

No, but it's incredibly convenient? Same way I don't carry a camera because my phone has one

You can put the card in the phone case and use it almost as if it’s Wallet.

If I leave the house, I need my ID, which is in my wallet, which also contains my debit cards. Perhaps your workflow is different, but I would gain nothing from using a wallet app, so I don't.

Not the original parent comment but for my life I don't need to carry a wallet most times, my ID is also digital, I leave the house with only my phone the vast majority of times.

I only carry my wallet with my physical ID card when I know it will be needed: doctors' appointments, traveling to other countries inside Schengen, etc.

I used to be in the camp, until I discovered how fast it is to tap my phone at transit vs taking out wallet, taking my card out of it, tapping and putting the card back and then the wallet back, especially if the phone is already in my hand.

I find it a bit dystopian to imagine that everyone has to carry ID all the time. I know lots of countries do it, but I've never had to and I'd like to keep it that way.

(I'm aware that some places I've been to require foreigners to carry passports at all times but luckily it's never been an issue.)

To be clear, I live on a farm 12km up and down small mountains from the nearest town of any consequence, and 21km from the town with a supermarket I can afford to shop at-- so if I'm leaving for anything but exercise, it's in a car, and the fine for not being able to produce my license if demanded by a cop at a traffic stop or checkpoint is around €50. They're actually not allowed to randomly check ID for no particular reason on the street in Ireland.

Even so, I think I'd prefer to keep my fondleslab and access to all my money as separate concerns. For example, were someone to grab my phone and run (in Dublin, perhaps), I would still have everything else. If I got mugged, well then, I'm getting mugged for everything either way. Plus I prefer cash whenever possible.

My Google wallet replaces not just my debit card but 3-4 supermarket rewards cards, gift cards, gym pass, train & plane tickets, some car parking tickets, and can be used to tap on and off buses and tube trains. It's surprisingly convenient not to have to have my wallet with me whenever I leave the house.

> I mean, is it that much of a hassle to carry a debit card with you?

In order to be exposed to targeted advertising? That seems excessive for the end goals (not mentioning the fact that you cannot opt out).

Yeah do that. I’ve just started doing this again. I have an iPhone but Apple Pay crapped put and I couldn’t remember my debit card pin. This was on holiday in Germany so I was up shit creek. Turns out wallet apps help make you stupid.

Gone back to physical cards.

This should be deemed as illegal - this isn't a consent choice but coercion resulting from the tiredness of being constantly harassed

This is exactly what I did this year, moving photo backup to Syncthing and using Immich. So far it has been a very rewarding trip, even if the home server it runs on is not the fastest.

> "and I do still use the google built in 'camera' app, so I'm kind of using google photos while I take pictures if that makes sense."

I found it quite inconvenient; you'd try to open the photos app from the photos button on the camera but it didn't work for me. Did you find a way to make the integration decent?

The "solution" is to run a patched version of GCam that allows you to select a different gallery app, e.g. https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/dev...

Or if you are using an alternative os you can use a fake google photos app.

It used to use your default gallery app, I see it as another anti-competitive choice on googles part

The thing that is needed is a cloud storage API that is mandatory by law and is required to be honored by the OS. The OS vendors create a virtual cloud storage layer which has a backend that can be implemented by any cloud storage provider and then all the apps use these abstractions when loading, saving, and so on their data to the "cloud." Which can be anything from a third-party online service to a self-hosted solution. It should be implemented in all apps that support cloud-based content, music, books, movies, home environmental data, medical data, exercise history and the like. Silicon Valley has developed an arrogance, and they need to be reminded that they are subject to laws and regulations like all of us and that it could be much worse for them if they continue to be wankers.

there are already protocols for exchanging files between computers. The cloud is just someone else's pc.... administered by mostly incompetent buffoons (or forced to act like incompetent buffoons by their higher ups). A "cloud" protocol doesn't make sense. Since a "cloud" could be any of a ton of wildly unrelated things, there is only one sane standard protocol that could be shared. It's called IPv4 (or v6)

Not just some cloud protocol, but an abstraction layer at the OS for the apps to talk to so that the cloud storage back-end can be replaced with no knowledge, participation, or consideration from the applications that a user uses.

I take my shiny new phone, go to settings, then cloud provider where I specify Acme Cloud Bit and Bobs Inc. And now everything just works with Acme Cloud. I switch it to Globodisk Corporation and everything just continues working. Maybe the OS does a nice one and asks if I want to migrate all my storage from Acme Cloud to Globodisk and performs said migration. And the apps never know or care.

But it would need to be mandated by some large political entity as no tech company would do this and give up the lock in that they desperately want.

ah.... so ftp or sftp