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I have great things to say as well. I left Google Photos about 1 year ago or two, used Takeout to export my ~terabyte of Google Photos, imported to Immich on my mac mini, along with more personal archives of photos. I store the images on an external SSD array (https://paulstamatiou.com/gear/owc-express-4m2-nvme-ssd-encl...) that I have backed up with Restic+Backrest to some cloud providers.

My mac mini hosts it behind tailscale to all my devices and it's been working great.

A tweet of yours a decade ago convinced me to add Google Photos into my workflow (thanks).

https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...

I removed it from my workflow when its integration with Drive was sunset.

I was without a great UI for a couple years, paying attention to Immich in my periphery. I decided to add Immich this year on a Mac Mini as well.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

As someone looking to exfiltrate my photos from Google, I'm about to trial Immich, and I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Sounds like it's a good next step for me.

There's plenty of tutorials but you can request a Google Takeout of your photos and then point immich-go at it. I can confirm that this works really well.

https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

The problem with google takeout is that it generates hundred of files to download as ZIP. I tried it in my own collection (800GB).

Agree - it's annoying. rclone to the rescue. Requires choosing Google Drive as the destination and then downloading with rclone to your computer. It's the closest to sane I've found.

https://metadatafixer.com/learn/how-to-download-google-takeo...

Claude made a PHP script for me that did API to Google Photos and pulls them all to my archive location.

I struggled with Immich, I didn't like the rclone option. I'm intending to go back to Immich but my first priority was to get the stuff out of Google. That's done, so with all my free time (ha!) I can get the family Immich going.

Nice. The PHP script could also write metadata back into the photo so it gets extracted by Immich on import. Just an additional prompt :)

I was planning on having Immich read from my archive. Then Immich on the phones sends right there (VPN?) and skips G all together. But maybe I'll end up with Amdroid->Google->PHP->Immich

Not sure if what I said made sense. I mean inject titles, descriptions, etc from the Google Takeout into the photos EXIF. Then when you import them into Immich, it'll extract those into its own database.

Not sure if it's still the same but years ago when you get your own photos from Google photos via it's APIs you could only get large thumbnails so a great quality reduction. So make sure yours are the original quality. Takeout was the only way out your photos in original quality.

Since we're on Immich, please let me vent out my frustrations after having looked at it recently.

Why the love affair with forcing absolutely everything into strict temporal constraints? Is there a single view in Immich that isn't peppered with date headings?

And I genuinely do not understand what the sharing feature is even for. What are you sharing? It can't be albums because an album would be a series of photos you yourself arranged, independent of when the photos were taken, and this seems a completely foreign concept in Immich land.

>But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.

I'd argue Google is always way worse than the open source alternative in both quality and ux. Their products are terrible. From Gmail to Youtube, the product itself comes second (or Nth), while in open source the product is always first.

In my experience, most open source photo apps lacked basic features like facial recognition, mobile apps, etc. And where they do exist, the UX isn't the best. Are there ones I'm unaware of?

I say this as someone whose last startup (circa 2012) was an open source photo app (https://github.com/photo/frontend).

I think it's a testament to how far computers have come that identifying the individuals in a photograph is now considered a basic feature.

The Kano Model customer satisfaction theory:

  Kano predicted that users' perceptions of satisfaction with a feature will shift from delight to expectation over time. This is either because they have got used to it or because competitors have started to include it in their offerings. In the case of the touchscreen, for instance, the newness that came with the iPhone is no longer a novelty; the touchscreen has become the norm. It's no big deal anymore, but taking it away would be a big deal!

https://ixdf.org/literature/article/the-kano-model-a-tool-to...

Did you also look at https://ente.com/ ?

I was going to recommend ente as well.

My photos and videos are the most important files I have in my self-hosted storage system. Being end-to-end encrypted buys some peace of mind knowing that it's not end of world if my homelab is compromised. And I can backup the data to whatever public clouds without worrying too much about leaking data.

This looks really good. Thanks for reco.

Gonna add it to the moose store for self hosters

Immich is great. I love it