One more vote for Immich. While I don’t like how it’s not easy to create albums from existing folder structures out of the box, the search and face recognition is amazing for a free self hosted app.
For those who want a minimal no bullshit alternative: lychee is your best bet !
Immich + a backup solution of your choice. If it’s worth saving, it’s worth backing up. Try to follow 321 as much as possible, but having at least a second copy is a good start.
I started using photoprism. But their viewer doesn’t show my 3D side by side stereo photos. Immich brings a better viewer that gets out of the way and it also has multiple users. The immich multiple user accounts function a bit weird. My family photos need to be shared as external libraries while our phone photos cannot be shared unless you share accounts. They did some decisions around handling multiple users that is not fabulous. I used photoprism for awhile but just a few months on immich I can tell its going to be a better experience.
How do you take stereo photos?
I 3D printed a special lens to do that. It basically holds 4 mirrors to catch two images on the same sensor slightly apart ~2.75" apart or so.
Sounds cool! I love 3D. Is there a guide online at all?
There isn’t an online specific place for 3D printing optic assemblies but there are plenty of places to read about stereo photos. There’s even a software called stereophotomaker that helps you crop and adjust the photos you take.
Do you view them just by crossing your eyes or by some other method?
You can do both cross and parallel:
Tl;dr:
- PhotoPrism: Local AI with strong privacy but heavier setup.
- LibrePhotos: Same, but less polished, more community-built.
- Immich: Best self-hosted Google Photos alternative.
- Ente Photos: E2E encrypted, low-maintenance, most “plug and play”
I have experience with both Ente and Immich and I can say they are both excellent. I like Ente a little bit more, but Immich is imho better for selfhosting (both are easy to self host). What I like about Immich in that regard is that it keeps photos organized as files too, they can be categorized in folders (like year > month > day and its customizable). I just want to have an option to have access to the files directly on the filesystem and if (big if) Immich dies, I still have my photos accessible and organized in directories without me needing to do anything. Ente uses s3 storage system.
I haven’t used immich in a while, but ente felt like the more mature product when I was evaluating the two.
It feels quite equal now that immich is stable. I was actually waiting for that, because I knew the updates before the stable release were sometimes painful and I didn’t want to do that on my production env. 😀
Immich’s AI search is so much better than PhotoPrism
It’s true. I uploaded a nude out of curiosity. I then searched “Penis”. It found my penis. Now if only my wife could too. 10/10 Immich best self hosted google photos replacement.
I’m sold!
Lol
It’s even better than Google’s in some regards.
Apart from me maybe thinking immich should have built in backup tools, I’ve very much found it met my needs.
Personally I host all this kind of stuff using containers, only mounting the folders that need backing up. Then I just back up all my podman volumes. It’s pretty nice not depending on any tools that have to be maintained or anything like that.
Comparison of self hosted photo library https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
Thinking of setting up immich, the tagging on memories is trash. Is immich better
Can’t answer sorry
I have a docker compose immich that I somehow managed to kill fourteen minutes after convincing my wife to switch to it.
Welcom to the world of self-hosting :-D
Oh yeah, I’ve killed mine a couple times. Usually it’s because I didn’t keep it updated and jumped too far ahead too quickly. Rolling it back and walking it forward fixed it for me once, another time there was something I was supposed to run first and I didn’t read the release notes (that one was a really long time ago though).
Every part of what you just said can be encapsulated in proper packaging so you don’t even need to care – about pre/post upgrades, or even dependencies and checks before it starts.
The lack of a proper release is the absolute only thing keeping me from using it.
its not beta anymore since 2.0
its not beta anymore since 2.0
I tried Photoprism, Ente and Immich.
Immich is by far the best. It has got an app that really does what it should do, has an AI that actually works and is easy to host and to update.
Last I tried Immich its background upload was horrible.
Some of that is definitely iOS being bad, but other apps at least semi-worked when Immich didn’t at all.
I might try it again, though. See if it’s improved.
They mentioned “better background backups” as a enhancement as since version 1.141.1 which was released on 9/8/2025. Personally I just started testing it after v2.0 so I’m not sure how bad it was previously but have not seen any significant issues with backup.
I honestly have no idea if the iOS app works properly.
Do you conbect to your immich instance remotely when not home or just dump the photos once home?
Tailscale with a subnet router running for my home network makes it so that I can just connect to 192.168.50.57 from wherever I like.
I use nextcloud as a general drive, where I also upload photos automatically. Then I just mount the images folder in my immich container.
I’ve got Wireguard running. As soon I am on wifi, my phone uploads the new pictures.
Anyone with Nextcloud Memories setup? I’ve read it’s the only one that still respects a sane files and folders setup, whereas the other options basically force you to forever use their database-based system and files are terribly organized, so you are forced to use their interface.
I switched from Nextcloud Memories to Immich when Immich added support for external libraries. From what I remember, Memories was pretty good but a bit slower, not as polished, and had significantly worse AI tools. I recommend Immich.
I use Nextcloud Memories for uploading folders to quickly share to relatives. Love it, very straightforward for them to use.
I also host Immich but unlike Memories not exposed, local only. I set Immich up because we found we never looked at our photos when they were just stored on a hard drive but we look at them much more now theyre easily accessible. I spent months slowly retrospectively tagging & adding geo locations to our photos in order to utilise the powerful search capability of Immich. I use the template option & set it up to match the folder structure of our photos.
I’m using Kopia to back up the entire Immich directory including the nightly Immich-db dumps & ive also moved a backup of the backup to another drive, currently somewhere in the region of about 80+GB.
whereas the other options basically force you to forever use their database-based system and files are terribly organized, so you are forced to use their interface.
Immich has a “storage templates” section which allows you to choose a folder structure that it will use to store the files in.
Or go the other way and include your folders as external libraries.
“external library” is the way
Yeah. It integrates so cleanly with nextcloud and also means I don’t have to pay for a second service just for photos so that’s nice
Since I would recommend everyone 3-2-1. I have both a good structured photobackup AND immich.
What do you use for 3-2-1? I try, so far I have my phone, backed up to a server HDD via SMB (Too poor for RAID-1 atm), and the very important stuff sent to a USB drive and returned to a drawer. Am I doing it right haha
Couple of considerations for you.
Is it a backup or a sync? Sync will sync your deletes and corrupted data.
It’s ideal that you have your USB offsite.
I use restic and have a repo on a USB and a repo on AWS S3
In immich you can also get the files organized in folders. I have it year > month > day. You can create templates for how you want to organize it.
I have it and immich set up. Nextcloud memories is fine, but for me the auto upload would randomly stop at some points. Overall ux with immich is better, but memories gets the job done.
I use FolderSync to push my photos to Nextcloud. Much more reliable than their app
Does that automatically add it to the database or do you have a scan schedule?
I don’t use Memories, but yes, uploading photos with FolderSync to Nextcloud (via WebDAV) does add them to the Nextcloud database. They show up as new photos in the recent activities list.
Ah, that makes sense. Didn’t realize FolderSync went through the WebDAV protocol. I’m used to manually copying things to my nextcloud drive and running a scan.
I think Memories schedules its scan with the normal cron job for Nextcloud
This is my preferred solution.
I have one setup. The setup was abit clunky since cli work is required. But after that I had a great experience.
Another vote for immich here, works great and let’s me shade albums with other accounts on my server.
Wow these all sound so much better than Proton’s photo backup. In the words of @mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud , it’s pants.
Proton reinventing the wheel is so stupid.
They should use what’s out there and improve it. Like including simplelogin. They should use immich, make it private, and include it in their setup. They even suck for calendar. You can’t integrate it anywhere. Integrating email is difficult as well. They want to become the next tech silo. I am somewhat stuck with them for now but I may move to tuta if I can
Honestly I would be ok with then being the next tech silo. If they just actually did a good job more often.
They perpetually suffer from 6 outta 10 syndrome.
They are good enough to use, better then most alternatives, but just suck enough that I’m always disappointed but not angry.
I may move to tuta if I can
I’m with tuta but in term of integrability I don’t feel there is a huge difference…
Thx for the heads up!
U’ve got well over 500 email addresses with proton. It’ll take a long time to migrate, if ever.
Proton services generally are not bad, but I could never use Proton Drive for anything else than mid to long term backups, because they don’t have it integrated with Linux. I am not angry though, it is what it is and I am only in the niche (even-though Linux is the best OS for privacy). Ever since I have setup my Truenas (and Immich) I find myself caring even less about not being able to use Proton drive 😀 That said, once they have integration I want to use it for a few files.
I’m in the same boat and hoping their new drive SDK will finally put a lot of these issues to rest. If possible I would love to sync a backup of my photos directly to proton from my immich self hosted instance. If they ever release it of course.
I’m super happy with self hosted Ente. It was really simple to setup, mobile app is perfect and local ML works great. I can recommend!
Plus thanks to built in replication, my photos are securely stored in three diferent places
How does the replication work when you self-host? I know their hosted version has backups, but I’m assuming you’d have to set your own up.
Also, have you seen any easy way to move to and/or from their self-hosted version?
Prinary storage is VPS hard disk, secondary hot is Backblaze B2 and cold storage is Scaleway glacier
I’m not sure, I’m assuming that you would need to export all data from their version and import it to self hosted
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I use nextcloud, the builtin photos app is pants. But memories is amzing
Using immich for photos, going to set-up nextcloud and onlyoffice for the rest
Made exactly the same experience. Dumped the map plugin and using memories now, to geo tag and re-import photos to my existing local photo manager. I might even transfer the whole bunch of photos¹ from local storage to NC. Which will be a good reason to get rid of all tha external drive and SAN-based crap in the house and replace it by fiber and a proper NAS.
¹ 20+ years worth of them, I basically shut down my darkroom and analog lab when digicams became available to common mortals. The bastards who stole my Minolta, my Fujica and the case with most of my lenses, flashes etc. made the decision to go digital a lot easier for me.
I selfhost immich in a netcup VPS. They have a 2tb VM for about 22 euros a month via a black Friday sale
I’m on a 1tb arm plan for about 10 euros a month.
