Immich 3.0

hashier 280 points 140 comments July 02, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (15 comments)

phikappa

There's a lot of things I spent a ton of time setting up, use once, and then never again. Tons of things that are easy to set up, and provide small benefits every day for a long time. Immich has got to be the thing that I've spent ages setting up, use extremely infrequently but the one time a year I use it I'm so happy I did. Great software.

DavideNL

I don't want yet another self hosted service to manage (update, backups, possible hardware failures, energy costs, ups, etc.). Unfortunately Immich is not end-to-end encrypted. If that would have be the case i'd use https://pixelunion.eu/ Seems like a great app though. So... i'm still pondering what to do :-)

mopsi

Does Immich support read-only source folders yet? I'd like to keep the original files intact, but allow Immich to index them.

MohamedMabrouk

Immich is an amazing software. I use it regularly as an alternative along side Google photos. I keep in it large videos that I wouldn't upload normally to Google photos + the snappy experience at home vs Cloud-Bades solution.

brewtide

Does anyone have any pointers on the best way to import roughly 14 Google takeout chunks into immich? I've downloaded all the chunks once, only to find them corrupted due to... Their 50gb size and using a browser in theory. One also cannot seem to use wget or alternatives because of the auth / session cookies required via Google takeout. I've yet to even broach the aspect of importing each giant bundle into immich because I've not had success in even grabbing the takeout files correctly, but would LOVE pointers on the best way of importing the roughly 700gb into the database without it ALL going wrong. I've had great success with immich running in docker for the past year or so, although I have yet to upgrade to the newest version. Google photos backups have been disabled on my phone for a year or so, but I yet to haul in all of the past years. Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud". Great software.

Cider9986

When I was switching to GrapheneOS from iOS, I decided to self host my photos. I considered Immich, but I settled on Ente because of the encryption. Ente Photos is extremely polished and it's comparable quality to Apple photos. It's cool they keep the server open and selfhostable instead of only open clients like many e2ee projects do. I like how you can share an album and anyone can contribute to it without an account. Another cool feature is that you can select photos to lock when you hand your phone to somebody so they can only see the ones you selected without your device unlock.

psadauskas

Has the ios photo sync gotten better? I've got 20k photos on my phone, and last I tried it filled up the storage on my phone with the originals, and never completed the process, even after leaving my phone open, unlocked, and the immich app running in the foreground for several days, on the same local network as the server. I know they were working on it, but haven't kept up, I just want to know if it works better now and I should try again.

oliyoung

Immich is such a no-brainer replacement for Apple Photos or Google Photos, combined with VPN like Tailscale, it's almost a drop in replacement

thenews

Immich is amazing, been using it as a backup since my phone is always full

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS

I got annoyed with Immich and external storage, because in order for every user to have their own facial recognition data on a large set of photos, you have to add the folder as external storage for each user, which means image previews for each user, even though the source image is the same. So if you have 3 users, you use up 3 times the space for the same thumbnail image. It got to where I had 20% of my space was just thumbnails for each user, even though it was one set of images in the external storage. Maybe that's changed recently.

AussieWog93

So many comments here about missing end to end encryption, but seriously - why would anyone want this? Lets say burglars break in and steal your homelab. Because you don't have e2ee, they can see all the photos you saved of your dead grandmother! Oh no! Or, in the more likely scenario that something happens to your phone, the lack of e2ee means that even if you lost your keys you didn't lose the only memories that remain of your grandma - you just copy across the .jpgs to a new device.

rewgs

Immich is the best self-hosted app I use. Hats off to the developers!

poisonborz

I wish they would better support external image sources - images not uploaded/managed by Immich, just a folder of images it has access to - especially if it's read only. It mostly works, but the UI and logic breaks in a lot of little ways.

qsera

I have come to the realisation that I don't need 10,000 photos. I probably need < 100. I will print them and keep them in a paper album... Which I am yet to do...

apples_oranges

Does it have image editing tools like rotate and crop and is it aware of basic exif metadata?

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