Posted by rzk 5 days ago
Feature wise I think they are pretty comparable (vs the paid version of Photoprism), and I like the UI of Immich slightly more. Immich also supports singe sign on via OIDC easily, which I rather appreciate so my family doesn't have to remember 10 different passwords.
Regarding stability it's actually pretty reliable. I've been running it for a long time via Docker in the form of the TrueNAS plugin and have never had any issues, like ever, so I think it being marked as unstable was a bit overly cautious. I think they have also recently moved to a new phase of development that is also going to be even more stable. Even if it does break, all of your media is stored in a nicely organized directory structure on the filesystem so you're not going to lose anything.
It didn't, that's just a timing coincidence. Immich was started because none of the existing projects offered the google photos-like experience.
Photoprism didn't support profiles or have an app (back then at least, don't know about today), and I couldn't convince her of using some other gallery in the browser...
I for myself liked the Photoprism GUI, but I could never get the face recognition to work well, and manually tagging people/places (or basically doing anything) on thousands of pictures was quite painful.
One thing Immich supports which Photoprism doesn't is multiple user accounts. That doesn't really bother me too much but it's a pretty big advantage.
Edit: Actually one thing I can complain a bit about is the object recognition accuracy. Face recognition I think works decently enough but objects are frequently not identified in my photos. How's Immich in this regard?
- There was no good mobile backup story. State-of-the-art was WebDAV sync and import delays which would truncate files and other issues on back connections. It also made deletion risky.
- The UI had lots of things that felt very opinionated for a very specific workflow that seems niche. Things like auto-adding generated titles and other things.
- The face recognition is much worse, especially for non-white faces. Even detection didn't seem to have a good setting that would reliably identify what is a face without way too many false positives.
- Immich's semantic image search is way better than what was on PhotoPrism where it seemed to just find a few tags.
- PhotoPrism had lots of UI quirks like the persistent selection that almost never worked how I wanted it to.
Lots of other odds and ends as well. There isn't anything that I actually miss from PhotoPrism.
Both still feels like the sad-er side of open-source WRT polish - stability, reliability and ease-of-use.
I would be willing to pay for something great that I can self-host, but sadly nothing truly great exists.
However I’m wondering how Immich compares it seems less interested in the encryption security and sharing aspects and more heavy on the image editor aspect.
Both are selfhostable. So it maybe an effort to migrate one day.
Immich has been absolutely awesome for this — I can finally look at all my pictures from any year from anywhere in the world. I’m very happy and hope the creators find a way to sustainably finance the project.
The upload feature in the mobile app is not a 1 to 1 replacement of apple photos import so i still do that via apple photos, but that’s something I can live with.
Some would say it's deliberately made to keep the library cluttered so you have to pay more for cloud storage.
Why Are Our Photo Libraries Such a MESS? (Ben Vallack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYeVWyNxaY
I've had it running for a year and have fearlessly and immediately updated. Never messed anything up, somewhat remarkably.
I showed Immich to my partner and they loved it so much that we've ordered significantly more storage for the server to accommodate it. We're currently using both Google Photos and OneDrive, but with this we'll be ditching OneDrive and filling that niche with Immich (as well as expanded network storage in general).
The website and documentation is super clear about not using it as the only source of photos. This is why we'll keep using Google Photos, and why I'll also be backing up Immich and portions of the network storage to B2 via restic. I've used this snapshotting pattern for my general server data for years, and it's even saved me a couple of times. Backups are something you hope to never need to use, but boy are they satisfying when you do need to use them and have them set up properly!
The other issue is my family use my account and don't want to be in charge if my backups fail.
I do love what immich is doing though and would love to run it.
But - seems great. I was prompted to do this after the death of a friend and the subsequent hunt for photos, so I’m hoping the facial recognition lives up to its billing.
I don’t really like having the NAS on 24/7 but I do like the idea of having that local photo sync. Probably cheaper to start with iCloud given the costs of 20TB drives and energy prices, however.
However, I'm back to Synology Photos. I'm using Immich iOS apps. The upload/syncing is noticeably a lot slower than Synology. Gave it a few months, but it's not getting any better. Moved back to Synology Photos for now.