Immich

Immich is a modern photo management web application which aims to be similar to Google Photo. It can be uses to backup phone photos and also manage older collection of older photos.

Immich is a fairly new player in the game but it's growing a lot and is gaining a lot of traction. It's heavily under development and very polished. Overall it's probably the best solution but:

• Doesn't support folders as albums (sorry, long term solution must be stored in folders and not only in a database)
• Uses a database for metadata, which is not good again for long term solution.
• It's been a bit unclear since it was acquired by Futo's. Futo's stance on Open Source is unclear to me.
• After moving to Futo they added some controversial support system (on which they also backtracked), and it seemed not very well tought of.
• Devs don't seems to care too much on user needs and keep plowing ahead on their roadmap.

Immich, at this time, does not support base_url out of the box. A lot of discussion is going on around the topic and somebody found a nice fix using a specific NGINX setup, which i will describe in this page.

Overall, i stopped using it.

Use photos user and group, see Photos Management Server.

Immich needs to be installed using a docker compose file. This is the official and only supported installation method. I will show you, of course, how to run it rootless with podman. Immich installation is detailed here, and i suggest you take a look at.

I assume you have already created the photo user and group, but in case you didn't, here you go: So, let's get going. Create an immich user:

useradd -d /data/daemons/photos photos

And download the standard Immich docker-compose and env files:

su - photos
wget https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
#optional: wget https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/hwaccel.transcoding.yml
#optional: wget https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/hwaccel.ml.yml
wget -O .env https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/example.env

(enabling hardware acceleration is optional and i will not cover it here, as it's not needed in my use-case)

I will not give you a full docker-compose file, because Immich sometimes ships with backward incompatibilities, you must start from the one linked above and do the following modifications:

• Specify a network to all containers
• Add any specific volumes for specific external galleries
• Remove the restart and healthcheck sections

This is the specific code for the network:

# Add these two lines to each one of the services (immich-server, immich-microservices, immich-machine-learning, redis, database, ...)
    networks:
      - immich-net

# This goes at the end of the file:
networks:
  immich-net: {}

Please note that you can have more than one mount, ideally one for each folder tree that contains photos you want to add as external library to Immich.

edit the /data/daemons/immich/.env file to adapt at least your Uploads and external folder:

UPLOAD_LOCATION=/data/Media/Photos/Uploads
EXTERNAL_PATH=/path/to/your/external/photos/trees
IMMICH_VERSION=release

External libraries let you integrate into Immich existing and already sorted out image libraries. It's a very welcome feature that let's you use Immich in evary conceivable scenario.

This page will give you more details on how to set up an external library.

You have to perform two steps:

• Add the external library path as a volume in docker compose
• From Immich web GUI, create the external library pointing to that path

So, in your docker-compose.yml ensure that you have mapped each external library like this example:

services:
  immich-server:
    volumes:
      - /data/photos/ExistingGallery:/mnt/media/ExistingGallery:ro

Then, you have to go to Immich web gui → administration → external libraries and add create a new library. Each library must belong to an user and shall have one or more paths, the ones mapped as above, inside.

You can also setup a watcher to monitor for new files or period scans to ensure new added files get updated inside Immich as well.

Keep in mind that Immich will not touch the files inthe external library at all, which means that any change to those files metadata will not be embedded in the external library files.

Storage templates let's you choose how Immich should store photos and videos on your filesystem. This is specially useful if you like to sort your photos for albums and/or year-month-day. I think this is a very powerful feature of Immich and a very welcome addition to it's features.

My template is: y/albumelseAltreif/filename and that can be setup from Immich web gui → administration → settings → storage templates.

You also need to enable it from the same setting area. Remember to run the update storage templates task if you change it. Also, remember to check that it's working as intended before you have thousand of photos stored the wrong way.

I assume you have setup a backup schedule like described here, with restic.

For Immich you should backup:

• /data/photos/Library/library: where actual photos are stored
• /data/photos/Library/backups: where postgres backups are stored

You should also go to Immich web gui → administration → settings → backups and reduce the retain to 1 or 2 backups, since you will be backing them up with restic.

Immich officially only support subdomain and not subpath deployment. Use the following NGINX configuration, i will assume your subdomain is called immich.mydomain.com. See here for more details.

immich.conf

 
    server {
        server_name immich.mydomain.com;
        listen 8443 ssl; 
        listen 443 ssl; 
        client_max_body_size 5000M;
        large_client_header_buffers 4 32k;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/immich.mydomain.com_access_log main;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/immich.mydomain.com_error_log info;

        location / {
        location / {
                proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2283;
                #proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8009;
                proxy_redirect    default;
                proxy_set_header  Host $host;
                proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
                proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        }
        include com.mydomain/certbot.conf;
}

To start it, and set it up on boot, as usual follow my indications Using Containers on Gentoo, so link the user-containers init script:

ln -s /etc/init.d/user-containers /etc/init.d/user-containers.immich

and create the following config file:

/etc/conf.d/user-containers.immich

USER=immich
DESCRIPTION="The photo gallery and backup solution"

Add the service to the default runlevel and start it now:

rc-update add user-containers.immich default
rc-service user-containers.immich start

Immich has a CLI which requires NPM:

emerge nodejs

as user immich:

npm i -g @immich/cli

The CLI might require login for upload operations:

immich login-key https://10.0.0.1/immich/api [apiKey]
immich upload --recursive directory/

When you want to update Immich, just:

su - immich
podman compose down
podman compose pull
podman compose up -d

Be aware that Immich is bleeding edge and sometimes there are breaking updates! Always check on Immich Releases page the release notes and take actions accordingly. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.