this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Immich runs great on my server with an i5-7500 CPU and uses about 800MB of RAM, with around 3-4GB while actively running the ML models on new uploads using OpenVINO/Quicksync hardware acceleration on the iGPU (RAM usage there depends on which models you've picked). I would consider that to be pretty old and slow hardware.
There are definitely other projects for slower hardware out there that are just simple photo galleries. Or an app like FolderSync can backup/upload your photos to any type of file server if you don't need the web gallery.
I won’t place a 7th generation Intel CPU as slow and outdated. You may be surprised to learn I have multiple Intel Atom 230/330 CPUs that serve my personal needs very well. It’s extremely slow CPU, yet it’s surprisingly capable for a home server setup.
To give you some context: a 4K JPEG image is converted to AVIF within 30 seconds on my i7-4770 desktop, while said Intel Atom processor does the same job within 30 minutes! I don’t expect Immich to run all the processing on such machine, obviously. But that would be cool to host a web site with the archives on said hardware (it’s plenty capable to run a simple web server, especially for just one user / or a family).
Also, I don’t understand the scale model. I’d rather make a reverse proxy and a bunch of old computers like that, so when I need to access a photo from, say, 2010, it would wake on LAN start the associated computer, instead of me needing to have a super beefy computer with 20 TB disks that does everything. That’s why I think the architecture does not have the scaling in mind, or it’s not obvious / trivial.
My current Immich server is the MacBook Pro from 2011, mobile i5 something (3rd generation I believe). It’s OK, when things are processed. But I’d prefer to offload it to ultra-low-powered machines for scale and power efficiency. Again: perhaps that’s possible already, I haven’t investigated it thoroughly yet.
Sounds like you want something more custom built if you want to wake up hosts when needed to access the media on them, that's not a very common setup. Maybe just a plain old set of SMB shares with the images on them for something simple! I suppose you'd want some kind of index kept on an always-on host to be able to figure out which host to wake up.
Distributed storage with all the hosts online 24/7 is more common, and Immich could certainly handle that just fine as your storage backend would be doing the work of distributed storage (Ceph or similar), and Immich doesn't even need to be aware of it.