A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don't know.
As someone who only used the stock synology app and has always wanted to try something else, what features and things does this do better? I am close to trying it out just to see. Im sure it will solve my 1 big issue where I can't control the location of photos that default to my application storage, which is pretty small, instead of my actual storage array.
Does everything Google photos does. Their app looks/feels exactly Google's app, including sharing links. Assuming you're running it on reasonably powerful hardware, it does all the same face recognition and ML based search that Google photos does.
You don't even need reasonably powerful hardware, I do it on my raspberry Pi 5. It just takes a little longer, which isn't usually a problem except for the first time you import your library.
Does it have an Android app that will automatically back up photos and videos that I take? Is there a way to do it without exposing a bunch of stuff from my home network?
Yes, and yes.
Their Android app feels like an exact clone of the Google Photos Android app.
To access it remotely, you can use Tailscale like someone else mentioned. But you need to have Tailscale installed on everyone's phones.
You can also use a Cloudflare Tunnel to allow it to be accessed over the Internet without exposing anything from your home network directly to the Internet.
The latter is useful when I want to share a secret link to a photo album after hanging out with people so everybody can upload the photos they took to one place (something I used to do a lot with Google Photos)
I currently have a Wireguard server setup on my router with the client on my phone that connects automatically any time I leave home (thanks Tasker!). This is essentially the same as the tail scale setup, right??
Any idea how much that cloudflare tunnel costs?? I'd love to be able to share via a link rather than sending individual pictures, but my current setup really only allows it if that person is connected to my home wifi.
Yep. Tailscale uses wireguard under the hood so that setup sounds exactly the same.
The Cloudflare tunnel is free. They don't seem to have a traffic cap either. They'll charge you if you want to use a non apex domain (e.g. subdomain) or if you need their more advanced bot detection/defense products. But a basic/standard setup like what us self hosters have is free.
Yes. I use it, no issues. Use tail scale to backup while away from the home network.