this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
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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.

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[–] Redex68@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (6 children)

One thing I don't get, if someone could explain it to me, is what's the point of immich over e.g. Nextcloud? Immich is just for photo and video, right? Why not just have a cloud file drive instead? To me, I feel like it's a waste to have both, since I use Nextcloud to both sync my PC and as a secondary backup, in which case I'd have two copies of my photos on my home server if I wanted to use Immich as well. Am I missing something or is it for people with different workflows?

[–] SWW13@lemmy.brief.guru 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Because it has a lot of photo specific features:

  • face recognition: enables you to (mostly) automatic tagging of who's in the photo
  • map of images, e.g. look at all the images you have taken in Italy
  • (local) AI to search images by keywords, e.g. "sunset at the beach"
  • memories: what happened on this day in the previous years

These are just the ones on top of my head, but you'll probably get the idea. If you just want to back up you photos then nextcloud is more than enough, but you'd probably enjoy the immich features once you used them.

Regarding the two copies: you can use immich on an external library, so you don't have to have to copies.

It's like asking why should I use paperless when I can just keep my documents as PDFs in my nextcloud.

[–] lightrush@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago

The AI search is just crazy, especially when you adjust the model quality.

[–] Zanathos@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The issue for me is that Nextcloud has these features as well with App add-ons. I have yet to try Immich because what's more important for me is the actual backup\upload of my photos than actually browsing them. Maybe someday, but my self hosting initiatives typically involve me chasing a shiny red ball of a deployment, and Immich just isn't shiny enough for me yet.

[–] SWW13@lemmy.brief.guru 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sure, if you just want upload / backup it's not worth it. If your currently happy with nextcloud then there is no reason to try immich.

But I highly recommend to sometimes view old photos to keep the memories alive.

I haven't looked into the nextlcoud add-ons, but didn't have a great experience with the ones I tried so far. In general I'm not really happy with nextlcoud even for file sync / share, but I haven't found any replacement, every thing else is much worse.

[–] Zanathos@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

It does take quite a bit of upkeep, especially if you don't use it frequently. I recently found my instance broke due to a bad addon, and then Authelia also broke because NC decided thier OIDC addon is not supported on the latest v32. I was able to re-enable without issue, but still flagged as unsupported.

Sounds like I'm talking myself into Immich already haha.

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