The most important data I keep is my photo library. Decades worth of memories are not something I want to lose. This is data that’s original, for the most part. I have copies of family photos, etc. that I could get some of back from the original photographers, but not everything).
I’ve kept CD and DVD backups of photos, external hard drives, and duplicates kept in off-site safety deposit boxes. I’ve never trusted my photo library to a cloud service though. No Flickr, no Google Photos, no iCloud Photo Backup. This archive has always been kept local.
I’ve been mostly good at keeping a folder structure that helps me find photos, but it’s not enough.
For years, I used an old desktop version of ACDSee for Windows. It was (especially for it’s time) a really powerful tool for organizing your photo library. I had years of photos tagged – at this time it was just manual tags for the photos. However, the ability to work with it’s database seems to have been lost to time, and my move off of Windows years ago. I really wish the software had written it’s data back to the image files, or kept them in a file format that I could have hacked something with.
But now that I’m buildling up the home lab, it’s time to do something about the photo library again.
Reading reviews it seems like the solution, hands down is Immich.
I’ve installed the Immich server as a docker container my VM in Proxmox. I also installed their iPhone app and logged into my server using the VM’s local IP. No cloud.
I uploaded the photos from my phone, and Immich read their EXIF data, capturing location data, camera data, etc.
It also started running (optional) facial recognition and duplicate detection. None of this uses cloud-based LLMs. It uses a local model running in another docker container. You can swap this out for other models if you choose. Cool, face detection without training “the man” on everyone’s identities.
Am I going down the same path as I did with ACDSee and getting locked into another app. I don’t think so.
- Immich stores all the data about your photos in my Postgres database. If I moved to something else I could figure out a way to transfer the missing data (like tags)
- You can have it use a “storage template” to keep your files in an organized file structure like “Year/Month/” so you can still find images from other applications.
- As long as Immich is maintained, I don’t see any reason I’d have to move to anything else. Fingers crossed.
I’m also giving the Immich Power Tools package a try. Might write about that later.