Truly excited about Immich

Digital sovereignty and freedom are the topics I’ve been exploring since deleting some of my personal social media accounts around 3 years ago. It is also an angle that influenced development of my personal online brand free with tech. Today, I am happy to say that I am no longer dependent on Google Photos thanks to Immich.

What a wonderful piece of software

Maintainers and contributors behind this open-source project called Immich are truly making the world a better place. Not only this one, but also maintainers and contributors behind immich-go (util for data import) and ImmichFrame (digital frame extension for Immich).

These guys allowed me to spend endless amounts of hours last week to transform my former gaming setup into a hybrid Counter-Strike 2 / NAS station (yeah, CS2 is the only game that I play on desktop PC nowadays so I was able to simplify this much). Bought 2x6TB HDD disks, installed Ubuntu 24.04 with RAID1 and I was ready.

Truly thankful

The beauty of this all is that it does not feel like a tradeoff. I am winning in every way:

  • I am the only one owning my personal photos and videos and there is no Big Tech that tries to profit out of it
  • I get to control many aspects of the software like AI & ML features that run on top of my library
  • I don’t need to pay 21 EUR / year or more for the duration of my lifetime to a Big Tech corporation that already has more resources than needed (I just needed to make a one-time investment into my hardware and pay for the electricity that I am already doing)

I am happy when I can document my life with privacy and control in mind (learn more about tech independence). This is why Immich deserves all this free promotion that I am giving them. Thank you again for building this beauty.

Setup

My GitHub repository contains my configuration but here are the brief steps for setting this up:

  1. Buy and install hardware (e.g. WD Red Plus series or Seagate IronWolf)
  2. Install Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu 24.04. LTS)
  3. Configure RAID1 or more for HDDs (e.g. Linux Software RAID using mdadm)
  4. Install Docker and use Docker Compose for Immich
  5. (Optional) Export your library from existing cloud provider (e.g. Google Takeout)
  6. (Optional) Import your library using immich-go utility
  7. (Optional) Install ImmichFrame extension to display albums as digital frames on devices in your local network

Depending on your hardware, you can also turn on hardware acceleration for machine learning and video transcoding. My configuration from the repository uses CUDA as I have GeForce GTX 1060 GAMING X 6G from MSI as part of my hardware setup. Also, feel free to buy a standalone NAS if you prefer that, where you can probably skip step 2 and 3.