immich VS gphotos-sync

It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google's retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.

That said, there's a vast number of self-hosted alternatives like Stalwart Mail (email) [1], Immich (images) [2], NextCloud (Google Docs) [3], etc.

[1] https://stalwa.rt

[2] https://immich.app

[3] https://nextcloud.com/

Last year we added CLIP-based image search to https://immich.app/ and even though I have a pretty good understanding of how it works, it still blows my mind damn near every day. It's the closest thing to magic I've ever seen.

I’m a big fan of https://immich.app/ and I use it every day for thousands of assets

The main thing to me was that since this runs on Nextcloud its more extensible as the photos are just stored under the files and you can use various other apps to do what your heart desires. The other aspect is you get your own Gdrive alternative. You may or may not want this.

For mobile compatibility Nextcloud is better since you can choose which folder photos go to and you can essentially automatically backup albums whereas with Immich you can't automatically specify which album photos from a directory should go [1].

In addition to this, Immich isn't too stable yet and each time you update the server all clients have to be on the latest version, at least since the last time I used Immich.

1. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1678

Real-world applications often require complex queries that go beyond simple Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search. To explore a practical example of such applications, let's take a closer look at immich, a self-hosted photo and video backup solution that highlights the importance of advanced vector and traditional relational queries.

I discovered these 3 amazing projects recently:

Cryptpad, essentially google docs/sheets/forms e2e encrypted. It does include collaboration. https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad

Immich, google photos self hostable, with share options https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Nginxproxymanager manages certificates and proxies to self hosted stuff through nginx https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager

Great self hosting stuff!

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/7405#discus...

It's a great software but I would not recommend it at all because of this and the answer from the authors about the issue

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/5907

Running REINDEX TABLE USERS; on the DB solved the issue for me.

Immich is definitely fast moving - it is awesome, but has been a challenge to keep it current.

Sadly, it’s not configurable. It’s just an inherent limitation of the API (1). Takeout is the best alternative, but for something more realtime you can use tools (2) that wrap the browser UI which also exports full quality.

(1) https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync#warning-google-api...

(2) https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync

I haven't tried immich yet, but I am using https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync with great success. I wonder how hard it would be to set up a workflow to get the synced photos into immich.

I pull mine from Google Photos, with a docker image running a tool: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

Its not perfect, but as a backup, it works well.

Exactly this. I have Google photos and I use it all the time, for everyone. But I also back up everything I can using the [gphotos-sync](https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync) python script. As it says, it's not the 100% quality in either photo or video, but it's still the memories.

Please if you aren't backing up your cloud storage photos/important files, stop reading HN and go and set it up now.

I can recommend backblaze for cheap reliable storage and the restic backup client which is brilliant (a single, small binary). There's also rclone, or even the backblaze cli client. [Sorry I sound like a Backblaze shill!]

I used this not too long ago: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

It works extremely well, and you can re-run it any time to sync new files locally too.

I used it like that for a few months before I finally installed syncthing on my phone and stopped using Google Photos altogether.

Now what I do is take photos on my phone, have them sync to a NAS. And on the NAS I used a modified version of this https://forum.syncthing.net/t/android-photo-sync-with-exifto... to build up a YYYY/MM folder organisation and move files older than 30 days from the syncthing folder into my archive. My archive is then in my Plex so it's still accessible to me.

In essence: 1) Take photo (implicit sync to NAS), 2) wait 30 days, 3) archive photo into long term directory naming convention, whilst making available to Plex and deleting the version from my phone (by deleting the syncthing version it will delete the one on the phone after 30 days too).

Ah. I suggest opening a separate thread for that if you need peeps to share their experience. I took a quick look at Github and this repository seems popular: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

Technically there is no way for a lossless synchronization/export out of Google Photos apart from using Google Takeout to the best of my knowledge.

For reference check the best effort project https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync and the "Known Issues with Google API" section.

In short: