Immich has gotten really good, in just the last little while. Here are some random geek notes/thoughts, after several hours tinkering (non-geeks, stop reading here):

As to sizing: a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4GB (better yet, 8 to be safe) of RAM - and the docker container gets its own fast SSD, for storage - could do it. Forget using a Pi 4.

The Good News:#

  • I’m playing with Immich on a Raspberry Pi 5 in docker, really liking it. It took a long time to import my photos - several hours to do 10,000 photos.

  • It’s very nice to access from Android or iPadOS, as there are Immach apps for both.

  • It does a local AI facial recognition. I’m giving names to the faces - what a trip down memory lane! That’s a rather astounding feature for such an open source app: it’s awesome to see pictures which involved certain individuals, all grouped. There’s been a lot of controversy around facial scanning by apps lately (the data being silently sent back to the “mothership”). With Immich, the data stays local - doesn’t go back to any mothership. No geek contests or says otherwise (and I would hear about it).

  • The Rasberry Pi 5 on the backend can keep up nicely - to me being the one user pretty much. Its little fan whirs away, while I do the editing, etc in the app, silently in the other room on the iPad.

  • can publish web-accessible Albums online easily. Great for sharing albums to family and friends privately; they’re password protected.

  • I set up a reverse proxy on a VPS for remote access.

The Bad News:#

  • had to strip out the videos, before an import. The videos just brutally crushed that Pi to the floor.

  • tried uploading all ~300 recent photos from my iPad to Immich. About 100 failed. Many are Jpgs, should have no problem. It does have a protection against duplicates - calculates hashes. Some uploads certainly failed (from the Immich iPadOS app), which shouldn’t have! Just saying: copyparty uploads with ~100% wire speed and does not fail. But it doesn’t have the photo management goodness which Immich has. Copyparty will do a basic slideshow of a folder of photos. Although it annoys me to say this, I think I’ll have to use Copyparty to exfiltrate the photos out of the iPad’s (walled-garden) “Photo Library”, then as a second, regrettable hop, use immich-cli (the go-based docker container) to do an import to Immich. I just did a test, comparing copyparty’s “up2k” uploader (just used from a web browser like Safari of Firefox), and the Immich app in iPad OS, and there’s no comparison. Copyparty absolutely rips Immich away, totally destroying it for bulk upload. I just uploaded over wifi at a steady, sustained 80MB/sec with Copyparty.