Hi all,
So recently my immediate family had expressed interest in getting some kind of photo share platform for us to share vacation photos more easily. We’ve done a Dropbox with extended family years ago, but that sucked to hard that it even managed to put my non-techy family off of doing that again.
So what are some ideas you all can think of? I’ve seen Immich mentioned around here before, but I’ve honestly never set up even a real homelab or sever before, so that’s a bit daunting. Their google photos-esque UI is a bit plus as everyone but me uses that.
It wouldn’t need to be open to the internet, local WiFi would work as well really just need to be able to share photos between our phones more easily once we get back from a trip. I’ve got an older laptop with like 8GB RAM that I could run the server off of.
Sorry if this is really vague. I’ve just been given instructions to “find out what’s out there” by my non-techy family and I figured you all here would have a better idea of my options. Thanks!
Just use Immich. It’s easy and apes Google Photos.
Ente is the other main option, but I never evaluated it because Immich worked so well.
Immich is the easiest self-hosted thing I’ve set up. It also might’ve been the first.
I have to warn you about Immich on one item: large file upload. Immich does not have chunk uploading, so if you are backing up a large video and you lose internet, the upload has to start all over. I found this out when my phone was trying to upload a 4k video that was about 10GB.
I eventually set syncthing to do phone image and video backups. That kinda solved this issue.
Can you upload by any other means, or does it always require it’s own upload mechanism?
Like massive_bereavement said, I ended up using syncthing to sync my photos to Immich. As long as you point it at the Immich data folder, you can use Syncthing or ever regular file copying to get it there.
Just recently migrated from Ente to Immich. Immich is much nicer, more consistent, friendlier to self host, and less buggy in my experience so far.
Immich doesn’t have shared album option does it ?
You can share albums with other users, or even with a public link.
Yes but can someone else upload photos into your albums?
Yes. When sharing the link you have the option to allow people to upload using that link.
Oh that’s great! Immich here I come
It does. My Immich installation is behind a reverse proxy, and I simply share the link to the albums with friends and family.
Can they upload photos onto your server too?
I didn’t give them their own accounts but you can if you want to.
It does, and they work well.