Immich

What it's good for#

If your phone keeps warning that it's full, or your family's photos are split between three cloud accounts, Immich brings them home. Its phone app uploads new photos and videos in the background, so every picture you take ends up on your server. On the server, they're laid out on a timeline, sorted by date, with a map of where they were taken, albums you make, and links you can send to share an album with someone.

Each person in the house gets their own account and their own library, and you can share albums between you.

Signing in#

A new Immich asks the first person who opens it to create the admin account, which would be a problem on a server anyone can reach. So LibrePortal makes that account itself, as soon as Immich answers, and keeps Immich reachable from the server only until it has checked the new login works. Nobody gets a chance to reach the setup page first. After that, Immich's setup page is switched off for good, so it can't be used even if the admin account were ever deleted.

Immich signs people in with an email address. The install asks for the Admin email; leave it empty and one is made up: admin@<your domain> with a domain, or admin@immich.invalid without one, an address that can never receive mail. The email and password are in the Login Details shown when the install finishes. Press Welcome on the app's page to see them again.

Backing up your phone#

Immich's own phone app, for Android and iPhone, is how most photos arrive. In the app:

If this server serves its apps over HTTPS on their own ports, with its own certificate rather than one from a domain, turn on Allow self-signed SSL certificates in the phone app's advanced settings, or it will refuse to connect.

This is why Immich is marked Public in the catalogue, with no extra login in front of it: the phone app has to reach the same port the browser does, and so do the people you send shared-album links to. If you only back up at home, you can make it private instead, and use the VPN when you're out.

Adding people#

Each person should have their own account, so their photos stay theirs. Create accounts in Immich itself, from its administration pages, signed in as the admin. Other people's passwords are also reset there.

The Tools tab has two tools. Reset Admin Password sets a new password for the admin account (leave it empty to generate one), updates the Login Details and signs the admin out everywhere. List Users shows every account and whether it's an admin.

Smart search and faces#

Immich can look at what's in your photos: find "dog on a beach", group the same person across years of pictures, spot duplicates and read text in images. This runs in a separate part of Immich that needs a lot more memory, so it's off in a new install. Without it, photos still back up, play and group by date and place, and you can search by file name, date, place and camera.

To switch it on, tick Smart Search & Faces on the Config tab and press Update Configuration. The first time it runs, it downloads about 0.8 GB of models from Hugging Face. Photos you already have aren't looked at by themselves: in Immich's administration pages, open the job queues and run Smart Search and Face Detection for all photos. Turning it off again removes that part and frees the memory.

Good to know#

• Memory. Immich uses about 0.8 GB after a fresh start and around 1.3 GB once it's been working on uploads, database included. Smart search and faces adds about 0.2 GB when idle and about 1.3 GB more while it works.
• The library grows, and so do backups. Immich keeps your originals and makes thumbnails and smaller videos from them, all in the library folder in its app folder. LibrePortal backs up the whole library with the database, so check your backup location has room; after the first backup, only new photos add much. The downloaded models aren't backed up, because they can be fetched again. Immich also keeps nightly copies of its own database inside the library. If the library outgrows its disk, move it to a bigger one.
• Keep a backup. Immich is where your photos live once they leave the phone, so make sure LibrePortal's backups are going somewhere other than the server itself.
• Updates wait for you. Immich releases often, every release changes its database the first time it starts, and its release notes sometimes ask for a step first. So LibrePortal starts Immich on Manual and pins it to an exact version: pressing Update brings fresh builds of that version, and nothing jumps to a new release on its own. When a newer release appears on the Updates tab, Upgrade moves Immich up one version at a time, taking a backup and checking it at every step, so you do it when you've read the release notes. If you'd rather it climbed on its own, set it to Automatic and it steps up one verified version a day. A backup is taken first, as always. See Updates. The phone app updates from its app store, and it works best when the server isn't far behind it.
• It contacts no one else by default. The new-version check and the map are switched off at install, because the map's pictures come from Immich's own tile server, which would learn roughly where your photos were taken. Place names like "Paris, France" are worked out on your server. You can turn either back on in Immich's own settings. The only outside contact left is the one-off model download, and only if you switch on smart search.
• One per server. Immich can't run as several copies side by side.