Immich Review

Immich is a photo and management system that you can self host for free and is available for many systems. I personally installed it on my low powered storage NAS that uses Truenas community edition, and whilst it is a fairly low powered system it does have 12tb of storage in a ZFS pool so is perfect to store media with. Immich does several nifty features like face recognition, automatic background backups from mobiles using the app – which works pretty well but is dependant on your network speed. You can organise via albums, via a map and even share albums with people which can be password protected. However the shared album(s) the images are not protected in any way so if you are thinking of commercial use, you may need to rethink things somehow. Pretty much everything works well, it can be slow as self hosted is dependant on your own hardware and quite often NAS boxes are low power as they are on 100% of the time, but I was pleased with the general performance. I have had it hang a few times with cpu at 100% but a restart of the container has fixed that. My only complaint is that it is evolving rapidly and has updates often, but there is little difference between the versions right now. As it is self hosted it can be a bit time consuming to update and you get a nice reminder that you are running an outdated version when you log in! This however does not stop me from recommending Immich as the best media management tool I have self hosted so far. This could be your best bet, check it out!

https://immich.app

Immich

7.8 out of 10

Immich is a self-hosted image and video management solution. Not perfect but still seems the best I have seen to self host and manage your photos. Sharing wise there are plenty of better options, but this has been the case for a while now.

Stability

8.1 out of 10

I have had it hang a few times, though a restart (of the container) has fixed that

Ease of Use

7.9 out of 10

Not hard to use, but is dependant on your hardware used to self host. Mine runs on a NAS and it can be sluggish

Look & Feel

8.3 out of 10

Looks alright though the sharing options for you to share things with others are basic, and the media is not protected in anyway

Price

7 out of 10

Self hosted is obviously free but the options to support the development are basic with just 2 tiers at $25 and $100 and they don't actually gain you much!

Pros

Easy to use and self host

Good price and options from FREE

Good features works pretty well

Cons

Updated often and as a self hosted solution this does add time

Can take a while to sync, though that is down to larger media sizes really

Sharing options are quite poor

Check out Immich

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