After all the amazing reviews and post i read immich I decided to give it a try.
To be honest I am quite impressed, it's fast and polished, it just works.
But I found a few quirks, and hit a wall with the developer that doesn't seems kind to listen to users that much (on these issues at least!)
Maybe you guys have suggestions?
Here I go:
One: it does not support base URLs, witch means that I had to spin a dedicated sub domain to be able to access it over internet while all my other services are on a single sub domain. I can work with that, but why. Dev already shut this request down in the past as "insecure". Which I find baffling. (I mean use mydomain/immich instead of immich.mydomain)
Two: auth cannot be tied to reverse proxy. I get it, it provides OAuth. But it's much more complex than proxy based auth... And overkill for many cases, mine for sure.
Three: impossible to disable authentication at all, which would just work fine in my use case. There is a switch that seems for that, but no, it's only for using OAuth.
Four: I cannot find a way to browse by location, only by map. (Locations list seems to be half baked unless I am missing something).
Five: no way to deploy on bare metal, and I tried! due to lack of documentation (only info I found where very very outdated), and no willingness to provide info about that either. Seems that docker is so much better that supporting bare metal is a waste of time.
Six: basically impossible to manage easily public albums. like a public landing page. I get this might be outside immich scope.
Seven: even if now you can import existing libraries, it still does not detect albums withinbthem (sub folders) which is very annoying.
So, overall its a great project and very promising, faster and more reliable than Libre Photos in my use case, but still lacking some basic features that the Dev seems not interested in adding. He developed it to please his wife, I get it :) - no pun intended, doing all this take lots of time, I know.
These are the alternatives I know of:
Photo prism requires a subscription for reverse Geo coding.
LibrePhotos feels sluggish and kind if abandoned.
Are there any others? (Piwigo and Lytchee are great tools, but different kind of tools)
Let's hope for immich, Dev is working a lit, let's hope for the best.
Yes I mean https://mydomain/immich, like all other self-hosted tools do.
Auth just with name, please why email??? And maybe get that name from already performed proxy auth, not many tools does, but some do. Its a neat feature.
But immich requires an EMAIL and will also enforce it, so you cannot fool it with a plain username. I just want consistency with the rest of the world.
Docker is enough? Maybe, but bare metal should always be an option. Always. Just write down some basic steps or publish the build script already in place for releases.
And for albums I mean that it should recognize that external libraries have already albums in the form of subfolders.
I will open tickets and feature requests of course, this post is here to share my findings and your aggressive reply is out of place.
By the way, I am talking with strangers on the internet and the objective is to help solve those issues.
I'll keep your feedback in mind, thanks for that.
Why are you after bins? Maybe they dev in a container to start with. As you say, you can pull them out if you need...
Yes I can pull them out but upgrading would be a mess overtime.
If they released also binaries, I can write my install/upgrade scripts and voila, bare metal easy.
I already do this for a few tools not available trough gentoo package manager
So you want binaries for the soul purpose of wanting to write an install script for them?
I was looking more for a functional or performance reason incase it was something I was not aware of.
In those cases I would have used the sources which are available...
Not having a binary release (docker doesn't count for practical reasons for my goal) hinders bare metal installation as the biggest limiting factor is building the sources, or better having the proper instructions to build them properly.
You still have not said why you want it on bare metal?!!!
While Docker is a great tool with lots of reasons to use it, why should it MUST be the only solution? Installing on bare-metal gives me more control of what and how i install and i fond it more fun than typing "docker compose up". There are already tons of package managers (including npm, pip etc) that another one, one on which you have even less control (let's talk about all these images created so that everything runs as root?), is not really needed for me at least.
I want the possibility to go bare-metal, and i will go bare-metal every time i have the possibility. Yes Docker might seems more convenient, but do i need a reason NOT to use Docker, really? Are we at this point? This is "self-hosting" which means doing things the way we prefer, not following the herd or going with packaged solutions. And i have more fun with bare-metal than Docker. Is this enough?
Why are you so much against giving the optional opportunity to go bare-metal then, can you elaborate?
...
You could have just said you "find it more fun than docker compose up" about 5 comments ago.
Got it. Thanks 👍
I just don't think immich Devs will take that as an answer to do more work, if infact they already dev in a container.
But as "they" say.. "Not accepting Feature requests, but do accept Pull Requests"