Immich sounds so awesome I plan to start using it soon.
Reminds me that now that all my data is processed (in particular the heavy ML part) I should move the resulting container data to my (much less powerful but always on) NAS.
Been hosting on my Synology NAS for a while now. This is app kicks hard. I love it.
Still requires docker?
Not on NixOS!
services.immich.enable = true;Yeah. I’m also waiting for a native Ubuntu package, I don’t want to deal with Docker.
If you’re using Arch, the AUR package works well
I’m fully aware of the joy of containers, but I just don’t want all that extra faff
Extra faff?
The additional software required to run it in a container plus its configuration, on top of Immich’s configuration.
Just install & configure Immich, done.
Thats… Just… Docker compose… You copy, paste, docker-compose up and you’re done…
I’m planning to do it with podman. It’s supposed to be quite easy to convert between the two.
Can confirm, works without problems in rootless podman.
Can you give me some pointers? I’m still new to docker and podman; hoping to get this going without too much learning curve to start with!
Sure, I set it up in nixos though this is the short form of that:
spoiler
- Install Podman and passt + slirp4netns for networking
- Setup subuid and subgid
usermod --add-subuids 100000-165535 --add-subgids 100000-165535 johndoe - I’m using quadlet’s so we need to create those: $HOME/.config/containers/systemd/immich-database.container
[Unit] Description=Immich Database Requires=immich-redis.service immich-network.service [Container] AutoUpdate=registry EnvironmentFile=${immich-config} # add your environment variables file here Image=registry.hub.docker.com/tensorchord/pgvecto-rs:pg14-v0.2.0@sha256:90724186f0a3517cf6914295b5ab410db9ce23190a2d9d0b9dd6463e3fa298f0 # hash from the official docker-compose, has to be updated from time to time Label=registry Pull=newer # update to newest image, though this image is specified by hash and will never update to another version unless the hash is changed Network=immich.network # attach to the podman network UserNS=keep-id:uid=999,gid=999 # This makes uid 999 and gid 999 map to the user running the service, this is so that you can access the files in the volume without any special handling otherwise root would map to your uid and the uid 999 would map to some very high uid that you can't access without podman - This modifies the image at runtime and may make the systemd service timeout, maybe increase the timeout on low-powered machines Volume=/srv/services/immich/database:/var/lib/postgresql/data # Database persistance Volume=/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro # timezone info Exec=postgres -c shared_preload_libraries=vectors.so -c 'search_path="$user", public, vectors' -c logging_collector=on -c max_wal_size=2GB -c shared_buffers=512MB -c wal_compression=on # also part of official docker-compose.....last time i checked anyways [Service] Restart=always$HOME/.config/containers/systemd/immich-ml.container
[Unit] Description=Immich Machine Learning Requires=immich-redis.service immich-database.service immich-network.service [Container] AutoUpdate=registry EnvironmentFile=${immich-config} #same config as above Image=ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:release Label=registry Pull=newer # auto update on startup Network=immich.network Volume=/srv/services/immich/ml-cache:/cache # machine learning cache Volume=/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro [Service] Restart=always$HOME/.config/containers/systemd/immich.network
[Unit] Description=Immich network [Network] DNS=8.8.8.8 Label=app=immich $HOME/.config/containers/systemd/immich-redis.container [Unit] Description=Immich Redis Requires=immich-network.service [Container] AutoUpdate=registry Image=registry.hub.docker.com/library/redis:6.2-alpine@sha256:eaba718fecd1196d88533de7ba49bf903ad33664a92debb24660a922ecd9cac8 # should probably change this to valkey.... Label=registry Pull=newer # auto update on startup Network=immich.network Timezone=Europe/Berlin [Service] Restart=always$HOME/.config/containers/systemd/immich-server.container
[Unit] Description=Immich Server Requires=immich-redis.service immich-database.service immich-network.service immich-ml.service [Container] AutoUpdate=registry EnvironmentFile=${immich-config} #same config as above Image=ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:release Label=registry Pull=newer # auto update on startup Network=immich.network PublishPort=127.0.0.1:2283:2283 Volume=/srv/services/immich/upload:/usr/src/app/upload # i think you can put images here to import, though i never used it Volume=/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro # timezone info Volume=/srv/services/immich/library:/imageLibrary # here the images are stored once imported [Service] Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target- systemctl --user daemon-reload
- systemctl --user enable --now immich-server.service
- enable linger so systemd user services run even if the user is logged of
loginctl enable-linger $USER - Setup a reverse proxy like caddy so you can make access to it simple like immich.mini-pc.localnet
Docker to rootful podman is easy. Docker to rootless podman can get annoying due to the file permissions and slightly more limited networking
Is it easy to self-host immich so that it operates on a READ-ONLY basis with my images? I really only want to use it for the local-AI indexing/search, but not as a backup or photo management solution (Synology Photos works just fine for that).
You can also try out photoprism for that. Immich is best for an all-in-one solution as a replacement for google photos.
Photoprism also has face recognition, maps, and many more features geared towards photography than immich.
I realized after using photoprism that I am too basic for that haha
I think you can use Immich external libraries for this, also to be extra safe you can just mount your external images folder as read only by adding
:roto the docker volume mount so that the container won’t be able to modify anything as a precaution.also to be extra safe you can just mount your external images folder as read only by adding :ro to the docker volume mount so that the container won’t be able to modify anything as a precaution.
This is what I was thinking, too.
Alright, looks like I’ll be setting it up soon! LOL
Yes, pretty easy - that’s exactly how I use it
