Immich and Picasa – Past and Future

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Those of us that are geeky, and old enough, will remember when apps were local and we saved data to internal and external hard drives. We would take photos with a camera, or a phone, and once we got home we would download them to our computer, using apps like Picasa and iPhoto. Both apps would help us to organise them chronolgically, and eventually by location, people in photos and much more.

Eventually Picasa and iPhoto moved to the cloud, and more and more of our photos were managed for us. They were offloaded from our phones and our laptops, to live in the cloud, controlled by Apple and Google.

Over time, as Google Photos picked up steam, so Picasa lost users, until Google pulled the plug. After that we were stuck with iPhoto. The issue with iPhoto is that it required gigabytes of storage, and our laptops didn’t have that much space. Neither did our phones. Our content emigrated to the cloud. We lost control and access to our own media.

Eventually, many yearss later self-hosting came along via Immich, Photoprism and other solutions. Immich and Photoprism are the Picasa of the cloud age. By this I mean that in the age of mobile phones, and laptops, we have offloaded photo management from our laptops, and mobile phones to online services. For a while these online services were owned by others. With Immich, and Photoprism, if we ignore NextCloud and other solutions, we are once again self-hosting our photos and other media files. We are once again moving away from the cloud.

Over two years I have moved from Raspberry Pi 4 towards Raspberry Pi 5 8GB and then 16GB before moving back to 8GB. I also had an immich instance on my laptop but stopped when I filled up the laptop’s storage. It makes sense to store photos on a Pi.

Self-hosting a solution such as immich is similar to self-hosting via Synology or other solutions, but on a budget. It is also more involved, because it requires gaining an understanding of Linux, docker containers and more. It requires you to update apps when required, and if something goes wrong to debug.

It also requires you to learn how to backup that data, or migrate it from one storage medium to another. Over time you get better at it, and that’s when you can remove backup solutions such as Google Photos.

Monthly Fees and Shortage of Space

Lightroom, Google Photos, Photos, for Mac, and other apps all have the same issue. They store your photos in the cloud, and in many cases retrieval is slow and clumsy. In the case of iCloud you need a volume with as much space as the library occupies. Most laptop drives are too small, The second problem is retrieval time. When I tried to recover photos from iCloud I saw that it would take days, if not weeks.

With Google Photos, and Flickr, if you write a simple shell script you can download photos within an extended period of time, but several zip files at a time.

Lightroom and other apps are burdened with monthly fees, which means that you pay every month, whether you use it a lot, or a little. You also get trapped, and that is what I don’t like. If I want to shift from one solution to another I want it to be fast.

That’s why Immich is good. With Immich you store a local version at home, and you can backup to a cloud service. The day that one cloud service is cheaper than another you cancel Service A and move to Service B without worrying about retrieving the data, because the cloud version is just an offsite backup, not the primary. It’s because cloud solutions try to hold on to data, that I feel they should be a backup cloud solution rather than a primary cloud solution.

By self-hosting your primary cloud solution you have the data locally, and you can back that data up locally too. The cloud is just the offsite third copy.

And Finally

With the shift from Desktop apps to web apps, and from free solutions to paying solutions Picasa became Google Photos and Mac OS Photos relies on online storage rather than laptop storage, The result is that with web apps, self-hosting solutions replace locally installed laptop and desktop apps. In the multidevice era it makes sense for us to install apps on our own web servers, and to access them via Tailscale when away from home, and via the local network when at home.

Immich is designed for this, specifically. It allows you to say "use 192.168.1.2 when on home wifi and use immich when not on home wifi." It has automated the switch.

In essence, desktop apps are now self-hosted apps.