It’s interesting that my use of Immich has evolved with my adoption of Gemini. I know that the cool thing would be to vibe code an Immich clone, and then show off about it to the world. I don’t want to do that. I don’t find it interesting to re-invent the wheel. I think it’s more interesting to get a model such as Gemini to help me make Immich stable on a Pi 5.
If I was up to mischief I would say that some people, especially Apple users, suffer from clouded judgement. Of course I mean this as a pun. If you use Android devices, or Windows machines, or Linux, you can purchase a microSD card and within seconds have one or even two terabytes of extra storage. With such a vast amount of storage you can keep decades of photos and videos with greater freedom.
When I migrated my Photoprism library from an HP Laptop to a Pi5 I found that there was a nine thousand photo hole in the total photo count. It’s when I looked closer that I found that the gap between expected photos and actual photos is down to Photoprism and the Pi5 not playing nicely when it comes to HEIC files.
I decided to experiment with Claude AI as it is flavour of the month and the first advice it gave was “force reindex the entire library”.
Due to the Raspberry Pi 5, and older, having issues with heat throttling and more it makes sense to build a Photoprism on a “normal” laptop before migrating towards the Pi. The process is an interesting one.
Photo Consolidation The First step is to consolidate your photos from Google Photos, Apple Photos, Flick and any other source you might have. The simplest method is to organise them chronologically, and then to spend time removing as many duplicates as possible.
Immich is an easy to install and use app that works well with the Pi5. By default you will have it run on the SD card but yesterday I finally found an NVMe drive at a reasonable price so I swapped the AI kit for a 521 NVMe drive.It was detected with ease so I formatted the hard drive. I then used GRsync to move the photos from the SD card to the NVMe drive.
Yesterday I started moving from a Pi5 8gb to a Pi5 4gb to self-host Audiobookshelf, Photoprism and Immich. I want to move from Ubuntu Desktop to ubuntu server to lower the head room required. When I checked I was using 3.9gb out of 8gb of ram. On the Pi5 4gb running the various services I was using 1gb of ram, but that’s without photos, videos and various audio files.
Learning Outcome The desired learning outcome from this experiment is to migrate the services from one machine to another.
For those that are wondering whether you can use a Raspberry Pi 5 with four gigabytes of RAM as a desktop replacement the answer is “not really”. I know I should have said this at the end but I prefer to tell people immediately.
The OS For this experiment I am running Raspberry Pi OS, the version released: 2024-03-15. I have no doubt that Raspberry Pi OS Lite and Ubuntu Server would be fine.
Yesterday afternoon as I set off for my walk I noticed that the Pi AI Kit was in my post box. I moved it to the locked compartment and then went for my walk. After the walk I took the time to set it up and it went well.
Easy Assembly If you’ve got your own kit but haven’t assembled it first, the long screws are there so that you can fix the Raspberry Pi and AI kit within the default Pi case.
There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.