So like I said in my previous post, Immich was the catalyst of me going full speed on selfhosting. So I figured I would like to spread the news a bit more on what I have done now, what apps I’ve installed and how it all ties together, in the app level at least.
Immich – Google Photos replacement
Immich Server & Immich Mobile App
So immich is the one that gave me the shills, it’s by far, the best and only replacement I came across that would really rival with Google Photos. Something I’ve wanted for ages, nothing has come even close.
- Selfhosted app that makes thumbnails and other stuff for your photos?
- Albums and everything to keep your photos neatly organised?
- Android app that automatically upload new photos to your own immich server?
Even if they stopped developing, which they are not apparently, it’s still by far the best thing I’ve come across, and once I get my ducks in a row, I will gladly pay for a “server license” to support their endeavors.
But they do have some nice things, like machine learning to identify faces, geo location so you can view all photos taken in a specific spot in the world. Nifty features if you want them. But for me, the basic usage, browsing images was the big win!
One person has even written a Go-application that will make importing all your photos, yes, even the ones in Google Photos, really simple: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
You can push google archives, folder structures, anything you wish into this thing and it just takes it all. Yes, it took a few tries for me to get all my photos nicely imported. Since I’m anxious and don’t like to “test” things that much. But it was easy to just wipe out my docker instances, delete the database, and start a-fresh.
So now, instead of measly 15GB of storage, I have 2TB of storage, granted, it’s for my whole NAS, but it’s way more than I could have ever hope for.
So now I can start importing, managing and dissecting all my photos in Dropbox, all ~40000 of them. You can autocreate albums, and then start going over the albums, one-by-one. You can even rely on Immich to find duplicates and remove them. It does a pretty good job of it so why not.
In my mind, the best thing I’ve done, maybe even better than Home Assistant, this thing actually has worth behind it. A lot of it.
Memos – Google Keep replacement
Memos Server & Moememos Android App
So with self hosting going full speed ahead, I did have some difficulties before with Google Keep, it’s just so darn good at just simple note-taking. I’ve tried using Obsidian, but it’s too cumbersome to use on simple note taking, where you want to quickly just write stuff up.
In comes Memos and MoeMemos, which is not 100% replacement for Google Keep, the UI is not as nifty, but it is self hosted, everything is in your own server, and you can interact with it anyway you want.
You do need to maybe, rely on tags more than you need with Google Keep, but everything is way worth it when you can ditch another service from the grasp of Google.
Heimdall – Dashboard for profit
When you start going full on with selfhosting, you encounter the problem that you start to have so many apps, on different addresses, maybe on the same machine but with different ports, that keeping up with all of them might become a bit … tedious.
So I just installed Heimdall, and added quick-links to every single app I’ve installed. It does have some nice actual features in itself, like proper integration with services like home assistant etc.
But for me, I just wanted to build a list of all our apps we use. So that me and my spouse can easily find them. Then I just added my own dashboard as my default page in my browser.
Problems, because there is always problems
Now, I do want to mention, I’ve used hundreds of hours of my spare time to get everything running. It’s not always smooth, I’m breaking stuff here and there. Stuff tends to break themselves quite easily, for weird reasons. And stuff might work automatically the next morning, go figure.
So you do have to have patience, you do have to keep going in the face of danger, and you do have to keep backups. Something always happens.
Is it still worth it? For some people yes. Others, not.