Other than viewing the photos taken on my Android phone, I've never used Google Photos for cloud storage/backup of my photos. Generally, I've never been comfortable hosting my private documents/photos etc. in a cloud that is controlled by proprietary profit-focused companies (email being the only exception).

However, one thing that Google Photos does really well is presenting your photos in a very nice way. Since the dawn of digital cameras, I've always manually managed the organisation and storage of our photos and videos. We have them stored on our NAS in a year folder, then a month/event folder.

I've never liked the idea of ceding the organisation of my photos (or any data, really) to a program/app, because they all come and go. Remember Picasa?

But because all the photos are just stored on our NAS in regular folders, accessing and presenting them has always been a big pain. I felt as though they were just there; not being seen or remembered. I've done things like using an Android tablet as a photo frame, but seeing the photos (and videos!) in a consistent and clean way on computers, phones, or on our TV(whilst retaining control of the files) had proven elusive.

That's where Immich comes in. It's an open source, fully self-hosted photo and video management platform. It's pretty much a self-hosted Google Photos. Setting it up is not for the faint-hearted, as it requires Docker and a fair bit of IT knowledge to get going, but it's a great solution.

It does things like indexing, using metadata, doing machine learning on faces, and has nice 'X years ago today' features. It has no problem displaying photos and videos (of many different codecs) from all the way back to our first digital camera in 2002. Look at that glorious hair! 😊

I've added our photos folder as an 'external library' that Immich regularly scans, and I'm happy with that at the moment.

I still don't let it add and organise my photos. I'm not quite at that level of trust yet, plus I like to do things like weed out the low quality stuff, so things like 100 burst photos of the floor taken by the kids won't end up in there. So I'm still manually creating folders and organising the files.

It's not perfect, though. I would like to be able to edit photos via Immich (especially for fixing date-taken metadata), but Immich doesn't ever modify the photos files; it instead saves the changes to separate metadata files, called XMP sidecars.

I understand the decision to not modify the source files, but I wish there was an option to do that. Modifying things date-taken metadata for photos is something I want the original file to have itself. So, at the moment I need to do that manually using another program.

Nevertheless, I'm very happy with it. Going back through the on-this-day photos has become a nightly ritual for me and Des, and it's fantastic to see all the things we've done over the years.