Immich is amazing
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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They already released 3.3.1
As is tradition.
"It is a great day for Canada, and therefore the rest of the world!" 🗣️
Finally people can be shared, me and my wife have obviously the same people in our pictures but we have to seperatelly tag them, etc.
I would love to not only share the people metadata but also all pictures where they are tagged.
Usecases: the grandparents always ask for pictures of their grandchildren. I do not want todo partner sharing with them, but I would be fine to automatically share all pictures that include their face. Bonus: only share pictures where a combination of people are tagged (e.g. grandparents+grandchildren)
This will be possible when they add a workflow trigger "person detected", that could be used to move assets with specific persons into a shared album
How is everyone backing up Immich off site without breaking the bank? I have ~4tb of photos and videos going back years.
Put a server at a friends house? I also saw a selfhosted storage sharing build the other day, allowed other users to access defined storages on your server.
What would my friend need to do at their end?
You could set them up to run a Restic server for you and then do backups with that. Restic is fully encrypted, does differential backups, and can do configurable pruning. With 4 TB the initial run will take long, even locally, but it can also resume, so should work.
Thanks!
I run an rclone script to S3 glacier every 2 weeks and obviously restoring from that will be intensive but if I need it there will be worse things going on. Costs only $2 a month for 1.5T
Immich has so many dirs and files that it will take hour/hours for any file-based program to walk that tree (on an HDD) in order to do a backup. I used to use rsync, syncthing, duplicity and had gotten it to about under an hour for 1TB library. The service has to be shutdown to preserve consistency of the backup. So that downtime was okay once per day. Still a heavy operation. Not great, not terrible.
Because of the above you might want to do one of the following:
- Use snapshotting filesystem like ZFS or Btrfs. That allows to avoid the downtime as you can backup a frozen-in-time snapshot while Immich is running.
- The above but with ZFS om both the Immich end and the backup end. That allows transferring just the delta between the new Immich snapshot and the last snapshot the backup has. This happens entirely within the filesystem so there are no file operations needed. At every point in time ZFS knows what blocks have changed between now and the previously backed up snapshot. When you ask it for that, it starts spitting data without spensing an hour figuring out what changed. That allows online backups every hour or even more frequently. The backup of my 1TB Immich instance (HDD) takes 5-10 seconds to initiate the network transfer, then it takes whatever time it takes to get to the backup machine, which is usually equivalent to transferring whatever new was stored in Immich.
So depending on how painful migrations are for you, I'd highly recommend the latter. Otherwise the former. The ZFS snapshot send strategy works for any service you may run.
Immich uses user/YYYY/MM folders on my setup, and I exclude any thumbnail directories from the backup too. So not many dirs/files to check for the backup software and it's very quick.
You don't need to shut it down, pg_dump works fine while it's like if you want to make sure it's a good database backup. The files side of things are fine either way.
Immich uses
user/YYYY/MMfolders on my setup, and I exclude any thumbnail directories from the backup too. So not many dirs/files to check for the backup software and it's very quick.
That makes sense. I copy the whole set of data dirs so I can trivially start it after restore or start it elsewhere without extra steps. Also because this strategy works with all services so I don't have to consider how to backup/restore each one. Makes adding new services less work.
pgdump with live file copy while the service is in active use can result in files the db doesn't know about, or files it thinks are there that were actuall deleted. Probably can be fixed after the fact.
More generally, as a someone who's done software for a very long time, I've learned that the further away I go from the happy path of a software program, the less tested it is, the more bugs there are and the poorer the edge case handling is. It's inherent to software development with limited labour. So for backups I lean on the process kill/recovery edge case that they all must handle. Snapshot + backup from that snapshot looks like a process death to the service upon restore.
That's fair, shutdown service + backup everything is certainly more guaranteed to work properly.
With Immich I'm not too worried about the DB potentially being off since it can rescan the filesystem, but I also backup at 3am when nothing is happening on Immich because I'm asleep!
If you do it at 3AM anyway... may as well eliminate the need to even think about mismatches. 😁 I think mine also used to do it at 3AM before I switched to ZFS snapshots + send/recv.
Hertzner storage box. I think it's €13/month for 5tb. Just storage with ssh interface. I use restic but most backup systems should work with it.
That's a lot of money, isn't it? Just buy a 4Tb HDD, backup and store somewhere offsite. Will pay of in a year.
some of us don't have friends, or at least none reliable enough to trust with an offsite backup machine 😂
If you have someone far enough away, with fast/reliable internet, and a safe spot to put it.
I have a literal HDD in a pelican case.
I plug it into my NAS periodically, clone over to it, scrub for bit rot, put it back in the case and drop it at my BILs.
Plenty good enough.
I have an HDD at my parents place and manually bring over snapshots when I visit. Off site does not necessarily mean cloud.
Kopia to Google cloud. Kopia can tag the data files so they end in the 'archive' tier, which is 1$/TBmonth. Recovery is like, 100$/TB, but if I ever need it that's fine.
Two old N40Ls acting as NASs replicating onsite, a third micro server at a friends tunneling back to get replicated on, and a external hard disk to get periodic offline replication
4tb it pretty high. I back up my files to backblaze, HDDs on site, and a cold copy on HDDs off-site.
I have a storage box with hostbrr for my ~800GB of files. They have deals sometimes with 4TB boxes for like $9 a month or so. Hetzner storage boxes are also sometimes on sale.
The one feature I’m still waiting for is manual ordering in albums. Sometimes the ‘date taken’ just doesn’t tell the story right.
Memories is a great feature, this would be a deal breaker for my partner.
I'm excited for memories as well, but I'm not sure you're using the phrase deal breaker correctly here haha.
The lack of memories would be a deal breaker for them to use immich. They love getting weekly generated clips of what was done this time last year or ten years ago
The regular memories feature has already existed for a while. This update just releases birthday memories as an upgrade.
I've really appreciated them, its a really cool way to see photos you may not otherwise look at.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
[Thread #124 for this comm, first seen 10th Oct 2026, 08:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
External hdd with manual backups, otherwise left at friends house.
@new_otters_raft What I miss, is a way to share an Album as webdav.
This would help in several ways.