Immich

The app looks beautiful! The main feature seems to be hit or miss. Some photos videos upload while others do nothing when I click the upload button. Totally worth 5 stars if that feature would just work. I understand it takes time to develop this to work well for everyone. Thank you devs for what you have done so far. Look forward to future updates. Update: I believe the issue I described only happens with photos/videos that are part of a family shared folder. It would be nice if there was at least some helpful errors or maybe a disclaimer. Also the icon on the photos I already uploaded for backup seems to always show us not backed up.

The primary purpose of a backup is to restore data from it. However, in practice, Immich is horrible at restoring photos to your phone. Consider this scenario: you purchase a new iPhone and use your own Immich server to back up your old iPhone’s photos. You want some of those photos on your new iPhone, so you open the Immich app, connect it to your new phone, and press the download button on a few photos to create a wallpaper on your new iPhone. Surprisingly, the app is coded so poorly that it doesn’t exclude the photos you restored or downloaded from Immich to your new phone. As a result, you end up with duplicates on the Immich server when the auto-backup begins from your new iPhone. It only excludes those photos once it backs them up again. I conducted some research and discovered that someone had submitted a feature request on the Immich GitHub to “Prevent re-upload of downloaded photos during app backup task.” The maintainer, bo0tzz, responded to them by suggesting that you should exclude the download album from your backup selection. However, this solution is invalid. Once you exclude the download album, you won’t be able to backup any photos saved from Safari or any other app. The app is stupidly designed to only exclude photos it backs up rather than also excluding the restored photos you download from it.

Gets better every update. I’m hosting with UnRAID and using iPhones. My wife and I can back up and share photos easily and automatically without paying a subscription fee or storing our data on other people’s servers. Update: I’ve been using this since September 2023, and it’s better than ever now! I have limited storage on my iPhone, so about once a week I select the current month and hit upload to make sure it’s been uploaded, then select and hit remove from device. I’ve never felt so free to actually record videos of my kids without being worried storage space!