June 27th, 2025

Immich: 6 Months Later.

TL;DR: It works. Highly recommend.

Immich: My 6 Month Review:

Around December of last year or so, I installed Immich on my NAS, the infamous HP Pavilion p6653w, and its amazingly slow Athlon II X2 250 and 5GB of RAM. I installed Immich because I was tired of having to plug my phone in, copy the photos off, and wait the half-a-decade for them to be moved to my desktop, and then make a duplicate of those copies on the NAS to have the backups in two places.

Installing Immich was a bit complicated (see my other post, linked HERE), but ended up being very well worth it. I was finally able to back up my photos without all of those pesky steps. All I had to do was open the Immich app on my phone, leave it plugged in, and it’d back up overnight.

Besides installing Immich to back up photos from my phone straight to the NAS, I also wanted a easier way to organize my photos. Immich has some very useful tools for doing so, and they’ve been quite handy to me.

The “people” option that can use facial recognition to find photos with a specific person has been useful. I can look for photos of just about anyone I’ve taken a photo of and it usually can find the photo. It does seem to have issues picking up some people, but going through and telling it who is in what photo usually helps quite a bit.

Duplicate detection has also been on the handy side. Instead of using the delete function it has, I ended up using it to find the duplicate folders that I have, delete the folder of duplicates, and then keep using it to root out folders of duplicates. I do wish there was a way to blacklist certain formats from it, as it constantly has a bad habit of picking up the RAW files I have and slating them for deletion. The only good thing about it doing that is that it usually gives me the option to “stack” them with the non-RAW version, making my photo albums just a bit cleaner.

Smart search usually works fairly well. The first two scrolls of results or so will usually be close to what you’re looking for. The more you scroll, the worse the results get. I haven’t changed much of the machine learning settings on mine, but I’m satisfied with the way it works.

Tags are one of the best functionalities of Immich. Yes, other apps have tags for photos too. But pair that with the search functionalities of Immich and it’s very nice. I can set it to look for photos, for instance, from “San Antonio Trip 2025” and look for photos of a lake taken with my DMC-G7. Usually it can find them, even though in that instance I probably wouldn’t use Smart Search since I know those photos are all easy to find thanks to that tag.

What was really useful with the tags as well besides the smart search was using the “file name” option, setting it to only look for .jpg files, and only from a specific camera from the “San Antonio Trip 2025” tag. It saved me a lot of time sorting through the RAW photos while writing my San Antonio blog post series. Immich’s search function used to cause lag when loading in the thousand or so photos while I was scrolling to the bottom to get the result I wanted, but since then a newer, better version of Immich has been released and functions much better due to not lagging as bad.

Immich’s user interface is also very easy to use. I had no issues figuring it out, and it’s only gotten better. On the web version, especially on a normal computer, it’s fast, snappy, responsive, very easy to use (I said that already, didn’t I?) and does everything.

The app is a different story. It works ok for doing the backups, but is not great in other areas. The video player has been buggy on my end, with it being unresponsive to my touches. The auto-backup in the background function does not work either, at least on my phone. I’ve tried all the steps to get it working. And it’s missing functionality that would be nice, such as browsing using tags.

And in terms of things I’ve changed since I set it up, I haven’t changed much on it. Stuff from my phone gets backed up straight from the app, and things from my camera and the such get copied to an external library on the NAS. I’ve also set Immich to transcode video down to 480p, as that way I can reduce the amount of power needed to play back the video, and if I want to watch the full quality one I can simply download it. I also set Immich to make the preview photos 1440p, and that does improve the thing’s ability to run its machine learning on them, as well as making the previews look presentable.

All in all, I’ve been very happy with my Immich server. I highly recommend it. You will need some technical know-how, but if you can follow instructions you can probably manage to set it up. The only time I ever had to dig back into a terminal to configure something after setting up Immich was a couple months ago with version 1.133, which changed some stuff and required some lines in a file to be changed.

In Other News.

In better news, we did get quite a nice storm a couple days ago, albeit at 4:40 AM. It was a downpour, with lots of rain, thunder, and lightning. There was even a blue light left behind after the lightning hit something very close to us. It was nice to have the colder weather for a bit. It did rain yesterday (Thursday) night, getting to around 80F outside today.

The chickens have been fine as well. The heat is hard for them, but they have swamp coolers and nice shady places to go. Thanks to the desert climate, a swamp cooler does actually function due to the low humidity. However, if it’s raining a lot, they don’t function nearly that well thanks to the humidity.

Felicitas taking a dust bath.

Naughty chicken. Notice the fact she is looking away, as if denying she was eating plants.