Oh man. Of all the self-hosted projects to not grasp, you picked the darling.

The creator of Immich had the same use case that got me in to self hosting:

1. A new family with child.
2. A whole lot of photos and video to share between the spouse and with extended family.
3. Ballooning Google (One) photos costs, to which I asked: am I going to pay this forever? Storage also caps out at 2 tb, which we are using more than.
4. A growing discontent with the idea of every family moment being harvested by a tech company I do not like.

At the core - Immich allows me a continuity of service and saves money while keeping spousal approval at the required levels.

For example, Immich. Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device

And you don’t share your photos with family, friends, or the public? Or is your sharing solution to spam people with MMS text messages?

Obviously, some features like AI image tagging are missing, but you get the point

No, I don’t. If Immich provides a feature your phone doesn’t, then it’s not a good example of something that doesn’t need to be self-hosted.

But let’s talk about this.

I change phones every few years (as infrequently as I can, but until Framework starts making cell phones my options are limited). I’ve had cell phones break. I haven’t yet lost one, but I can imagine it happening. Keeping all of my eggs in one easily broken, easily lost device over which I have increasingly less control sounds really stupid. But we can back the phone data, and that doesn’t require self-hosting, as you say.

So when does self-hosting make sense? For me, it comes down two cases: (1) data sharing, and (2) multi-device use. The first one accounts for maybe 80% of my self-hosting. I really hate cell phones as computing devices. I hate typing on them, their absurdly small screens, and limited app selections. So my other case for self-hosting is so I can do most of my work on a desktop or laptop, yet still have access on a phone when I need to. Oftentimes, there’s no mobile app for the data I want to access, or there is but app developers are using some stupid bespoke data format that nobody rose uses; so be self-hosting, I can get at and interact with that information from not only my mobile device, but from any device. I can borrow my wife’s laptop if I didn’t being mine; I can borrow my BIL’s desktop when we’re visiting them. I’m not forced to use a tiny screen and crappy hunt-and-peck on screen keyboard on my phone.

I’m interested in other examples you have; it sounds as if many self-host solutions perplex you, beyond Immich - what are they? I’m honestly curious. We know Immich adds value (for some people) through AI tagging, and that alone justifies self-hosting Immich for those people. What other software do you think it’s silly to self-host?

Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device. Aves combined with some automatic backup solution such as Nextcloud gets (from what I can tell) most of the functionality Immich offers.

How would you backup Immich on device?

And if you backup to Nextcloud than you already have a served?

So you are arguing that having a file server is enough? And processing is done on client side?

That would be in this case very inefficient.

1. You would need to have all the data on the Client or transfer all the data to the client once you load it.
2. You device has to do all the processing which would lead to lower battery life.
3. How do you handle multiple Users? Giving partially access to the Filesystem?

I could come up with other points but this should give you an idea. Yes, for some use cases a server-client approach does not make sense but for a dedicated photo backup and indexer it absolutely does.

I have 113k images going back two decades. The screenshot above doesn’t include RAW files, with those included I’m around 2 terabytes of total storage.

• Immich is in fact a photo album, and a damn good one at that.
• Immich keeps google’s grubby paws off my photos. I don’t need or want anyone datamining every precious memory I have in order to modify my behavior to their benefit.
• Immich shares photos between my wife and my phones.
• Immich ensures that if I lose my phone, my photos aren’t lost.
• Immich lets me easily re edit and re-export RAW files without creating duplicates or losing metadata
• Immich lets me conveniently share photos with friends and family without requiring them to have an account anywhere.

Mostly I self-host things when I want data synchronized between multiple devices, or I don’t want to lose it in the event I lose the device it was created on.

Also, like, phone screens are tiny and typing on them is terrible? Why would you want to do everything on your phone?

I think collaboration is another thing that’s missing in your answer. Of course synchronization would be one main thing for me to use a photo gallery or note taking app across devices, since I’m often accessing stuff from my phone and my laptop. But I also like to share photos with my relatives and friends, I have shared calendars with my wife to organize our lives. I collaborate on projects and collaborative edit text documents. And sometimes I keep notes and small snippets on technical details mainly for myself, but also share that with the internet, for other people to learn how to install some software or customize it to a niche use-case. And while some of that could be done by separate applications as well, I often use one generic self-hosted platform and have that do everything, disregarding if some of the job doesn’t really need the features. It’s a balance. I’m also sometimes wasting resources and in the end I realize I never needed a self-hosted solution and I would have been better off with a simple and local phone app.

A reason I self-host stuff is privacy. When I host my data it’s my data. It’s not owned and kept by a billion dollar company somewhere, that is willing to sell it to make a quick buck.

So it’s my way of making sure that my data really is my data and that it is only shared with those I want to share it with. Some applications require a server component to achive this (eg Immich), so that’s why I self-host those.

What you have missed is the ability to run what ever you need, self hosting is more then just backups and sync.

Some self hosting to self reliant, nextcloud can do way more then just file sync. For example I use it for calendar and contact sync, photo and file backup from my phone, an office suit, RSS server.

Lots of people mentioning collaboration / multiple users, yet all your replies seem to completely ignore this aspect. I’m guessing you might live alone and are struggling to imagine some very common use cases here.

I think selfhost is more useful in a multi-user scenario, for my personal needs I also love Syncthing.

The appeal for me to use immich is the AI search.

I have over 100,000 photos I have taken. I can do a search of “blue sky with pink clouds and a moon” and it will show me the photo I want.

The way I did it before would take me 2-3 days of looking at every photo one by one to find that photo.

The other benefit of the server is I can access all these apps from my laptop, phone, desktop, or using my VPN from anywhere in the world.

Appreciate this post OP, as I’ve wondered similar at times when not wanting to fuss with another machine for self-hosting (as often it’s not the case that I could run the server software on my main system).

To me, the appeal is that my workflow depends less on my computer and more on my ability to connect to a server that handles everything for me. Workstation, laptop or phone? Doesn’t matter, just connect to the right IPs and get working. Linux is, of course, the holy grail of interoperability, and I’m all Linux. With a little bit of set up, I can make a lot of things talk to each other seamlessly. SMB on Windows is a nightmare but on Linux if I set up SSH keys then I can just open a file manager and type sftp://<hostname> and now I’m browsing that machine as if it was a local folder. I can do a lot of work from my genuinely-trash laptop because it’s the server that’s doing the heavy lifting

TL;DR -

My workflow becomes “client agnostic” and I value that a lot

In immich I can open the world map and select photos i took in Hungary and Colorado without having to manually tag and manually locate them, and I have thousands of photos (hundreds of gigs of videos backed up from my phone as well) from the last 25 years taken across the world and can do this seamlessly by simply uploading them and having my server run a heuristic to automatically do this from the photograph metadata, and then proceed to share them with a self-hosted link to my spouse to enjoy.

Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?

Why would you need a home server in addition to your day to day desktop computer? I leave my desktop on at all times because it’s a Plex/ErsatzTV server, HomeAssistant server, web server for various utilities I’ve written, etc. It works great.

@Charger8232@lemmy.ml I run my own server for a simple reason: it means owning my social media presence.

I own my content, my audience, and who I federate with.