I’ve maintained gallery.overt.org in one form or another for about twenty years as a way to self-host my photos. I wrote the initial version in Cold Fusion soon after I got my first digital camera around 2000.
For the last 10+ years, it’s run on Piwigo, a PHP clone of the now-defunct Menalto Gallery. These platforms are great, but they are definitely meant for showing of a curated subset of all the photos you take.
To manage the ongoing stream of photos our family takes, we’ve been using Google Photos for over ten years. It offers automatic backup of photos as you take them, easy group albums, and slick ML-based search–I don’t even know why I’m describing it as it is ubiquitous, probably the best new Google product to come along since GMail. But it does expose you to reliance on Google to store and organize your photos–something that the self-hoster in me has always chafed at. I’ve also been vaguely worried that I could lose my photos if I ever lost access to my Google account.
Along comes immich, an open-source clone of Google Photos you can host yourself. It has all the key features of Google Photos without its basic problem of a third party controlling your photos. I set up an instance on my home server and used immich-go to ingest the ~60k photos we had saved to Google. It took a couple of days, but now I’ve got ongoing automatic backups from my phone and Leslie’s phone.
I’m leaving Google Photos turned on as a parallel solution, and to make it easier to share with others, but it feels good to have a self-hosted copy of all our photos now. Nice work immich team!