While this is a great idea to tell people to self host and I self host myself. I think it needs to also be mentioned how laborious backups are.

Photos aren’t something that is only inconvenient like movies to lose WHEN your drives die. They can be devastating because you will likely not get them back.

Backups are a lot of work to maintain, it’s not just simply copying the data to another array but also testing the backup regularly and making sure that they work and continue working. Backups are almost like a secondary job and many that self host are probably not interested in how much thought goes into it. Sure the web applications like Google Photos are annoying but they take away all of this that most people don’t think about.

The vast majority of people that read this will set up a server and have no backup. Many of them will eventually lose their data if they didn’t also keep a cloud service.

I just installed Immich this weekend to try it out - it is pretty good! Face grouping, semantic search all seem to work well.

I find it better than google photos already in some ways. For example, to add photos to an album google forces you to scroll slowly through all of them so the thumbnails load, before you can multi select them all. Immich just let me select the top picture, go straight to the bottom and select all of them. Makes a difference when adding over a thousand photos!

I moved my 565GB photo library to immich about a year ago and haven't looked back. Unfortunately, convincing my wife has been a bit harder, as she has real network effects of many shared albums across a large family (30+) that all aren't going to switch the immich app so they can join her album and sync the photos.

Nonetheless, a positive move in the right direction!

I use immich too, on my home cluster. I did it as a "backup" to google, in case my account gets flagged by an AI with no immediate recourse.

PS: I used to be an employee, and there was a time i needed an account help for an old account who was clearly definitely mine, and they were of no help. Good for security, terrible if you get flagged.

> "and I do still use the google built in 'camera' app, so I'm kind of using google photos while I take pictures if that makes sense."

I found it quite inconvenient; you'd try to open the photos app from the photos button on the camera but it didn't work for me. Did you find a way to make the integration decent?

This is exactly what I did this year, moving photo backup to Syncthing and using Immich. So far it has been a very rewarding trip, even if the home server it runs on is not the fastest.

You know what I wish I could ditch but cannot due to their firm grip on it, Google Wallet.

Every other time I open it, it shows a pop-up asking "Can we use your payment data to show you more relevant ads?" which is annoying but what's more aggravating is the choices: "Yes", "Remind me Later".