You could argue it’s much easier on the software side, because self hosting Immich is much easier thanks for AI assistance with setting it up. If you can live without the built in facial recognition feature you don’t need particularly beefy hardware.
I find myself taking on far more ambitious self hosted projects thanks to Claude. Extending home assistant in various ways, deploying a “self hosted Spotify”, making sure everything is fully accessible via Tailscale out of the range of the wifi and so on. Of course the general population isn’t really aware or interested in most of this.
And it's not to fault Immich, on the contrary, Photos is one of the rare Google property where the team is constantly pushing the envelope.
I could combine it with a bunch of external tools to make do, but it would be crazy clunky or would need full sync with Adobe Cloud for instance for the editing part, while doing all the scanning and categorizing locally.
On AI assist...I'm still pausing a lot when t comes to home projects that will be constantly talking to the outside and hold the stuff that is the most private to me and my whole family and friends. It helps me as a research tool, but due to my own restrictions it won't be magic.
Totally understand this part. I didn’t mean to give Claude code full access to locally hosted environments but rather copy back and forth in your local shell with help from Claude (error messages, helping to plan out the installation etc.)