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Since we're on Immich, please let me vent out my frustrations after having looked at it recently.

Why the love affair with forcing absolutely everything into strict temporal constraints? Is there a single view in Immich that isn't peppered with date headings?

And I genuinely do not understand what the sharing feature is even for. What are you sharing? It can't be albums because an album would be a series of photos you yourself arranged, independent of when the photos were taken, and this seems a completely foreign concept in Immich land.

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Did you also look at https://ente.com/ ?
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I was going to recommend ente as well.

My photos and videos are the most important files I have in my self-hosted storage system. Being end-to-end encrypted buys some peace of mind knowing that it's not end of world if my homelab is compromised. And I can backup the data to whatever public clouds without worrying too much about leaking data.

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As someone looking to exfiltrate my photos from Google, I'm about to trial Immich, and I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Sounds like it's a good next step for me.
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There's plenty of tutorials but you can request a Google Takeout of your photos and then point immich-go at it. I can confirm that this works really well.

https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

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The problem with google takeout is that it generates hundred of files to download as ZIP. I tried it in my own collection (800GB).
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Agree - it's annoying. rclone to the rescue. Requires choosing Google Drive as the destination and then downloading with rclone to your computer. It's the closest to sane I've found.

https://metadatafixer.com/learn/how-to-download-google-takeo...

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>But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.

I'd argue Google is always way worse than the open source alternative in both quality and ux. Their products are terrible. From Gmail to Youtube, the product itself comes second (or Nth), while in open source the product is always first.

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In my experience, most open source photo apps lacked basic features like facial recognition, mobile apps, etc. And where they do exist, the UX isn't the best. Are there ones I'm unaware of?

I say this as someone whose last startup (circa 2012) was an open source photo app (https://github.com/photo/frontend).

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I think it's a testament to how far computers have come that identifying the individuals in a photograph is now considered a basic feature.
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