There are still some features that a miss from Google photos. There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated.

Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google Photos.

It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back, but it isn't perfect yet.

I'm waiting for that first point to. The good news is that they just started work on workflows, which should allow for that.

The /people page looks a lot like albums based on face to me, is that not what you are talking about?

It seems like he’s saying that he could create an album and add a rule saying “add all pictures of John and Jan”

Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part.

How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.

Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.

I’d gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a fee forever for essentially… storing files on drives.

We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.

> We got to this stage of having to sync ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶l̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶s̶.

"because a company that sells you Cloud storage has very few incentives to give away more local storage, or compress/optimize the files generated by its camera app." might be more accurate

I'm actually in the process of building a home NAS server primarily for this purpose. Delighted to hear everyone has such a good experience.

How does sharing an album with others work on Immich?

I have not shared it with many people. But one of my most wanted feature is to completely share by photos with my partner. None of the services I tried (Plex, Synology Photos) had it. In Immich, it’s just a flip of a button.

Ugreen has it. It has conditional albums in which one can setup rules like person, file type, location, anniversary and more and share a live album. Or leave all params empty and simply mirror the entire library.

You get a link and you can set read or write permissions on it.

Whoever gets that link can browse it in a web browser.

I've used this to share albums of photos with gatherings of folks; it works very well. It does assume you have your Immich installation publicly available, however. (Not open to the public, but on a publicly accessible web server)

If you want to share with family, you can permanently add them as users to your Immich instance. Otherwise, you can create a link that they can use.

Other than redundant hosting, what will I get as an Apple user by setting this up? It would be very easy to set up, just not sure what I’m gaining from it

I don't think it would add any value for you. For me, it adds value because I only have to turn my head to the left to see the computer that contains all my photos since I started taking pictures with a smartphone.

For once iCloud have a terrible sync speed. Even 500GB of photos / videos take forever to sync like a week and I can't imagine what it will take for someone with multi-TB archives.

Yes, but it's a one times occurrence, isn't it?

I'd imagine if you're person who make a lot of photos / videos slow sync can be pretty annoying. Unfortunately I'm not one of them to tell, but just had to wait like a week for the first sync of my wife's iPhone to finish.