I want to get away from iCloud Photos, but a must have is that I can access my photos in an easy way on iOS, iPadOS and macOS. Next to it, I must find photos by given text like „summer beach wife high heels red dress“ or „yellow motorbike nordschleife“. Therefore, it needs not only face & object recognition but also usable apps for mobile devices. Clicking 10 minutes through a web ui is no solution. I gave nextcloud and immich a try and unfortunately both failed. Nextcloud tooks ages for previewing thumbnails even this features are only available in the web ui, immich looks pretty good but could only handle a subset of photos for testing because it takes long time to import and scan everything. So, immich looks promising before taking the efforts, maybe someone can give some insights with bigger libraries.
I need to process more than 8TB of photos and additional TBs of videos…
@gyptazy I’ve been having the thought of moving away from iCloud Photos recently as well, but as far as I can tell, there is just no replacement for it that has the level of simplicity and search ability yet. I’m running Nextcloud for other reasons and back up photos there, but don’t really use it for browsing them.
I’ve been wondering what I’m going to do in the not-too-distant future when my photo library is so large I have no choice but to pay for its storage somewhere.
@jrollans I can fully see the struggles. Immich comes close to it, but it’s slow - especially when you initially need to index your database, can’t use Neural Engine from the iOS to speed it up. Then it’s all „alpha“… I think photos will keep me forever in the iCloud.
@gyptazy I was just reading up on setting up Immich yesterday and ended up getting defeated because I knew how much speed I would be losing. And knowing the the Neural Engine is “going to waste” would be pretty lame!
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