I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting

[email protected]

Is that automated?

If I left the USB stick plugged in constantly, but then it wouldn't be very useful I guess.

I've only recently started selfhosting on my own, so I am still quite new.

Nevertheless, you might like the idea of local-first software which is kind of a hybrid between local only software, and self-hosting (or cloud hosting).

I'll check it out, thank you!

[email protected]

To me, the appeal is that my workflow depends less on my computer and more on my ability to connect to a server that handles everything for me. Workstation, laptop or phone? Doesn't matter, just connect to the right IPs and get working. Linux is, of course, the holy grail of interoperability, and I'm all Linux. With a little bit of set up, I can make a lot of things talk to each other seamlessly. SMB on Windows is a nightmare but on Linux if I set up SSH keys then I can just open a file manager and type sftp://<hostname> and now I'm browsing that machine as if it was a local folder. I can do a lot of work from my genuinely-trash laptop because it's the server that's doing the heavy lifting

TL;DR -

My workflow becomes "client agnostic" and I value that a lot

[email protected]

Powercycling is not healthy lol

[email protected]

Thanks reasonable! That does make me realize how different my workflow is. My philosophy is compartmentalizing everything. What I do on my phone stays on my phone. What I do on my desktop stays on my desktop. What I do on my laptop stays on my laptop. I've never really had the need for anything more until now. Then again, I've also never had the resources to selfhost until now.

[email protected]

I found this article explaining some of the benefits. Let me know if I'm wrong, I'm always open to learning!

[email protected]

Immich is just much nicer, i can make an album and share it with my wife and she can see that on her phone right away since I set her phone to use immich as well.

I used to use nextcloud for images but it was kind of weird and didn't have a lot of the features, then randomly one day while I was at a work event nextcloud just decided to start syncing everything to my phone and killed my battery.

After that I tried photo prisim but that didn't have a proper sync app and I had to use other work arounds and I ended up just not liking the way it sorted my photos, immich to me just makes sense and was much easier to setup.

Also like everyone else has mentioned being hardware agnostic is great, I can plug my phone in to a monitor with a keyboard and mouse and vpn in to a VM on my server and I have a full fledged desktop experience where I can play games or edit videos and photos

[email protected]

The purpose of most of these apps is to be able to use them on multiple devices. If I had immich entirely running on my phone (this is not actually feasible regardless) how do i access my images from my computer.

Also many people have multiple users. A family could have all their images on one immich server and be able to share images with each other easily.

On jellyfin for example, I can play any of my media on someone elses TV as long as they have Chromecast. Not possible if its all just kept locally in a folder on a computer

[email protected]

Appreciate this post OP, as I've wondered similar at times when not wanting to fuss with another machine for self-hosting (as often it's not the case that I could run the server software on my main system).

[email protected]

The appeal for me to use immich is the AI search.

I have over 100,000 photos I have taken. I can do a search of “blue sky with pink clouds and a moon” and it will show me the photo I want.

The way I did it before would take me 2-3 days or looking at every photo one by one to find that photo.

[email protected]

I think selfhost is more useful in a multi-user scenario, for my personal needs I also love Syncthing.

[email protected]

Lots of people mentioning collaboration / multiple users, yet all your replies seem to completely ignore this aspect. I'm guessing you might live alone and are struggling to imagine some very common use cases here.

[email protected]

I agree with this comment. As mentioned as answer in the post, to have a backup of these things is a big reason why I chose to selfhost. I had to switch devices (and operating systems) too many times. Moving data around everytime would be a hassle. To have all the important stuff not only stored but also organized and easy to access is very convenient and makes me stop worrying to accidentially lose my phone for example.

[email protected]

To answer your question, most people don't have just one device. Do you have only one device? You must have at least a desktop computer and a smartphone? What if you want to have something stored in your computer when you are not at home?

Music for example. If I don't want to pay Spotify or whatever, and I want to listen to my music on my phone at work and on my computer at home. Other than making two full copies of the entire music library, I think I have to store them on a 3rd location then share it to my two devices.

If I don't listen to music at home, then you're right, there's no reason to self host anything. I can just store all songs on my phone.

[email protected]

Agreed. Do I expect my mom to manually plug in the usb flash? She ain’t have slightest idea of what a file is. Same goes for Nextcloud everything and Syncthing. Setup and done is Immich. The lead dev of Immich explicitly mention his motivation was to make it easy to backup and share pics with his wife and child.

[email protected]

The misunderstanding seems to be between software and hardware. It is good to reboot Windows and some other operating systems because they accumulate errors and quirks. It is not good to powercycle your hardware, though. It increases wear.

I'm not on an OS that needs to be rebooted, I count my uptime in months.

I don't want you to pick up a new anxiety about rebooting your PC, though. Components are built to last, generally speaking. Even if you powercycled your PC 5 times daily you'd most likely upgrade your hardware long before it wears out.

[email protected]

What you have missed is the ability to run what ever you need, self hosting is more then just backups and sync.

Some self hosting to self reliant, nextcloud can do way more then just file sync. For example I use it for calendar and contact sync, photo and file backup from my phone, an office suit, RSS server.

[email protected]

A reason I self-host stuff is privacy. When I host my data it's my data. It's not owned and kept by a billion dollar company somewhere, that is willing to sell it to make a quick buck.

So it's my way of making sure that my data really is my data and that it is only shared with those I want to share it with. Some applications require a server component to achive this (eg Immich), so that's why I self-host those.

[email protected]

It would be difficult to recommend Immich as a gallery app to someone who doesn’t have experience in selfhosting.

You already have plenty of responses, but immich is not an gallery app. I'm in the process of migrating my photo libraries to immich and it's 20+ years of memories. Some are originally taken by film camera and then scanned, others are old enough that camera phones just didn't exist and we had "compact" digital cameras. Then there's photos taken with DSLR and drone and obviously all of the devices have changed multiple times over the years, so relying on just a single device is just not going to work over time.

All of those require some other system to store, organize, back up and enjoy than the device itself. And, as I have family, storing them on just my desktop would mean that no one else around would have easy access to them. And with immich I can easily share photos around when I carry DSLR with me in a family gathering or whatever.

And then there's the obvious matter of having enough storage. Even my desktop doesn't have a spare terabyte right now to store everything, I need the hardware anyways, so it just makes sense to keep them separated from my workstation which I can now do whatever I want with without worrying I'd lose any of those precious memories. And for the server part, I'm having one around anyways for pihole, home assistant, nextcloud to store/back up other data and so on, so for me it's the most convenient approach to run immich server on there too.

And for the backup side of things. I've tried manual backups with various stuff over the years. It's just not going to work for me. I either forget or life gets in the way or something other happens and then I'm several days or weeks behind the 'schedule'. With dedicated server I don't have to do anything, everything is running automatically at the background while I'm sleeping or doing something else more interesting than copying over a bunch of files.

[email protected]

I think collaboration is another thing that's missing in your answer. Of course synchronization would be one main thing for me to use a photo gallery or note taking app across devices, since I'm often accessing stuff from my phone and my laptop. But I also like to share photos with my relatives and friends, I have shared calendars with my wife to organize our lives. I collaborate on projects and collaborative edit text documents. And sometimes I keep notes and small snippets on technical details mainly for myself, but also share that with the internet, for other people to learn how to install some software or customize it to a niche use-case. And while some of that could be done by separate applications as well, I often use one generic self-hosted platform and have that do everything, disregarding if some of the job doesn't really need the features.

[email protected]

I have 113k images going back two decades. The screenshot above doesn't include RAW files, with those included I'm around 2 terabytes of total storage.

Immich is in fact a photo album, and a damn good one at that.
Immich keeps google's grubby paws off my photos. I don't need or want google datamining every precious memory I have in order to modify my behavior to their benefit.
Immich keeps my photos stored on my hardware, where I control access.
Immich shares photos between my wife and my phones.
Immich ensures that if I lose my phone, my photos aren't lost.
Immich lets me easily re edit and re-export RAW files without creating duplicates or losing metadata
Immich lets me conveniently share photos with friends and family without requiring them to have an account anywhere.

Mostly I self-host things when I want data synchronized between multiple devices, or I don't want to lose it in the event I lose the device it was created on.

Also, like, phone screens are tiny and typing on them is terrible? Why would you want to do everything on your phone?

agnos.is Forums

I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting