I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting

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In immich I can open the world map and select photos i took in Hungary and Colorado without having to manually tag and manually locate them, and I have thousands of photos from the last 25 years saved and can do this seamlessly by simply uploading them and having my server run a heuristic to automatically do this.

Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?

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Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?

I suppose not. That's a fair point. Although I will mention, if your camera supports it, location metadata can be embedded automatically. Aves and many other gallery apps support viewing photos with location data on the map.

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Why are frequent restarts healthy? Do you mean at a hardware level or for the OS?

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I don't use gallery apps on my phone because I don't have the space for terabytes of photos and videos on my phone, but my server does. So Aves is useless to me.

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Both. If your hardware isn't designed like a server to run 24/7 it can be unhealthy for it, especially if it isn't properly maintained. It can cause wear to it. As far as the OS, restarting is good to clear caches, fully install some software, and keep the system sanitary overall.

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I personally backup my phone to my own USB stick every few days or so

Is that automated? It sounds kind of tedious, and it would be easy to lose data if something goes wrong in between those few days.

Some of the motivation behind self hosting is that there is one source of truth that is easy to manage and make backups for (a server or servers). Android backups in particular are kind of notoriously fragile (especially if you're avoiding Google services) so it's simpler to have the data stored on a server. Then I can wipe or lose my phone with impunity without really worrying about losing data, because it's handled elsewhere.

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).

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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!

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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

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Powercycling is not healthy lol

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting