Our photo curation journey

[CiNcH83]

I just jumped on the Immich train and love it so far. I am still evaluating the possibilities and shortcomings, trying to find a proper workflow for storing our family photos. I am quite confident that I will become a contributor to the project, in one way or the other.

Some time ago we moved away from a DSLR over to our iPhones exclusively. Photos are all over the place. So I was looking for a proper way to curate the mess and a workflow to use from now on. I evaluated several solutions like QNAP’s QuMagie or PhotoPrism.

QuMagie would have required me to buy a new NAS as my TS-231P2 with 1 GB RAM wasn’t quite up to the task, even though it performed way better than I expected it to. I just don’t trust QNAP enough to take good care of my photos. I really only use it as a dumb backup storage nowadays.

During Corona, we put some solar on our roof and I got myself a Raspberry Pi 4, running software to intelligently distribute the power and some home automation tasks. Unfortunately at that time, only the 2 GB variant was available. I tried PhotoPrism on it, totally locking the system when running “the AI”. So I moved over to Immich and loved it from the first minute. Not only is it a much smoother experience, the multi-user support was what put me over.

So I got myself a new Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB RAM together with a 2 TB NVMe SSD. It now acts as Immich photo server, share for documents, and energy management system.

Photo uploading from the iPhones is done via PhotoSync app to respective SMB shares, already establishing a comprehensive folder structure.

Here are some limitations of me and my wife’s workflows that we stumbled across…

My wife likes to do photo book printouts. While I laugh at her every time she does, the less tech-savvy family members really like those. We take and store photos as HEIC/HEIF for the sake of sparing some Bytes, which however are not very compatible. A feature which would support her workflow would be the possibility to choose format and quality when downloading a photo with Immich transcoding it on-the-fly. Or maybe we should just take a step back and go with JPEG for now.

With me embracing the digital present, I love sitting on the sofa in the evening with my 3-year-old, skimming through memories and projecting them on the big screen via AirPlay. I love the experience with the iPhone having become a brilliant navigation device. No TV app would be able to match that as still no TV manufacturer figured out a proper way to control it, which is why I believe that casting is the only good way to watch photos from a large collection on the big screen. As soon as those photos are off to the Raspberry Pi, there is no way of casting them any longer. Or probably there is, but not with Immich.
AirPlay via Apple Photos app is a super smooth experience. Seeking video is so much fun, feeling like a smooth fast-forward (over Wi-Fi!) rather than a series of jumps when moving the slider. Guess that only a native app with native player can achieve this level of smoothness.

Apart from those two limitations, we both love this new experience of approaching our photo collections with Immich. So big thanks to all the involved people! We will certainly be doing our part!