this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Hello everyone, Alex from Immich here!

On behalf of the team, I'd like to express my heartfelt gratitude for your support in 2024.

Since the first day I posted the video prototype on the self-hosted subreddit, Immich has been on a journey. I still remember the project’s early days and loved seeing those first issues open on GitHub. How exciting it has been to build something useful for so many people. I am grateful for the compassionate community as well as the feedback and criticism we have received this year.

The project's core idea is to do good things without a hidden agenda or ill motives, to give people a delightful choice to manage their digital media besides the solutions from exploitative big cloud providers. Just last year, we were daydreaming of how wonderful it would be if we could do those things daily as our full-time job. One might have said it is good karma, but Louis Rossman from FUTO found us and extended the invitation for the company to fund the project to let us develop the software full-time. It was a dream come true for all the core contributors to talk about Immich, interact with the users, have fun writing code, and build out the features of Immich every day. We would not be here without your love and support for the project.

Similar to last year, here’s a recap of everything the project accomplished in 2024:

Milestones

  • A new logo

  • GPU acceleration for machine learning
  • Library watching
  • Search enhancement with advanced filtering

  • Built-in OpenTelemetry metrics
  • Read-only albums
  • Email notifications
  • Microservices container be gone
  • Web translation
  • Immich-hosted map tiles
  • Star rating
  • Basic editing on mobile
  • Theming on mobile
  • Folder view

  • Tag support
  • Album sync on mobile
  • Automatic database backup
  • Auto-switching server URL in the mobile app
  • Alternative machine learning URL switching
  • Supporter Badge / buy.immich.app
  • and more

Fun

  • Over 30k stars were added to Immich’s sky on GitHub :star: [editor's note: Jan 16, 23940]
  • Going from MIT to AGPLv3 License
  • Over 900 awesome people from the community helped make Immich a better software.
  • Overcame our first marketing fallout with the choice of wording in the product key purchase introduction
  • Immich isn’t even 3 years old yet. Technically, we are still an infant.
  • Alex got his 150-day comment streak on Reddit.
  • As shy as an infant, the project managed to get a lot more screentime from many YouTubers
  • Coming down from 12 breaking changes in 2023 to 8 breaking changes released in 2024

Next Year

  • A stable release is our top priority, and we are pushing hard to have it ready by Q1 of 2025.
  • After the stable release is out, we have a series of cool features in mind that we want to add to the application, such as (in no particular order)
    • Proper SemVer :P
    • Workflows/Automation
    • Plugin system
    • OCR
    • Pet Detection
    • Federation
    • and more
  • We want to offer additional mechanisms and services built directly into Immich to help you with your 3-2-1 backup strategy. This will make self-hosting Immich even easier while allowing you to maintain peace of mind when dealing with your most precious memories.

Finally, the team will attend FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium, on February 1st and 2nd. If you are around, stop by and say β€œhi.” We will have a stand there on Sunday (02-02), and we also registered for a lightning talk session. We're looking forward to seeing some of you there!

As always, if you find the project helpful, you can support us at https://buy.immich.app

Have a happy holiday! 🎊

Immich Team

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Immich is awesome. One of the few software purchases I feel good about.

My personal top wish is collaborative person editing and sharing the person database.

If each user could have simple custom text notes section per person that would be awesome too.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

No demands, just a personal wishlist:

  • Stable release
  • Federation
  • Private/locked/encrypted albums
  • Hiding photos from album from timeline
  • Dropping Redis dependency (not open source)
  • Better editor
  • Some (unofficial) Linux mobile client happening
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Immich is what got me into self hosting, an incredible piece of software (is that the right term?), and I can't wait to see where it goes into the future.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago

Thank you for immich! I use it every day.

And thank you for posting on lemmy

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

Glad to see you posted here and not just reddit.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Immich is part of FUTO now? Great, congrats!

I look forward to implementing it on my new home box.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Yeah, FUTO rocks, literally my only complaint is their license for in-house stuff. If that gets fixed, I'll shill them all day long.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Ooooooo so its AGPL UwU

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

Thanks for all the hard work, delivering a great piece of software!

Immich server key purchased a few weeks ago, was the least I could do.

Using the go application to import the Google takeout zip file is a really good way to improve the WAF.

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Thanks a lot for Immich and for posting here. Much appreciated the hard work this year and helping myself and family on our self hosted journey.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

Woah federation would be huge!

Someday I would love to be able to share and receive shared photos / albums to and from users on different servers. Especially if it lets me sync the original files so that I can keep a copy in case their server goes down. It would also be neat if you could enable activitypub so that your account could show up as a fediverse user that people can follow for public or approved follower only posts, pixelfed compatibility would be super cool.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

I'm glad that development is getting more stable, the regular updates with breaking changes were not so great.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

@[email protected] nice for showing up in here!

Thanks for your work. Keep on keeping on and we'll keep on supporting!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Congrats to those milestones ☝🏻 Using Immich since the early versions and it got better and better, thanks to the efforts of the team

Thanks again for the help if something broke because of an update 😊

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I think simpler deployment should be on top of the list for next year. The microservice architecture scares quite a lot of people away and makes it complicated. If it was me, I would make microservices optional, for people who wants to scale their immich components. Most will never have the need.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What? Immich currently has 2 containers, plus 1 typesense, 1 redis and 1 db. That's not really a lot compared to other stacks

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

yeah, plus you just copy and paste the docker-compose and you don't even need to know what's under the hood.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I too use the singular container from imagegenius and point it at a DB and redis. Usually their upgrade paths mention several components but I've only ever used the one.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

@[email protected] thanks for Immich! I was a bit reluctant to move from photos to Immich but I think the experience has been great!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hi and thank you so much for the fantastic work on Immich! I'm hoping to get a chance to try it out soon, with the first stable release!

One question on the financial support page: is it not a donation? There is a per server and a per user purchase, but I thought immich was exclusively self hosted, is it not? Or is this more like a way to say thanks while giving some hints as to how immich is being used privately? Or is there a way to actually pay to have immich host a server for one?

Thanks for clarifying!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It is a donation. You will get a license key and when applied to your instance, it will report you are a supporter in the web interface.

For me it was a means to show some support.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I'm not saying it's not true, but nowhere on that page is there the word donation. And if it is, the fact that it is described and a license, tied to a server or a user causes a lot of confusion to me, especially when combined with the fact that there is no paywall but that it requires registration.

Why use the term license, server and user? Why not simply say donation and with the option of displaying the support by getting exclusive access to a badge like signal does?

Again, I'm very happy immich is free, it is great software and it deserves support but this is just super confusing to me and the buy.immich.app link does not clarify things nor does that blog post.

Edit: typo

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Why not simply say donation

It's about setting expectations. The wording is chosen because they believe that paying open source developers for their work should be the norm, not the exception. Calling it a donation would not do that justice. Their wording is saying "Here's the software, we'll trust you to pay us for it if it brings you value and you can afford it". It's an explicit expectation to pay, unless you have good reasons not to, which is also fine but should be the exception. Whereas a donation is very much optional and not the default expectation by nature.

In the end it's just a semantic difference, it's just all about making expectations clear even if there is no enforcement around them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

It says on the page that

As we’re committed not to add paywalls, this purchase will not grant you any additional features in Immich. We rely on users like you to support Immich’s ongoing development.

So this is a purchase which grants you no extra bonus, which is functionally a donation. This is a common practice with software supported by Futo - they offer the software for free, but ask that you pay a good-faith "license fee" for the software anyway to help fund development. I think Louis Rossman has a video about it somewhere, if I remember I'll link it in an edit when I have time to find it later.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I totally agree with you, the wording could be more clear.

Reading this: we have enabled a way for you to financially support the continued development of Immich, ensuring the software can move forward and will be maintained, by offering a lifetime license of the software

Was enough for me to order a server license (..). I like the software and being a professional developer I totally understand you might need funds to do the job.

So this is just my €0.02 to keep the flow from caffeine to code flowing..