[avtolik]

I haven't heard of this app before, so I looked around their site and docs. I was mildly interested in trying it out until I saw the requirements: "A system with at least 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores.", but recommended 6 GB of RAM. Why does an image storage solution needs so much RAM?

[darkwater]

Because it is written in Node, it uses several other softwares (i.e. Postgresql), it runs image/video processing on the fly (transcoding to various formats depending on what you upload and who views), it does face/object recognition running a local model and a few other nice features that yeah, require more power. It's not a static HTML of your photos.

[tim-kt]

The last time I tried Immich (a year ago or so), my impression was that Immich tries to imitate Google Photos as much as possible. This includes features such as searching by a person or by "cat", which requires some machine learning sophistication, which is done locally (you can also disable these features). This would be my guess, but I'm not entirely sure.

[d3vnull]

Because it's not just an "image storage solution". A thumb drive would be an image storage solution. If you're indexing, making geo queries, serving over the network, categorize, transcode video and everything else that's needed to create a google photos competitor, you're going to need the hardware to back it up.

[fifafu]

If you just need an image storage solution: no, but then you don't need Immich. If you want the feature Immich offers: yes

[abdusco]

You can turn off AI features. You won't need as much RAM, then.

[frenkel]

Because it wants to recognize objects in you images.

[dangus]

I hope you slept well in your cryo-chamber, Austin Powers. It’s the year 2025, 6GB of RAM is not a lot. A stick of 32GB of RAM costs about $50. Most simple telephones come with 8GB of RAM.

[izacus]

Synology Photos runs on NASes with 2GB still.

[eviks]

Are you going to host this app on a simple telephone?

[diimdeep]

It is ridiculous bloat of "high level technobabble"

    npm install for web/ server/ 
    % cloc .
    81808 text files.
    51415 unique files. 
    Language                             files          blank        comment           code
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    JavaScript                           25050         453101         913671        4436663
    TypeScript                           14997          85346         630503         831318
    JSON                                  2238            168              0         457435
    Perl                                   233          10541          34463         293957
    Markdown                              1977          89859           1551         234399
    Dart                                  1257          24152          14748         229937
    Svelte                                 678           5917            190          51223
    HTML                                   128          16361             90          31719
    ... 
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUM:                                 51415         713200        1617503        6726009

In comparison, qemu does emulation of literally every hardware that there is and it is only 1/3 more code, and it is without counting code required to run nodejs, docker, postgresql, redis that is dependencies of this image catalogue software.

    qemu-10.1.0 % cloc .
    58961 text files.
    43347 unique files. 
    Language                             files          blank        comment           code
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    C                                    18063        1068616        1312988        5590243
    C/C++ Header                         13980         366138         907350        1774239
    Assembly                              1370          42839          55872         320027
    Python                                1345          67483          89294         255732
    SUM:                                 43347        1789003        2759752        9220521
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[d3vnull]

QEMU has been in development for decades.

I'll take the high level language developed solution that I can use now over a low level language version that would reach feature parity with this 10 years from now.

Speed of development is a feature.

[bo0tzz]

You're counting a lot of generated code.