[sonar_un]

For me Immich has been good, but not great. I keep going back to nextcloud photos if I really want to do any work, like sharing images and file management.

I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure. Immich can look at your external libraries but it can’t really do anything with them. I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage. I’ve wanted to like Immich and what they are doing, but I am fearful that they won’t be around forever and I will have just another wandering database of my images that I can’t really move to another platform when inevitably comes along.

[sz4kerto]

> I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure

Immich can store your photos in a file structure you want. It can also reorganise your files on disk based on EXIF data, and so on.

> I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage

It can absolutely do exactly this.

https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/

[sonar_un]

The storage template is nothing like managing your photos within the app, moving them to different, more specific, folders. All it does is allow a type of folder structure on the main drive where the upload directories are, but if you have a more specific file structure, it doesn't allow you to manage this.

[kevinfiol]

Does this make Immich effectively function like Photoview? My current Immich by default stores my uploads in an `uploads/<UUID>/<bunch of random two character folders>` structure. This was a huge disappointment after moving from Photoview.

[oblio]

They've been around for a 3 years, which is not a very long time for FOSS. However the software seems stable, fast, it has lots of releases, all of which are good signs in terms of future availability.

I forgot the name, but there is a software "law" that software that has been around for N years will probably be around for N more years (so the longer it's been around, the longer it will continue to be around).

I see about 7 big contributors: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/graphs/contributors. I think most of them work for/are sponsored by FUTO: https://futo.org/about/what-is-futo/

And seeing the FUTO description, I like that. We need more of that :-)

> FUTO is an organization dedicated to developing, both through in-house engineering and investment, technologies that frustrate centralization and industry consolidation.

Though this part needs more research:

> From its founding, FUTO has been funded entirely by investment from its sole owner, Eron Wolf.

I have no idea who Eron Wolf is...

Edit: found some more info. Potentially promising:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35914264

https://gitlab.futo.org/eron/public/-/wikis/Thoughts-on-Open...

Though the question remains about FUTOs long term sustainability.

[alfyboy]

You’re thinking about the [Lindy effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

I donate to Immich monthly, and I’m glad they managed to keep the project going and not paywalling any of their features, even under the influence of their new sponsor.

[poisonborz]

But for structuring, tagging, why would you need a database? There's the file system, and countless tools to batch edit images and exif. Immich is great to display images, and perhaps gather some bit of metadata, like face recognition.

[sharperguy]

Funnily enough I use nextcloud to upload my photos and then immich with the external dir pointed to my nextcloud directory to actually view them. Mostly came about because I installed nextcloud first. But it means I get to keep both immich and still have a regular file structure.

[hagbard_c]

Same here, I tried Nextcloud Memories first which has some of the same functionality but ended up being too slow in nearly all aspects. Immich does well in this regard so I use it just like you do using its external library feature.

You may be interested in the change I submitted to Immich which makes it possible to directly log in to Immich using the Nextcloud OIDC app. Add Immich as an 'external site' and use the autoLaunch parameter [1] to have the site open in NC as if it were a 'native' app without needing to log in first.

[1] https://docs.immich.app/administration/oauth/#auto-launch