Where is Immich going to be in 1 year? What's your prediction?
Copying this from Reddit (I still get the daily emails). Since I no longer post there, I figured I would ask here, and include my prediction: Will be more popular, possibly in stable release. Still won't be able to rotate photos natively.
I was one of the first Immich core developers but had to leave a year ago due to a change in my job situation.
Just wanted to say that the team (especially Alex, the founder) are wonderful people and very dedicated to the project. When they don’t implement the features everyone wants, there is usually a very good reason, like security or architectural concerns. The philosophy behind the project is also to do things slowly but right.
I believe they continue focussing on robusness and bugfixing. A topic that we discussed a lot was e2e encryption. We really wanted to implement that, but it was very hard and back then would have compromised performance too much. I still think that e2e encryption will come at some point.
It'll be good if it can be decrypted by the device itself. Almost perfect security tbh
The problem here is, that the server does a lot of image processing to generate various thumbnail sizes. This is the main reason images in the gallery load so fast when scrolling. But to archive this, the server needs to read the image which would not work with e2e.
Very cool post. I didn’t mean to denigrate the dev team at all. They’ve done incredible work, and I’ve read some of the threads about rotation. They’re definitely aware of the issue, and they want to make sure it’s done right, which I appreciate. Also, it’s FOSS, so I don’t want to be negative about the outlook when its users already get so much more than they pay for!
Still, it’s such a thorn in my side!
Brand new Immich user here. Love the project and I hope it goes far!
Also maybe I'm not understanding, but the two complaints about it so far in this thread are not being able to sync photos to a phone and not being able to rotate photos and, I'm pretty sure I can do both?
From my testing today, you can only rotate a photo using the mobile app, and even then you have to save it locally and re-upload the rotated photo. Thus creating a separate, mostly duplicate photo! This is essentially a metadata orientation update, or it could be more. Immich seems to incorrectly orient a lot of photos that other applications have no problem with. The devs are aware of it and have been discussing this since at least 2022, possibly longer. There are also a number of feature/pull requests on the github page covering rotation, photo editing, cropping, etc. Personally, I don't care about editing/cropping. I consider those edits which should result in a separate asset, possibly linked back to the original.
For me, this is probably the biggest missing feature for Immich. They've done some really amazing things in the past couple years, but this seemingly basic feature remains missing.
In my mobile app, I can select a photo > edit > crop, and get rotate options there. Does that do what you're looking for? I can't confirm right now since I'm not home and haven't exposed it beyond my home network yet, and haven't tried it from the web interface. I agree though, as I continue to use it, rotating will be a common use case and I'd hope it handles it gracefully.
I've never used it, but one should also ask a what kind of 90 degree rotation does it do. Good image editors can do lossless 90 degree JPEG rotation, meaning they don't compound the JPEG lossiness and potential artifacts every time.
Yes, it can do both.
The sync is weird though. I can't say "upload this image" I have to say "keep this whole folder in sync".
I have no more wants of Immich, it does everything that I need lol
Basic editing, plus full implementation in tag view woulf be nice. Also the mobile app needs a little work still. Oh, also pet recognition would be cool. All of those are planned, although the last one needs some external stuff before they can do it.
And a few other tweaks and QoL improvements here and there. But it's really close.
Manual ordering of images in albums is an absolute must before I adopt any image management system. It’s wierd to me that seemingly none of the FOSS systems support it (considering that most of us are datahoading control freaks).
Copying this from Reddit (I still get the daily emails)
You know you can just delete the email address from your reddit account, right? I don't know why you'd want to willingly tie reddit to your email in the first place.
It’s a throwaway address I use for online vendors. Most of those get an addy.io address nowadays, but Reddit still goes to the original address.
TL;DR: I’m aware, thanks.
Their facial recognition is really good! Makes organizing photos a breeze. Immich is by far the best software currently. But hopefully the setup becomes less of a hassle.
I have a feeling it'll simply grow more in popularity, since stable release will probably make a lot more people feel more comfortable recommending it to people, myself included.
Right now, I don't treat it as if it's a backup in any way due to its beta nature, and I hope that can change.
Shift+click a range of images to add them to a location in batch, please.
A more sophisticated query system would be interesting.
For example if I want to see every picture with Joseph in it, that's really easy. But what if I'd like to share those with Joseph along with the albums he's in?
Similar to that would be a query by location and person. Or a query that includes two people.
I believe Piwigo had the first feature you mention. Actually, there are quite a few things from Piwigo I’d love to see implemented in Immich. One that was pretty unique was designating an image as the back of another one, for scanned files. Niche, but really useful in those cases.
[Edit] Webdav:
I seriously only want to have options for sorting when I do a search. That's the only thing that I need for it to be "perfect".
It'll be safe to host without extra software in front of it to make it read-only
Where I wish it would be:
I tried it briefly, but when I realized I could not easily sync a bunch of my pictures from server to new phone, I lost interest and went back to syncthing
Just out of curiosity, what's the use case for having all your photos actually on the phone as opposed to remote access from your phone?
Backup, redundancy, easy access.. If my server goes down I don't have the time to fix it at the moment.
Also the photos app on my phone is quite good, so I find it very easy to find old pictures quickly.
I also prefer offline-capable solutions
If the internet disappears or you lose access to it for some reason, you can still see your photos.
You can still use Syncthing to pull photos back to the phone, Immich just stores them in organized directories as normal files.
Just an idea: Maybe a simple photo editor would fit in nicely? Crop, rotate and adjust the colors/brightness/contrast.
And ... please let me rotate videos that are accidentally 90 degrees off.
Basic photo editing capabilities are planned after stable release, this year :)
That's what they said last year! And the year before!
Maybe not the stable part.
FWIW Ente just added photo editing
Ente is a great project but with immich as a competitor it has a hard time
Does it not already have basic image editing? I can crop/rotate and apply some preset filters.
I disagree.
Yes, there is some editing capability in the app, but it doesn't edit the image, it stores a new file in your local (non-immich) gallery. As I don't sync this particular folder on my phone, I had to reupload it - and now have this image twice in immich, and one version with the wrong timestamp (now).
That's barely any more helpful than downloading the image and editing it with another app.
I'm just learning about the software but all the tasks you listed (crop, rotate and adjust), can be done easily with imagemagick simple one-liners.
For example:
Convert in.jpg -rotate out.jpgOr
Using the auto-orient option or using jhead.
Why is it so hard for this app to implement it?
I know nothing about coding, but its probably not trivial in a project the size of immich to add "one simple one-liner".
Think of the Web UI, the mobile apps, the internal API, the filesystem handling, preview generation etc.
I'm sure it can be done, but it probably takes a couple of days.
Former Immich dev here:
Even in the early days, we got hundreds of different feature requests that “can be done easily”. Even this example is a lot harder than you might think.
If you have an idea, how to tackle all of this, contact the dev team on Discord, they’re really helpful and will surely guide you through the process of implementing.
Forgive me if I'm being dumb... But is there a way to share a photo with my own editor, then save the result as an "edited" version of that asset? Currently if I send it to Snapseed, and save it, it will be placed in a different random folder
I don’t think so. I think for any kind of editing, they’d need to implement some kind of asset versioning.