My thoughts on Immich

Immich is amazing. It looks like Google Photos, it feels like Google Photos, and it’s even faster. Google Photos tends to move infrequently accessed photos to really slow storage, so going through your timeline can be very slow. The desktop version of Immich is also worlds above whatever Google cannot manage to achieve. Video playback works without tons of buffering and dealing with what seems to be an outdated and probably unmaintained fork of the YouTube player. (August 2025 update: they fixed the video player, yay!)

I really wish it were stable though. The project is several years old now, has lots of users, developers and funding, so this is definitely a possibility.

I really, really cannot use it for more than occasionally playing around with it. Every time I do, I really enjoy myself until I get to some huge problem which means I cannot use it to replace Nextcloud or Google Photos.

During the last update, somehow the password of the database user was changed. I did not update the database, just the immich server. The database in the recommended Docker Compose file is tagged with a hash, which is usually not a sign that it is a recommended or stable version, so it might have been a bug in the database, or the server had permission and somehow needed to change or delete the password. I manually changed the password back using the psql CLI inside the database container, and now everything is working again. Running imperative commands on a database with Docker where everything is supposed to be declarative feels pretty dirty, and the fact that the DB can still get messed up is scary enough for immich not to be a good backup solution yet.

The backup UI on the mobile app is either very unclear or very buggy. I am not a fan of the header “Uploading file info.” It sounds like it’s just uploading metadata, when it is actually uploading the file.

The remaining count frequently shows 0, even though there are still photos and videos currently uploading. The total and backup counters are a bit unclear as well. Does Total refer to the total number of files for my account, or the total number of photos on my device, regardless of how many have been backed up? Or maybe it counts all automatically uploaded files, not including files that were uploaded manually or from other devices?

What does the Backup counter mean then? How many files are on my account? Why is it higher than the Total counter?

The progress bar for uploading files is very unclear as well. Right now, I am looking at my phone, and the bar is stuck at 100% for a file. I am unsure if the file is uploaded already, or if it is at least being counted as uploaded. The “Start Backup” button is still there, so it might not be doing anything. Tapping the “Start Backup” button turns it into a “Cancel” button, after which the 100% bar does not change, and nothing appears to be happening. There is no indication that there are any files to upload either. It might even be better to show the amount of files which will be uploaded before starting the backup, or disable the “Start Backup” button if there are no files to upload.

I am not saying the immich developers are incompetent, or that this is the most horrible UI out there, but it does not make me trust it enough to use it for backing up my photos. The backup process is absolutely critical for a photo app. I can deal with occasional jank when viewing photos, as long as I can trust that the photos are actually there.

Also, side tangent: how is pausing videos still a problem? There is MULTI-SECOND LATENCY when pausing a video. I have reproduced this on a OnePlus Nord 2 and a Pixel 6a, both visibly struggle with pausing a video. I want it paused immediately, not a second or two later. I want to continue the video where I paused it. Why is most work happening with features like tagging and asset locking when video playback is still an open issue? Why is there a steadily growing list of thousands of features but nobody is working on making them actually stable? Is this becoming a Star Citizen-like project? Do not get me wrong, I find Star Citizen to be very impressive, but it’s not a game I would ever play besides going “huh, that’s nice”, and likewise, immich is impressive, but I want it to become more than impressive. I want it to become a part of my day to day life I do not have to think about. I want it to be just “my photos”, not a cool piece of technology I can and have to fiddle around with, only to still get an experience that is great in some ways but very subpar in others.