Chosing the right photo app for my family
So, Immich vs Ente, this is my last piece of the selfhosted puzzle. Please help me make an informed decision:
Immich
on the plus side, it seems to have more features and it has a gazillion integrations with other selfhosted software. Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
Ente
looks like the opposite, more mature, scoped and less integrated.
Am I reading this right? Am I missing something?
Edit: Thanks everyone, I’m going with immich!
Immich
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIKUh… that’s news to me. I’ve been hosting 2 user’s photos for 1.5 years with absolutely zero breaking changes. I just updating from v2 to v3 and nothing broke.
I briefly checked out Ente, but personally I have zero trust for any project that requires users to sign a CLA to contribute like Ente: https://github.com/ente/ente/pull/11084#issuecomment-4762402896
Immich doesn’t do those shenanigans: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/7023#discussioncomment-8433346
CLAs are bad because the project can change the license whenever they feel like it. So Ente is effectively reserving the right to go full evil with their CLA.
Whereas Immich can’t suddenly decide they want to move away from AGPLv3.
Ok, wow. Well, that kinda wraps it up for me. Fuck CLAs.
immich hasnt had any major breaking changes for a while in my experience using it for a few years, anything that does break is probably some third party integration or plugin that would have to wait for it’s own maintainer to fix, that’s pretty normal in the open source world.
Except for database versions in 2.7.5->3.0.0
But one docker compose change and it migrated seamlessly.
Photoprism users every time this topic comes up
I switched from photo prism after 12 months on it, to immich. Much prefer it and offers more and better features from my perspective.
Yeah I might switch over too because immich didn’t originally have some of the sort and detection features like Photoprism.
Photoprism is pretty good but it doesn’t have some of the nicer UI features immich has.
Also, accounts. Long promised for community or lowest tier then integrated only in the expensive tier of photoprism IIRC, which made me switch because that only then works for individuals.
LOL 😂
photoprism is good. i ran it for a few years before running both immich and photoprism side by side, and eventually shut down photoprism and moved entirely over to immich. i’d never give anybody flak for using photoprism, but for people starting from scratch i’d strongly recommend immich.
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
Breaking changes only come with major version changes now.
I do still read the changelogs and compare compose files thoroughly on every major update. With that in place, Immich has not once broken down on me, and I’ve been here from almost the very start.
Oh, same here. As soon as I discovered Immich, I pored through all the info I could get my hands on and found that breaking changes happened often, so I made absolutely certain to read every changelog for things that may affect my setup. I sstopped updating it last year due to life getting in the way, and it was stuck on 1.138 (and shut off) until last week when I decided to pay attention to it again.
I’ve got a second deployment of immich that also got stuck somewhere on v1.x. May I ask how you upgraded to the most recent version? Did you just go for 3.0, or did you do “baby steps” in between? (e.g. 1.138 > 2.0 > 3.0)
Did you just go for 3.0, or did you do “baby steps” in between? (e.g. 1.138 > 2.0 > 3.0)
Pretty much that. Downloaded the latest
compose.yml, copied all the relevant bits from my existing compose file to the fresh one (volumes, database/db credentials, etc), set the version tov2.0.0, and let 'er rip. Made sure it was playing nice, then checked all the changelogs up to 2.7.x (whatever the newest release was last week), set the version tov2, and updated it again. That was the newest release. Fast forward to this week, all I did was set the version to ‘v3’ and the update took without a problem.Great, I’ll probably do just that this summer. Thanks for the info!
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
This is no longer the case after the version 2.0 release. Version 2.0 is the stable release: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/22546
Funny enough I had to rollback, since it doesn’t start in the latest version in my setup. I have to make a conscious effort to keep it one or two subversions behind. It is not the first time an upgrade breaks my install. It will probably be a whole thing when I decide to actually upgrade it again.
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/tag/v3.0.0
is V3 not stable? Are they back porting security fixes to V2?
V3 is stable. It is the new version after V2. V1 was where the majoriry of the breaking changes happened.
No, v3 is a release with breaking changes:
This release includes several breaking changes; read the full migration guide here. It’s worth mentioning that many of the breaking changes are updates to API endpoints and only affect third-party tools that integrate with Immich’s API. For the vast majority of users, updating works exactly as it always has.
https://immich.app/blog/v3.0.0-release
That’s why the major version was increased, it implies breaking changes in semantic versioning, which Immich is doing since v2 apparently:
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
- MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes
- MINOR version when you add functionality in a backward compatible manner
- PATCH version when you make backward compatible bug fixes
Yes, between major releases there can be breaking changes. But within there wont be, which is what I was referring to. In “V1” we didn’t have such a guarantee.
Oh I see. You mean like v3.0.1 will be stable, and v3.1.0 will be stable. Yeah that’s true. But v3 (as in v3.0.0) is breaking. At least that’s how I have always seen the terms used.
I use Ente, but it’s purely because I want my images backed up in the cloud, but I don’t want the server provider to be able to mess around with them. Hence the e2ee being important to me.
I love Ente, I think it’s a great project, but for self-hosting, immich seems like the best choice to me.
Just a FYI, when using a tool like rclone to backup data to some cloud, it can also encrypt the files for you when pushing data, and decrypt when pulling data. Of course, the files will still be unencrypted at rest.
That’s very neat! It doesn’t really work for my Ente use-case, but definitely good to know!
It wasn’t rsync that started breaking because of some Claude changes, right?
Kind of. Claude helped the developer find lots of bugs. He decided to start making major changes to fix these bugs. Major changes often break things.
I think it was rsync indeed. Afaik rclone and rsync are different developers, despite the name
rsync and rclone are two different projects
Running immich since 2 years, never had a single breaking issue or instability of any kind.
There is really no reason not to choose immich unless you prefer something that’s only in ente.
Immich is just fantastic. Probably one of the best software in the self-hosting world. I had no problems with breaking changes in the last ~1,5 years I’m using it.
Right now, the latest update doesn’t run in my otherwise until now perfectly working environment. It’s frustrating because there’s no easy way to downgrade it in my setup.
Don’t forget to change the database. There were breaking changes there as they moved to a different version in 3.0 which causes error loops.
All of my stuff luckily moved seamlessly without having to restore a backup.
Yeah, it’s going the be a whole ordeal. I will have to block an afternoon for the migration. Definitely not a “never breaks anymore” scenario. Everything can be broken, there’s no perfectly stable software.
Using immich for like 4 years and it never broke down. Migration steps are always super clear.
Ente i got for my parents as an alternative to iCloud photos and until I figure out some tunneling.
Netbird on a cheap $50 a year vps.
Echoing what others have said, Immich hasn’t had breaking changes in a while. That being said it’s one of the services I keep it on a pinned version and read release notes before updating.
I’ve tried both and had favored Ente for months but I eventually drifted towards Immich. The most obvious reason is that Ente isn’t optimal for self hosting. And it’s rather proof of concept to show they are committed to openness. On the other hand, Immich is built for self hosters.
Ente has client side encryption. That why I initially committed in order to respect privacy of my users. So if you care about the users. Go for it.
The big difference is that ente is encrypted.
If you use FDE, Immich is also encrypted but only at rest.
By at rest you mean not in transit or something like that?
That may not be the right terminology. I men it’s decrypted when booting and encrypted when it’s unplugged or shut off.
The disk is still encrypted even when turned on, it’s just transparently decrypted when read. I doubt Ente is any different - you store images encrypted on disk, decrypt them to be able to read them as an image, then send it re-encrypted over HTTPS.
Ente is a pain to setup, was never meant to be selfhostable correctly
Can’t comment on ente. I looked at it originally along with many others and initially chose photo prism. Ran that for around 6 months then switched to immich. Have no plans on changing any time soon. I host 4 users on it. It works great, been using it over 12 months so been on it from v1, and been through all the changes to V2 and V3 and never had a breaking change. Have auto updates in in podman for it so I never manually touch it. It just works.
I’ve been pretty happy with ente after moving from immich a year or two ago when the breaking changes were basically every time I opened the app on my phone.
My experience with ente was that it is horribly slow. It also lacks any feature to upload a large number of photos at once. I just never bothered uploading my 10k pictures I have taken over the last 15 years because it would have had to transfer them to a phone and then have the app open for a few weeks. No rclone or any other reasonable way to upload from a computer other than browser (which just doesn’t work for more than a few images)
