Well I installed Immich on my Debian server the other day. It works really well; I’ve been especially impressed by the facial recognition, working even as people lose or gain weight, or aren’t looking directly at the camera, that sort of thing.

Though there’s no indication when it detects a face that doesn’t meet the requirement that it appear 3 times, so I’m not sure if it’s just ignoring that face or if it’s missing faces. I saw one picture where it missed the face of someone it had identified in other pictures, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to say, hey, there’s a face here.

I did have to laugh that it picked up a face in the artwork of a pinball machine we own. I had no idea what face I was looking at until I saw the larger picture. LOL Turns out it’s Bobby Orr, sort of.

The external library function wasn’t clear to me, and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t edit metadata for pictures in an external library for a while. (Turns out, you can’t - the only option is to update the pictures in the library with the info.) So I imported all of my old phone pictures - a mix of Apple and Android phones - into the internal library. It’s odd because it says it won’t edit the original pictures - either in an external library, or an internal one - and all of the information we enter via the interface is saved in a database. But it doesn’t want to save the info about pictures in an external library.

But I really like it overall; it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted to self-host pictures.

I do hope that editing pictures will become a possibility at some point.