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I wouldn’t say it’s “hard”, but taking responsibility for all the photos your wife took of your darling children growing up is… a thing.

Who are they? Hard for who?

I propose a new title… “This thing I know a lot about is easy!”

Because it is for those who aren’t sysadmins or at least amateur Linux enthusiasts. The easiest tools quickly become very hard when something breaks and you got no one who could fix things for you you don’t know anything about.

Immich is amazing until you update and your wife is complaining she can’t see her photos.

The most reliable piece of hardware and software I have is my Synology.

Don’t update anything without a way to restore.

Now that it’s in stable release, is it really still the case?

I just rename the immich file, install a new immich instance and copy the data over manually to the new install, deleting the old install file after a week or so

I’ve had the least buggy experience that way

Immich updating is a dogwater experience

Honestly, the time i had to manually intervene since ~2 years is less then 5-10 times, and that is way before the stable release. So I doubt that.

As long as you don’t directly connect it to the internet, it’s not hard.

When you do, it does become hard.

Only if you care about security, which you should ofc.

I setup caddy and a proxy server for ingress.

Essentially I have a server with wireguard connections between my home server and the external VM.

Proxy using proxy protocol with nginx so it preserves the ip.

DNS certificate management with cloudflare, and I’ve got Authelia in front of the majority of my websites, with some exclusion rules, say for a share link.

Authelia has mandatory 2FA, anything less is silly, with Grafana alloy scrapping caddy metrics.

Anywho most of my stuff runs in docker. The stuff I don’t want on the WAN but on tailscale/Lan has a filter to block the wireguard interface.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #134 for this comm, first seen 5th Mar 2026, 16:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Tell that to someone starting out and look at their deer in the headlight face. Then you’ll realize that the point went over your head.

You know, I have been using Immich since forever. The last issue was probably a year ago.

I wish it was that simple. I have over 15 TB of videos and images as far back as the 1970s. Mostly in raw format or slog format. Copying and pasting an instance would take me a ton of time.

People who don’t care about security are the cancer of the selfhosting-world. Billions of devices are part of a botnet because lazy owners don’t care about even the most basic shit, like changing the stock password. It’s insane.

For old photos, you can easily have half a dozen copies on old HDDs, DVDs, cloud.. a few GB maybe? How many photos can be that important?

If you bork your server, those photos are not lost, just harder to access. The Missus can still be upset, just not as much.

I know there are solutions, but if you never get involved its never your responsibility.

Yeah I wouldnt trust immich with directly storing it myself

Get that stuff off on its own and have immich access that as shown in Louis Rossmann’s setup video

Think of it like having a dedicated steam drive with the os on its own, so if you have to format or decide to distrohop, you don’t have to download and reinstall a dozen +250GB games

Still feels like I’m doing too little, but kinda hate 2fa.

And I kinda don’t want to know if complex passwords and low retries before an account gets locked out are enough.

I don’t. Synology stores all the files and it comes with Synology photos, but it’s clunky if you don’t have an Intel chip that has an onboard GPU.

I have a 10 GbE connection to my proxmox running the immich with only read access.

I’m a Procrastination Wizard™, so I get it..

yes quite - self hosting is tricky and dangerous

i think there is space for a distro or box you can plug into your router that makes it safe and easy

maybe that’s what unraid and trunas are getting towards?

I only set up auto-update since the stable release, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue since I set it up 2 years ago. Every time I read the release notes they said “go for it”, and… it worked. I guess trauma holds much longer for those who were there early ;)

Dick. I’ve spent two days tearing my hair out trying to get restic to connect to hetzner. Hate it when folk spend a couple of hours tinkering with Plex and they’re all like ‘yeah this is a breeze you’re clearly a moron’.

Now try that rootless.

And I kinda don’t want to know if complex passwords and low retries before an account gets locked out are enough.

I’ve created a custom cert that I verify within my nginx proxy using ssl_client_certificate and ssl_verify_client on. I got that cert on every device I use in the browser storage, additionally on a USB stick on my keychain in case I’m on a foreign or new machine. That is so much easier that bothering with passwords and the likes.

I thought so too for a long time. Had to figure it out for actual budget though. Tailscale makes that aspect pretty simple. Still probably too complex for your average user, but if you’re setting up self hosted apps you should be able to figure it out.

The “average user” shouldn’t selfhost anything. Might sound mean or like gatekeeping, but it’s the truth. It can be dangerous. There’s a reason why I hire an electrician to do my house installation even tho I theoretically know how to do it myself - because I’m not amazingly well versed in it and might burn down my house, or worse, burn down other peoples houses.

People who are serious about selfhosting need to learn how to do it. Halfassing it will only lead to it getting breached, integrated into a botnet and being a burden on the rest of humanity.

That would only work if I’m the only one using my hosted stuff, but can’t really expect non tech ppl to deal with stuff like that.

They already struggle with the little 2fa they have to use. Introducing yet another system is too much to ask.

Adding certificates is a 5 step process: Settings -> Privacy and Security -> View Certificates -> Import -> Select file and confirm. That’s on firefox at least, idk about chrome, but probably not significantly more complex. With screenshots, a small guide would be fairly easy to follow.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get your point, but I don’t feel like making users add client certs to their browser storage is more work than helping them every 2 weeks because they forgot their password or shit like that lol. At least, that’s my experience. And the cool thing about client certs is they can’t really break it, unlike passwords which they can forget, or change them because they forgot, just to then forget they changed it. Once it runs, it runs.

A lot of people simply don’t have time to go the extra steps.

Instead you should be focused on secure by default design. E.g. not setting a static router password to admin admin.

It’s stupid in this day and age to continue to see default logins occur still.

simply don’t have time

Sorry, but that is no reason. That’s a bit akin to having a dog and saying: “Nah I don’t have time to walk the dog now”. Selfhosting something that is publicly available (not as in “everyone can use it” but “everyone can access it”) bears some level of responsibility. You either make the time to properly set up and maintain it, or you shouldn’t selfhost stuff.