Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I get that they're trying to figure out how to monetize it while staying kosher FOSS, and their first wording suggests they'd like to offer per-seat licensing.
What I don't get is what would compel me to get a license. I still can't rely on it for anything serious. I'm basically using it as an UI for the face recognition models and that's shoddy too. They've made it impossible to lean on it for anything else.
I don't want to sound like a hater because they're obviously working hard on it but, God, you can tell they're not professional developers and it's so frustrating. Focus on doing something well, and stop breaking compatibility every other week.
Ideally nothing. Maybe a sticker or a theme, but nothing important to the function of the tool. If the personal gratification that comes with offering financial support to a FOSS project (along with the resulting product itself) isn't enough, then this "license" (or whatever they end up calling it) isn't for you...ideally.
Should I not be able to use the software if I'm donating?
I see these comments going "oh it's still alpha, we need to encourage them". Well it should have exited alpha a long time ago, and secondly I'm not going to pay for the mere possibility of it being useful at some undetermined point in the future. Show my something useful now.
If anything, Immich has demonstrated it has no intention of ever becoming a useful project. A perpetual alpha that breaks super often and plans to remain in that state on purpose indefinitely should not be asking for any support.
Even in FOSS you have to show some modicum of practical sense. FOSS was founded on "scratch an itch" not on "break forever".
You should be able to use it fully regardless of whether you're donating.
That's fine, by definition, a donation means you're not paying for anything.
I take it you haven't been in the self-hosted photo space long. Even despite their alpha status and frequent breaking of backwards compatibility, it's still the best experience I've had (comparing to Plex, Nextcloud, and Photoprism). But if you can find something better, I'm all ears.
OK but that just means the offer for this particular type of app sucks. It doesn't make Immich good.
It's not really uncommon in the selfhosted space, there are some huge gaps. Try finding a multi-account email webapp for example, or a CalDAV/CardDAV webapp.
I don't follow the argument you're trying to make. Immich is fast and simple which fits my requirements where others don't. If you know of a better alternative, I'm all ears.
Immich recently had a bug where it would delete all the photos if you remove a gallery. It has breaking changes and API changes all the time. Why? I don't know. You do NOT need to break the API every other minor version, it's super dumb.
That makes it impossible to use it with other users because I can't control how and when their mobile app gets updated, which means at any given time I have no idea if their apps will work with the server version. And when they do work, they're buggy.
You can use it just for yourself if you're very careful but it's not something I can offer friends or family and promise it's better than Google Photos or iCloud. Not if it doesn't work half the time and may delete their photos every once in a while.
A simple alternative is to use a sync app to upload photos from a person's phone and then use a reliable (doesn't break all the time) photo webapp to let them browse them. They can still manage their photos locally, and use other services, and other backups and so on, they just have an extra backup + viewer.
Yes, I highly recommend not relying on alpha software ever as your daily driver. I never give my photo viewing software write permissions on my images, so there's never any risk of losing data. And yeah, I'm not directing anyone outside my household to it, so I currently don't need to worry about servicing a bunch of users.
The app/webapp mismatch issue has been more annoying that I think it needs to be. I understand the need to make security updates, but breaking compatibility this often is unusual.
But again, my point is, the money you give them is a donation. If you don't want to donate, then don't. There should not be any incentive to get you to donate, besides seeing the project continue.
If you don't give immich write access to photos you lose one of their biggest advantages, i.e. having your phone upload the photos directly. So now you need something else like syncthing to do that job, which is not as elegant.